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A Masterpiece

When I was young, someone told me about a Japanese film that brought the twilight of chivalry to life in a more powerful and gripping way than anything else he had ever read or seen on the subject. The film was called “Seven Samurai“, directed by Akira Kurosawa. 

When I finally saw the film for the first time, I was impressed by the story and the way it was told on screen: thrilling, dynamic, dramatic—and at the same time full of humanity. The film highlights the divide between social classes, the inner conflicts of the characters, their weaknesses, and their courage in the struggle for survival.

At that time, I had already delved a bit into German cinema during the silent film era, as well as into directors like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders and their films, which for me represented something like the resurrection of cinematic art in Germany after 1933. Akira Kurosawa, however, had been a complete unknown to me until then.

Soon after, I met OUBEY. Already during one of our first long day-and-night conversations, we started talking about cinema. He raved about Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Barry Lyndon,” Ridley Scott’s “Alien” and “Blade Runner,” and Steven Spielberg’s “E.T.” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I hadn’t seen  any of these films at the time.

I told him about Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” Fassbinder’s thirteen-part “Berlin Alexanderplatz,” Wenders’ “The State of Things,” and also Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”—films that he, in turn, hadn’t seen until then.

From then on, we spent a considerable part of our lives together watching movies—at the cinema whenever possible, otherwise on VHS or later on DVD at home.

When we watched *The Seven Samurai* together for the first time, we began by discussing the historical and human dimensions of the story. Then OUBEY explained to me how masterfully Kurosawa had woven direction, cinematography, acting, editing, sound, music, and visual rhythm into a single organic whole of outstanding quality.

For my part, I was struck above all by the film’s immediate impact. OUBEY, moreover, understood how this impact was achieved thanks to Kurosawa’s masterful direction. Anyone who would like to learn more about Kurosawa’s filmmaking craftsmanship can watch the video “The Directing Genius of Akira Kurosawa Explained”, which uses concrete examples to demonstrate what OUBEY explained to me back then.

OUBEY’s extraordinary ability to develop analyses of even the most complex matters on the spot with almost surgical precision has amazed and impressed me time and time again.

One of OUBEY’s paintings is titled “Samurai.” The title not only evokes the culture of Japan’s noble martial artists but is, above all, a reference to Akira Kurosawa and his film “Seven Samurai”. That´s why you find a reference in the Spark about the art of film making in the Matrix Room of the OUBEY MINDSPACE, too.

To this day, Kurosawa is regarded by many directors as a towering master. The list of filmmakers who refere him as a “Maestro” ranges from George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg: “Where to start with Kurosawa“.

When Kurosawa struggled to find producers for his films in his later years, Lucas, Coppola, and Spielberg helped him with their contacts at Hollywood studios and also invested in his film projects themselves as producers.

Such solidarity did not merely move OUBEY. It also reinforced his conviction that there is a spiritual bond between people through art. That friendship can arise from a shared passion. And sometimes even a community of masters who defend the freedom of art against the constraints of profit-driven commercial thinking.

 

A Master

In the spring of 1990, OUBEY and I traveled together for the first time since the fall of the Berlin Wall through Berlin and what was then the GDR. It was a time when past, present, and future coexisted here in an indescribable way.

Back then, OUBEY purchased a copy of the book’s “licensed edition for the German Democratic Republic,” which had just been published in East Berlin: Akira Kurosawa – Something Like an Autobiography. Today, this edition of the book is a rarity.

A few years ago, I rediscovered it while moving and only recently read it myself. I can’t recall ever having read an autobiography written with such un , clear, and simple prose, yet one that tells the story of the author’s experiences in such a compelling and moving way. Kurosawa, who once earned his first money as a screenwriter and wrote the screenplays for all his films himself, has mastered the art of storytelling. His book thrives on the same uncompromising clarity that, paired with deep humanity, is also found in his films.

He recounts his family life and school years during his childhood and youth in the authoritarian Japan of the 1910s to 1930s—as the son of a strict father and a descendant of the samurai. This conservative father believed in the educational power of film and encouraged his sons to go to the movies regularly. German, French, and American films, in particular, shaped the young Kurosawa.

In an extensive footnote, he lists nearly a hundred films he saw between the ages of nine and nineteen (1919–1929) that made a particular impression on him—including Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid” (1921), Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1926), and Luis Buñuel’s “An Andalusian Dog” (1929). Today, these works are classics. Back then, they were avant-garde.

He saw these films as a very young man, just as they were first released in theaters. I know from my own experience what an impact that can have, for my first cinematic experiences at the ages of seven and eight remain in my memory to this day. For Kurosawa, the early history of film was intertwined with his own history as a director.

The last sentence of his autobiography reads: “Nothing says as much about a creative person as his work.”

