The Beginning

I worked a lot with both film and music in my teenage years, but visual art had for some reason escaped me. I had always found pleasure in good art or visual design, but never given the arts any serious thoughts. This changed around 2003-4 when I discovered both conceptual art and street art almost simultaneously.

Discovering street art made me see the physical world around me in a different light, and the idea driven approach of conceptual art ignited a fire in my head. The result was countless ideas being jotted down in various notebooks or on my phone. But I never tried to do anything to realize any of the ideas. At the time, art was primarily something I enjoyed thinking about.

Then, in 2007, I brought the first set of ideas to life. Bored with an exam period at the uni, I tried to spice things up with a few artistic interventions to counteract the dullness of exam reading. I snapped some photos of one of these projects, the Toilet Fantasies-series, and sent the photos to Wooster Collective, the biggest street art blog in the world at the time. They featured the series, and the images went viral.

In the weeks that followed, my toilet stickers were featured on countless blogs and online magazines around the world, and even some conventional news sources like Der Spiegel and Australian Broadcasting featured images from the series. My shitty website suddenly had thousands of daily visitors from 100+ countries, and I had received the confirmation I needed to bring more ideas to life.

The End

In the year that followed, I developed countless new ideas for art projects, and realized a few of them. I had more projects featured at various blogs and magazines, I took part in a group exhibition at a renowned German Museum, had works featured in two street art books, and I even got an international award for my work.

All this was fun, but the motivation and purpose of the Knudzich project was never about recognition. It was to serve as a creative free-zone where I could just fiddle and play with creative ideas. Some of my projects are featured on this site, but most aren’t. And the reason is simply that I did not document them all, and because showing them to others was always second to the joy of playing with ideas.

As a curious side note, a majority of the projects you’ll see on this site was create during exam periods when I was a student. Apparently, the best way to ignite the creative spark is to be bored. Which I tended to be during exam periods.

Ironically, I not only finished my studies, but also continued to do a PhD. Today I work as a professor at the same institution that I tried to mentally escape from with my art projects. The drop in artistic activity since my study days is perhaps the best proof I have that it is more fun to be a professor than a student.