Helmut Kinzler
Associate Director
/ Head of Virtual Reality
Dip. Architecture
Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste
B.Arch Architecture
University College, London
Helmut Kinzler, Associate Director & Head of VR, has been with Zaha Hadid Architects since 1998. Since then, he has worked on a number of important architectural projects such as the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg, Germany. Besides his work as a designer and project director, Helmut is an avid gamer, and closely follows developments in the gaming industry. In 2014 he started the ZHVR Group with the aim to develop the technology for applications in the practice’s design and presentation workflow and develop a comprehensive understanding of emerging cybernetic space and culture.
Early Work
© HELMUT KINZLER
Eigenweiss, Happening by DONNEREXE collective with 15-20 invited participants inside a former Winery Building, Stuttgart, Germany, December 27, 1995.
DONNEREXE was founded in 1991 by members Bernhard Kinzler, Gero Götze, Helmut Kinzler, Uwe Büchele.
Eigenweiss is a 14-hour art happening organised for 15-20 participants, including the group’s founding members, set in the processing room of an old derelict vineyard building (donated for the purpose of the art experiment by private DONNEREXE supporters). The guests-turned-participants were provided white boiler suits with hoods, white acrylic emulsion paint and a set of ‘bespoke’ painting tools, and were given free rein to paint over any or all the existing stained and dusty surfaces of the abandoned processing room.
As work progressed, the surfaces providing contrast to the white paint soon became covered by new murals created by the individual authors. Subsequently, these murals faced progressive infringement by other participants’ work. Once all work became unattributable, painted over, and only recognisable as a blended melange of authors, new improvised artistic strategies and methodologies emerged.
Using inscribing/engraving and pigments made of crushed brick or soot from candles, the participants overlaid the initial individual layers with new distinctive formulas – resulting in further development and sustaining of expression. Many participants shifted from individual creation to collaboration; working in rotation to select, preserve and highlight artistic details deemed valuable - while the ongoing layering and new artistic production continued.
As anticipated by DONNEREXE in setting up the parameters of this happening, strict artistic limitations achieved a forced clash of individual expression. Stemming out of the group’s previous work and research, the event was designed to transfer experiential knowledge and to document the open resulting collective artistic response. The conceptual approach was developed to contest boundaries of authorship and understand the individual capacity for adaptation in response to the emerging conditions within the collective.
Projects