I wholeheartedly agree with this statement. That is why, for over twenty years, I have primarily let OUBEY’s artistic work speak for itself. And yet, with his autobiography, Kurosawa demonstrates that there is a story of the creative individual that is absolutely worth telling—one that is inextricably linked to their work.

This book is far more than a memoir. It is a work in its own right. In it, you learn a great deal about Japan in the 1920s through the 1940s. About school, education, and the military. About filmmaking under the most difficult circumstances and the importance of truly good friends and teachers. Above all, however, you get to know Akira Kurosawa as a person.

It’s a good thing OUBEY bought this book back then. It’s a good thing I rediscovered it years later and have now read it. When I decided to honor Kurosawa and “The Seven Samurai” in the OUBEY MINDSPACE series on film art, I hadn’t read it yet. Today, I am grateful to Akira Kurosawa not only for his films, but also for leaving us this story of his life—masterfully told by himself.

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There are six rooms in OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse lies a story about OUBEY and what interested and inspired him. I’ll be telling these stories here.

At this point, I would like to thank the team at Kubikfoto³ for the outstanding design of OUBEY MINDSPACE, which has already been honored with three prestigious international design awards—including, most recently, the 2025 Red

Since the 1930s, research has repeatedly drawn attention to the highly developed intelligence and fundamentally peaceful nature of whales and dolphins. Initial efforts to protect whales were undertaken; particularly endangered species, such as the humpback whale, which at the time numbered only about 100 individuals, were placed under international protection; and the first protected zones were established.

Nevertheless, in the 1960s, whaling on the world’s oceans remained a common practice, while at the same time, a different kind of business involving these marine creatures was launched  in SeaWorld parks around the world: in small, artificially constructed pools, orcas and dolphins, deprived of their freedom, performed acrobatic tricks for a paying audience.

Then, in 1974, a book titled “The Spirit in the Waters—A Book in Honor of the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins,” edited by Joan McIntyre, was published. To my knowledge, it was the first book to compile the findings of various researchers on the intelligence and social behavior of whales and dolphins into a comprehensive anthology, making them accessible to a wider public.

“But how is it for that other mind, the mind in the waters? How is it for these enormous, alien brains that traverse the oceans, whose songs ring out, which dream, which dwell on distant memories, which school one another in decency and morals? What does it look like in the spiritual world of a creature whose brain is larger and possibly more complex than ours and which cannot translate its will into world-changing action – if only because it has no hands?”

When OUBEY and I read this book for the first time in 1984, ten years after its publication in Germany, we were impressed and moved by the encounters with whales and dolphins and the stories of experiences with them recounted here. The pathos of esoteric whims was equally foreign to both of us. From our perspective, however, this was about knowledge and a fundamental understanding of facts. The idea that other living beings inhabiting this Earth or its oceans might possess consciousness seemed unimaginable to most people— , at least at that time. That they are intelligent and capable of learning was, after all, no longer in dispute. After all, intelligence agencies have often used the occasional dolphin for their espionage operations and still do so today.

But that they possess consciousness? Don’t they simply follow a genetic-biological program? How could they gain insights that would constitute consciousness, when they know only the elements of water and air and nothing of life on land? And where would they get the free will to make decisions?

We discussed these and many more questions. With questions of this kind, our aim was not to find an answer, certainly not the one true and correct one. In these conversations, our own consciousness opened up to possibilities we had not previously considered. Our self-perception as a species was constantly being put into perspective, without ever underestimating it.

Today, one can find many excellent scientific reports and impressive videos on this topic online, most of which have been published in the last five years. Fifty years ago, Joan McIntyre’s book was a completely new source of insight and inspiration, at least for OUBEY, to whom and to whales and dolphins we have therefore dedicated a special Spark in the OUBEY MINDSPACE:

By the way: 50 million years ago, the ancestors of whales and dolphins still lived on land when, during the Eocene epoch, a major climate change began that caused temperatures and water levels to rise drastically. 10 million years later, they had completely and successfully shifted their habitat to the sea. A unique and impressive evolutionary process that, as a species-specific life and world experience spanning such a long period of time, can justify the idea that something like consciousness may indeed have emerged in this process—whatever that may be.

OUBEY would have been delighted to learn that India officially recognized dolphins as non-human persons in 2013. And even more so that in 2024, the New Zealand Maori, together with the indigenous peoples of Tahiti and the Cook Islands, adopted a joint declaration declaring whales to be legal persons.

If you’ve read this episode, you can perhaps imagine how thrilled and happy I was when nature and whale filmmaker Daniel Opitz, founder of the Ocean Mind Foundation, promised me in 2011 an encounter with an original image of OUBEY on camera in his second home, Maui, Hawaii. Here you can watch the video of this extraordinary encounter.

 

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There are six rooms in OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story about OUBEY and what interested and inspired him. I will tell these stories here.

