Lillevan is an animation, video and media artist based in Berlin. He is perhaps best known as founding member of the visual / music group Rechenzentrum (Mille Plateaux/Shitkatapult).

As a video artist, Lillevan recontextualizes, combines and politicizes existing film images and fragments. ‘The aesthetics of the image are not to be found in its beauty, density and completeness, but in its transparencies and potentials.’ The images are a communicative medium interacting with the music. The selection of the images can either support the sound, or work against it, the aim being to achieve a dialogue. Interference and broken imagery is a central dramaturgical element in the creation and performance. Some film doesn’t need a soundtrack, the images produce the music, and propel the viewer into a psycho-visual-composition.

For Lillevan a working process takes place in a Godard-like search for the relationship between images, intensities and textures. ‘I always prefer to take the risk of failing with a live experiment, than to perform a well tested concept; improvisation is a decisive working principle. One should never be satisfied with the modes of presentation.’ Lillevan sees his work as a multi-layered process, giving each viewer the opportunity to focus on different details and moments. Human perception remains the final interactive element of live video composition, while returning images to their original ambiguity, escaping the imperative nature of traditional montage, creating unsolvable tasks for new software and creating new and unexpected relationships between non-related imagery.

Parallel to his work in Rechenzentrum, he has performed and collaborated with many artists from a wide array of genres, from opera to installation, from minimal electronic experimentalism to dance and classical music. Lillevan has performed and exhibited all over the globe, and has performed at all the major media festivals, including Cimatics (Brussels), Transmediale (Berlin), Unsound (Poland), MUTEK (Canada) and prepared video for the likes of Fennesz, Vladislav Delay, Morton Subotnick and countless others.