We first met in 1989 in Stuttgart in a small theatre where Thomas worked as a technician, lighter and stage designer and Susanne did a stage design internship.

Susanne moved on to Berlin to study architecture (being actually there when the wall came down) and Thomas followed along soon after.

Thomas worked in stage design, props and film-set-building as a freelancer for the first 5 years, but then went into the virtual, learned to code and to work with 3D, video and audio.

This in turn became quite fascinating for Susanne and in the coming years we worked on a wide range of animation and design projects together or separately.

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The roots of 'UrbanFlow' go back to 2008, when we had many ideas involving spiraling designs for furniture, architecture and stages and came up with our Logo (see below).

Our lifelong work in 3D, design, photography and the arts over time led us to our current focus on projection mapping, realtime animation and living paintings.
Which go very well together with our love for characterful physical objects and sculptures that we bring to life with light, colour and sound.

With our backgrounds in stage design, architecture, carpenting and metalwork, we are thoroughly grounded in the real world and go from there into the virtual.

And our work with trauma and healing connecting it all with humanities current challenges.

Susanne is a multimedia Artist with a focus on realtime animation, music, video and photography.

Her background is formed by capturing the world through drawing, painting, dance and sculpting.

Susanne lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She graduated with a degree in Architecture at the Berlin University of the Arts – combining it with an apprenticeship as a metalworker.

Additionally, as a certified Bodyworker and practitioner of the Grinberg Method, she integrates her comprehension of the human body and mind with her artistic work.

Thomas Helzle is a media artist working in 3D, realtime animation, creative coding and sounddesign.

His main passion are organic flowing forms, be it with wood sculpting or in the virtual realm.

Living and working in Berlin, he originally started out as a carpenter, but moved on to stage design, props and film-set-building to finally work mostly in computer graphics for the last 3 decades.

The tension between Nature and Technology and the border between Order and Chaos - where life happens - drive his work.

Which also resonates with a lifelong exploration of trauma, what it does to body and mind and what roads there are for healing.

This image has a long history. We created it first in early 2008, after we had come up with the name "UrbanFlow".
The rendering was created in "Fryrender", one of the early unbiased global illumination renderers that gave that fantastic subtle lighting that 3D so often had lacked before. The textures are the veins of a beautiful autumn leaf that we had found and reduced to just the structure.

We were always fascinated with spirals and had some cool sculptural ideas with this general form: as seats for listening to audio in an open air exhibition, as a house on a cliff, as an outdoor stage...

These ideas and the logo have been with us all this time. We returned to it and the designs every now and then, had several false starts, other things got in the foreground instead, as it sometimes is in life.

But in late 2024 it became clear that we had to finally go for it, or we may never do it...

The focus has changed a bit over the years, we grew as artists and learned a lot. But the central core is still winding around those natural forms that form snail shells as well as galaxies.

You can also watch the header videos on YouTube in higher resolution:
· UrbanFlow.art · Logo Animations ·