Stefan Ihmig

Pioneering atmospheric light installations

A central strand of Ihmig’s practice is the development of water-and-fog projection methods that move beyond a sequence of flat screens. He works with the varying density of the scattering medium along the direction of projection: concentrated image-bearing regions, thinner atmospheric filling and clearer intervals form a single composition in depth.

The fog does not simply replace another screen. It also partially fills the space between more defined regions, allowing projected imagery to gather, dissolve and extend through a volume. In this approach, the atmosphere helps form the image.

At Boom Festival in 2023, Ihmig realised a multilayer waterscreen installation. Building on that experience, he found that fog positioned farther behind a waterscreen could carry imagery with a perceived quality comparable to an additional water surface. His subsequent hybrid approach uses this substitution and the fog’s non-uniform distribution to extend the composition without constructing a complete waterscreen system at every depth.

His installation BEYOND, presented at Boom Festival in Portugal and O.Z.O.R.A. Festival in Hungary, embodies this development. Alongside the hybrid works, he develops large-scale multilayer fog hologram installations.

Explore BEYOND: the work and its development →

Artistic roots and research

Ihmig’s background connects experimental electronic music, spatial sound, computational art and media architecture. He studied Religious Studies and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cologne, followed by Digital Media at the University of the Arts Bremen and the University of Bremen, graduating with distinction in 2009. His early work explored electronic and acoustic soundscapes, multichannel sound systems and real-time three-dimensional sound processing.

A founding member of the URBANSCREEN artist collective, Ihmig began creating 3D projection-mapping installations in 2007. He helped realise the Urban Screens festival in Cáceres, Spain, in 2009 and 2010, and led Mapping in Movement, a research project combining high-speed camera tracking with sculptural simulations for projection onto moving structures.

This relationship between artistic expression and technical development continues throughout his practice. The image, the projection medium and the surrounding space are developed together rather than treated as separate production stages.

The Digital Sanctuary

RE:SORB’s Digital Sanctuary approach brings light, darkness, moving imagery and sound together in environments for immersion, contemplation and shared attention. Architecture and landscape are not simply backdrops: their depth, scale and physical character become part of the artwork.

Ihmig’s work connects the collective experience of electronic music and festival culture with the spatial focus of installation art. Technical construction makes room for an unstable, transient image — an encounter with light that changes through its relationship with atmosphere and place.

International practice and collaboration

Since 2007 Stefan Ihmig has shown work in fifteen countries across Europe, the Caucasus, Asia, the Arabian Peninsula and Latin America. The practice moves between two poles that rarely meet: the temporary, collective architecture of festival culture, and the fixed, historically loaded architecture of monuments, palaces and civic squares. The same questions travel between them — how light behaves in a volume of air, how a surface can be persuaded to open, how an audience shares an image.

His exhibition and performance history includes Boom Festival, Fusion Festival, O.Z.O.R.A., Ars Electronica, Genius Loci Weimar and Berlin’s Festival of Lights. His collaborations include Low Bros and Gérard Rancinan at Urban Spree in Berlin. For The Party Is Over — Rancinan × RE:SORB, Ihmig contributed the concept and art direction.

Through RE:SORB, this practice extends from gallery installations and audiovisual performance to architectural projection and public-space commissions. The studio’s portfolio includes work on the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Torre Latinoamericana in Mexico City.

Festival culture and stage work

The festival work began with mapped stages and sculptural stage architecture and grew into free-standing light environments. Boom Festival in Portugal has been a recurring site since 2018, from a projection-mapped zome to the multilayer waterscreen of ISHQ in 2023 and the monumental water-and-fog environments of BEYOND in 2025. O.Z.O.R.A. in Hungary followed with Depth/100, Re:birth Festival in Japan with ÆTHER.

Alongside these came Fusion Festival in Lärz, Garbicz in Poland, MO:DEM in Croatia, Tribal Gathering in Panama, Psybox in Austria, Plötzlich am Meer, and Elbjazz aboard the MS Stubnitz in Hamburg. Working in these conditions — night, weather, crowds, temporary structures — shaped a way of building images that tolerate wind and hold together at a distance of a hundred metres.

Light-art festivals and competitions

Berlin’s two light festivals, the Festival of Lights and Berlin leuchtet, have presented the studio’s work repeatedly from 2014 to 2025. Internationally, the practice has been shown at the Circle of Light festival in Moscow, in the Art Vision competition at the Bolshoi Theatre in 2018 and 2019; at the 1minute Projection Mapping Competition in Japan, at Odawara Castle in 2019 and in Tokyo in 2022 and 2023; at the Zsolnay Light Festival in Pécs; at Lichtfest Leipzig; at Hannover leuchtet; and at La Notte in Magdeburg.

More recently the studio has opened the Sharjah Light Festival in the United Arab Emirates in successive editions from 2023 to 2026, and taken part in the Festival de la Luz de Antigua in Guatemala. The competition entries are RE:SORB works rather than solo pieces, and the awarded ones were directed and animated by John Tettenborn, with sound by Kourtney Lara Ross and Uli Buder. Those awards belong to the studio and to the works themselves; they are listed further down this page with their credits.

Monuments, palaces and public space

The architectural strand of the work treats buildings as instruments rather than screens. In Berlin it includes the Brandenburg Gate, the Siegessäule, the Berlin TV Tower, the Rotes Rathaus, Charlottenburg Palace, Schloss Köpenick, the Oberbaumbrücke, the Humboldt Forum — where a mapped façade became a multiplayer game of Snake — the Gendarmenmarkt, the tower of the former Tempelhof Airport, and Schloss Bellevue for the Federal President’s Bürgerfest.

Beyond Berlin the list runs from the St. Petri Cathedral in Bremen and the Staatsoper in Hannover to the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, the Templo Mayor and the Torre Latinoamericana in Mexico City for the five hundredth anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the castle ruin on the Gebhardsberg above Bregenz, Odawara Castle in Japan, and the San Francisco Church in La Antigua Guatemala.

Galleries, collaborations and commissions

Urban Spree in Berlin has been a long-running gallery context: a remix of works by the Low Bros, sculpture mapping with Monarch.Ohne, mural and street-art mappings, and the vernissage of Gérard Rancinan’s The Party Is Over. Indoor installation work continues at MaHalla in Berlin-Oberschöneweide, where The Seeker and later Sanctum of Sound were shown, and a permanent installation has run at the Juice Club in Hamburg since 2013.

Commissioned work has taken the studio to the opening ceremony of the Hannover Messe, the Mall of Berlin, the Peter Behrens Bau for a centenary of electric mobility, the City Walk in Jeddah for an LED wonderwall, Georgian Railways in Tbilisi for the launch of a new line, the Ramadan celebrations at Al Ain near Abu Dhabi, and The Sixth Sense immersive exhibition in Bengaluru.

Where the work has been shown

• GermanyBerlin · Bremen · Hamburg · Hannover · Leipzig · Magdeburg · Weimar · Lahnstein · Lärz
• EuropeIdanha-a-Nova, Portugal · Ozora and Pécs, Hungary · Garbicz, Poland · Primišlje, Croatia · Bregenz, Austria · Moscow, Russia
• Caucasus & GulfTbilisi, Georgia · Sharjah and Al Ain, United Arab Emirates · Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
• AsiaTokyo and Odawara, Japan · Bengaluru, India
• Latin AmericaMexico City, Mexico · La Antigua Guatemala · Panama