Demien Rapp

19, Düsseldorf. I use technology as a medium to express my world. I build installations, software and machines. Whatever I need, I bring into reality.

Write me. Or read the manifest.

QR code linking to a portrait of Demien Rapp

mine 2026

I built a robot that reacts to how close its visitors are: the closer someone steps up to it, the faster it starts to walk.

The twist: it cannot move freely through the room. It is chained to a power socket.

It won both the Audience Award and the Jury Award at the 19th Gestaltungswettbewerb at Lernort Studio Düsseldorf.

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PHOTO UNIT 2026

I built a photo booth into a wine crate. Press the button, and a few seconds later your photo comes out of a label printer on thermal paper.

Inside is a ThinkPad, plus a few 3D-printed parts. You can switch between different looks, and a QR code lets you download your photo straight to your phone. One label roll lasts for around 300 photos, so a whole evening.

I kept everything as simple as possible: plug it in and it runs.

Want PHOTO UNIT at your event? I am very happy to lend it out. Write me.

PHOTO UNIT: a black wooden crate with an upright screen in a white frame, showing a live dithered image under the words PHOTO UNIT and PRESS THE BUTTON, a round white button below.
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MOSH_UNIT 2026

MOSH_UNIT is a Windows desktop tool I built that turns ordinary video into datamoshing glitch art by bending the compressed byte stream. You import clips, draw where the effect should hit, stack effects like BLOOM, FREEZE, REVERSE and SHUFFLE, and export an MP4.

Get MOSH_UNIT

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gefühle 2025

Three stacked CRT TVs run through an analogue video mixer. Visitors turn potentiometers to mix a self-portrait into heavily distorted edits of nature and city, a “dirty mix” of my world.

It won the Audience Award at the 18th Gestaltungswettbewerb at Lernort Studio Düsseldorf.

“gefühle”: three stacked CRT televisions showing glitched video, with the potentiometer stand visitors turn to mix the image.
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glück.exe 2025

Nine floppy disks on a silver plate. Each one carries a part of happiness.

Large programs once came on several disks. None of them ran alone. Happiness works the same way: it only exists when all of them come together.

An Arduino shakes the disks at random, sometimes one, sometimes all at once, like a gift before it is opened. It never opens.

Soundwalk 2026

Two sound works built from childhood and 18th-birthday recordings, processed with self-built algorithmic tools that layer and deform the sound. Memory as something that reshapes with every playback. Made in the Werk:Klub at K21 Düsseldorf.

Nr. 5 · Erwachsenkdfsdhfdjmadherf · 5 min
Memory does not produce a past. It produces you. Chaotic. Unclear. Foggy.

Nr. 7 · Kindsiuiuhfusadufnkskmdibi · 7 min
Memory is not a storage device. It invents. Again and again. What you held to be true may never have been so.

A QR code printed on the stone floor at K21, labelled Demien Rapp, Kindsiuiuhfusadufnkskmdibi, 7:00, a visitor’s shoe at its edge.
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1/4 2025

BE A TRANSFORMER! is a collaborative 5 × 12 m banner shown at K21. 1/4 is my part of it: 100 socially and politically significant events of this century, generated as AI images and composed into a single picture.

2491 2025

I made the short film 2491 and submitted it to the Uncut Award 2025 at the Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf. A project against surveillance.

Also in 2025: I was the cameraman on the film project Last Slice, which went on to win the Audience Award.

Still from the short film 2491, shown at the Uncut Award.

Soirée de Brioche 2024

A drama about twins raised apart, and my first large film. I was director of photography, camera, stills and part of the direction; it premiered at the Metropol Kino Düsseldorf.

Cover still from the feature film Soirée de Brioche.

Knisternder Bahnhof 2024

I reinvented a cheap camera by circuit bending it, and shot a photo series with it in Düsseldorf.

Circuit bending: deliberately short-circuiting and altering a device’s electronics until it malfunctions in unpredictable ways. That is where these glitched, noisy, intensely colourful images come from.

Knisternder Bahnhof: a grid of 24 glitched, intensely colourful photographs of Düsseldorf main station, shot on a circuit-bent camera.

X 2026

Together with Destina Devrim Danacı I made the short film X, around 5 minutes, and submitted it to the Uncut Award 2026. It is about not fitting in.

X is an undefined variable: no place, no meaning, always searching. A constant back and forth, endless questioning and rethinking. How far is it put on display? Is there a place for me?

Watch X on YouTube

The programme slide UNCUT-FILME 2026 / BLOCK 2 in red light, X last on the list, people with a microphone in front of it.

Uncut Award 2026

The Uncut Award is the festival of the Filmwerkstatt Düsseldorf. On 10 October 2026 it drew around 150 visitors. I co-organised it: social media and parts of the organisation.

For the evening I built a small video installation. A webcam watched the room and picked out the pixels that changed quickly when people moved. These were laid as red artefacts over black-and-white videos that members of the film club had shot at the Filmwerkstatt.

Uncut Award 2026: a group on stage in red light in front of the festival logo, the audience in the foreground.
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