About Me

Hello and welcome on my little blog!

My name is Jan Bode. I’m a creative technologist with a background in audiovisual media, interactive installations, digital product development and cultural production. Over the past decade, I’ve worked as a media technician on international art and exhibition projects for museums, artists and galleries.

I feel particularly at home working across disciplines: translating between technical, creative and practical needs, and bringing people, ideas and expertise together to work towards a shared goal.

Alongside this, I am also active as an artist and musician, producing music and developing audiovisual projects that combine sound, video and technology.

This blog is mostly about that “alongside”.

I studied Visual Communication at Kunsthochschule Kassel in Germany, so my formal training is mainly in video and design. The rest—music, technology and programming—joined the party over the years, mostly through teaching myself.

Music has always been part of my life and has become increasingly important to me in recent years. As a child, I told my parents I wanted to learn the keyboard after watching a one-man entertainer at my aunt’s wedding. With just his keyboard, he kept the whole evening going and everyone on their feet on the dancefloor. I was impressed.

On my next birthday, I received a little 36-key Casio keyboard and lessons with an older lady in her basement. There, four other children and I sat at home organs, wearing headphones and learning to play. This wasn’t quite what I’d pictured when I said I wanted to learn the keyboard, but it was in the neighbourhood—and hey, at least the books were for keyboards, complete with charming ’80s graphics. 😉

Then came my teenage years and the discovery of Nirvana followed by bands like Pantera, Korn, Rage Against the Machine, NOFX, Bad Religion, Nada Surf, Beastie Boys, Sick of It All, Built to Spill, The Notwist and many more. The home organ struggled to keep up, and I started playing bass guitar.

Some friends and I formed a band and rehearsed every week at a youth centre in my hometown of Vellmar, near Kassel. As our musical tastes developed and took different directions, we found our way into other local bands.

Here I am at nineteen, playing with my band Esel at Rockumenta, an event held during documenta X in Kassel in 1997. That’s Florian and me on the two bass guitars, with Robert on drums. Daniel on bass clarinet and Jens on saxophone joined us later. Unfortunately, there are no recordings of that line-up.

Gradually, playing in bands gave way to playing records as a DJ in bars, clubs and cafés. It was also a good way to earn money while I was studying. My musical tastes wandered through jazz, electro, downtempo and trip-hop. I loved Portishead, Lamb, Tortoise and much of what Ninja Tune released.

In 2003, I developed a travelling club night inspired by Hamburg’s Mojo Club. Instead of funk and soul, though, the idea was to get people dancing to jazz from the 1930s to the 1960s: vocal jazz, bossa nova, rhythm and blues, and swing. Under the name Chew Chew Club, my fellow DJ Maya and I toured clubs and bars across Germany, organising two or three events a month.

Here are two DJ sets as example:

A solo bar set with jazzy trip-hop and downtempo beats…

…and a short musical tour through the different flavours of the Chew Chew Club.

After finishing my studies and moving to Berlin, I eventually started making music again, mainly for audiovisual performances. I taught myself Ableton Live and gradually acquired some studio equipment. At some point, I also took up the piano.

Here’s a video I recorded in 2022 for a forum discussion about MIDI controller keyboards and virtual pianos, playing a Studiologic SL88 Grand with Vienna Symphonic Library’s German Upright 1904.

Around that time, I was slowly discovering the cello—and, through it, classical music. The piece I’m playing is Morning Passages, composed by Philip Glass for the soundtrack to The Hours. It was one of the pieces that helped open that door, leading me towards composers and musicians such as Jóhann Jóhannsson, Pēteris Vasks, Max Richter, Emilie Levienaise-Farrouch, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Joep Beving and Daniel Bjarnason.

I’ve been learning the cello since the end of 2022. For the first two years, I taught myself with an online course, working my way through 75 lessons across five modules—each lesson with video tutorials, sheet music as PDFs and MP3 play-along tracks. It took a fair bit of perseverance!

If you speak German and would like to learn the cello too, I found it a good place to start. You can find the course at BogenBalance. If you enjoy it, though, I’d recommend finding a cello teacher at some point. I started taking lessons in 2025.

I now play in positions ranging from half position to sixth and am beginning to explore thumb position. My next goal is to bring the cello into my live performances. I’m currently writing pieces for cello and synthesizer, bringing together my growing love of the instrument and my longstanding fascination with electronic music. My influences here include Boards of Canada, Mouse on Mars, Ben Frost, Rival Consoles, Recondite, James Holden and Amon Tobin.

For the audiovisual performances, I’ve also built stage props incorporating small motors and LEDs. Controlled by an Arduino, these could either be operated manually using a homemade MIDI controller and touchscreen or automated from Ableton Live or Resolume via MIDI or DMX.

I love combining simple materials such as wood and metal with analogue electronics, giving the resulting devices a deliberately low-tech appearance—as if they were wooden toys or curious contraptions from a 1950s science-fiction film. What interests me most is the contrast between their handmade exterior and the modern technology and programming within.

DIY wooden MIDI controller.
USB touch controller with a hand-drawn interface.
Custom-built AI assistant featuring a speech module with LEDs and a movable camera.

Shows, Exhibitions, Screenings & Workshops:

Enough about me—I’d love to hear a little about you, too. Drop me a few lines at hello@janbode.de or use the contact form below, whether you’d like to explore working together or simply say hello.