Lutz Dammbeck

Lutz Dammbeck (* 1948, Leipzig) is a German graphic designer, visual artist, and filmmaker. In his films, media collages, and installations, he explores the relationship between art, media, power, and science, always taking a decidedly critical view of the system. 

After training as a typesetter, he began studying book design at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig in 1966. In the early 1970s, Dammbeck made animated and later experimental films, both at DEFA, the largest film company in the GDR, and in his own production.

Inspired by Expanded Cinema, he turned to multimedia and intermedia experiments in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, he developed the »Herakles« concept, a permanently updated media collage. The resulting »live films in space« combined film and slide projections, drawings, archival materials, literature, installations, painting actions, dance, and music, thus breaking down all genre and media boundaries.

In 1986, Lutz Dammbeck left the GDR and moved to Hamburg, where he founded his own film production company in 1990. From 1992 to 1993, he was a visiting professor at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, and from 1998 to 2015, he was a professor at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

Since the 2000s, Dammbeck has been exploring the origins of digitalization and the internet in films such as »The Net – Adorno, LSD, and the Internet« (2003) and installations such as »SEEK II« (2023). In doing so, he traces the networks of those actors who helped shape the digital age with their research on mathematics, logic, systems theory, cybernetics, and chaos theory, as well as their government and military interests and their art and technology projects. In films such as »Overgames« (2015), Dammbeck has uncovered the connections between media, power, ideology, and games.

Lutz Dammbeck’s archive, which has been housed at the ZKM since 2017, comprises approximately 750 digitized copies of almost all of his films and audiovisual documents. Around 340 analog video tapes were digitized in the Laboratory for Antiquated Video Systems.