Julian Hespenheide

BIO

Hespenheide’s animations and installations have been exhibited internationally, including at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media in Japan, Bright Moments Gallery in Berlin, and Design Society in Shenzhen.

Alongside his artistic practice, he has worked as a senior creative technologist at FIELD.IO and Studio TheGreenEyl, and he teaches creative coding and computational design at institutions such as ZHDK Zürich, UDK Berlin, and HfK Bremen. In 2024, he co-founded an artist-run gallery in Berlin-Mitte with Anna Lucia, focusing on digital and algorithmic art. Through his work, Hespenheide continuously redefines code as a poetic and expressive medium.

Dream Project: Ratio (Responsive Dreams 2025)

Ratio is a generative artwork that explores the aesthetics of division, balance, and rhythm of a canvas. The piece continuously divides its surface into distinct sections, each running autonomous calculations that manifest as shifting patterns — sometimes calm and meditative, sometimes erratic and overflowing — before returning to order.

The work draws on the Latin ratio (meaning computation, reasoning, and proportion) while echoing inquiries of early cyberneticists in the 1940s and 50s(*). Ratio (as a system) has a systematic approach that weighs the balance between random values by dropping them into their places at specific beats and leaving the viewer to contemplate whether the evolving structures feel right or not.

(*) The Ratio Club was a small British informal dining club from 1949 to 1958 of young psychiatrists, psychologists, physiologists, mathematicians and engineers who met to discuss issues in cybernetics.

The underlying grid of the animation is resolution independent. Try different formats like portrait, landscape or square. On the project page you'll find a tool to adjust some parameters via queries components. Please visit: https://ratio.julian-h.de for more information

Controls
→ [f] To enter fullscreen mode
→ [spacebar] Play or pause the animation
→ [s] Export current frame as a PNG
→ [g] Capture a small GIF

Created using p5.js and GLSL.

/ TGAM's NOTES

Julian is a digital designer and all-rounder who transforms pixels and fragments into profound experiences, blending new media, interaction design, and physical computing.