At this point, I would like to thank the Kubikfoto³ team for the great design of OUBEY MINDSPACE, which has already won three prestigious international design awards – most recently the Red Dot Award 2025.

In astonishing synchronicity, two events ventured into previously unknown territories of their respective disciplines: Albert Einstein formulated the General Theory of Relativity, and Pablo Picasso, with his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, laid the foundation for what would later be called Cubism.

In his General Theory of Relativity, Einstein describes gravity as the curvature of four-dimensional spacetime, caused by mass and energy. It explains the interaction between matter and spacetime and, to this day, remains the only scientifically recognized theory of gravitation.

In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Picasso explodes the two-dimensional figure on the canvas, breaks it down into its individual parts, reassembles them, and thereby creates a previously unknown form of three-dimensionality on a flat surface.

The simultaneity of these two events stands in contrast to the scale of their significance. Picasso’s painting moves within earthly dimensions; it transformed art. Einstein’s theory moves within cosmic dimensions; it transformed our understanding of space and time.

OUBEY found the synchronicity of these groundbreaking advances—into entirely new dimensions of scientific knowledge on the one hand and radically new forms of artistic expression on the other—extraordinarily fascinating. In one of our countless conversations about “God and the world,” he once brought up the year 1907. That he effortlessly explained the General Theory of Relativity to me on the spot and quite in passing is mentioned here only as an aside.

He spoke with great enthusiasm about the simultaneity of these two events—a fortunate moment in cultural history when science and art came as close to one another, both in time and in their social relevance, as they rarely have.

Over the centuries, the division of the world and of life into school and university disciplines had led to increasing alienation between them, sometimes even to mutual ignorance. OUBEY never accepted this separation. Herein lay one of the roots of his intellectual connections to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and to Ilya Prigogine and his groundbreaking work Order Out of Chaos. Yet OUBEY did not merely reject this division — he experienced the overcoming of this separation and expressed it in his painting: “Everything is connected to everything else, and my art is a visual expression of this realization.”

Among the few research institutions that were already consistently pursuing an interdisciplinary approach during OUBEYs lifetime is the legendary Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. That Prof. Stuart Kauffman, associate of the institute, agreed to do an Encounter with one of OUBEYs paintings would have delighted OUBEY. What he said about it in that encounter would have pleased him even more.

The year 1907 is not explicitly mentioned in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Yet visual references to Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and to Einstein’s theory can be discovered there, and twice Albert Einstein appears in the form of a quotation.

There are six rooms in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn hold various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse lies a story that tells us more about who OUBEY was and what he was like. These stories are told here by me.

With thanks to the team at Kubikfoto³ for the design of the OUBEY MINDSPACE, which has since received three international awards, including the renowned Red Dot Award.

Countless poems and songs have been devoted to its cool light in the dark of night. Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata touches us deeply in the soul through its compositional perfection; Debussy’s Clair de Lune lifts us up into floating states of bliss. Jules Verne´s science fiction novel “From the Earth to the Moon” described the journey to our satellite a full century before Neil Armstrong’s first step on the Moon—astonishingly precise and visionary at the same time. In 1902, pioneer Georges Méliès ventured a cinematic adaptation of this material, creating a milestone in film history, to which Martin Scorsese paid a loving tribute a hundred years later with his film Hugo Cabret . Pink Floyd devoted an entire album to The Dark Side of the Moon, and Bob Dylan, in his epic love song  Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, let the moonlight swim in the eyes of the celebrated beauty.

 

Seen up close, however, the Moon loses its romantic aura. Viewed through a powerful telescope, it reveals a gray, dusty surface covered with craters. Thus, the term “moonscape” became synonymous with inhospitable, desolate regions. Yet the Moon’s influence on Earth is immense: its gravity stabilizes Earth’s axis, causes the tides, affects the biorhythms of certain plants and animals—and presumably even the female fertility cycle. For our ancestors, the Moon was also a celestial body of great spiritual significance.

John F. Kennedy’s announcement to send a human to the Moon within the decade of the 1960s was an expression of the systemic rivalry of that era—but also a testament to pioneering spirit and visionary ambition. On July 20, 1969, this seemingly impossible feat became reality: Neil Armstrong set foot on the surface of the Moon as the first human being.

 

The exploration of space and human spaceflight had fascinated both OUBEY and me from an early age—independently of one another, long before we met. After we got to know each other, we felt closely connected, not least because we shared a keen interest in the cosmos, its phenomena, mysteries, and history. We celebrated special missions such as the journey of the two Voyager probes Voyager program – Wikipedia into interstellar space or the – initially rather bumpy – launch of the Hubble Space Telescope A friend in space – OUBEY MINDKISS. We were deeply moved by the statement of many astronaut who had been to space and summarized their most important insight from this experience as follows: We went out as technicians, we returned as conscious human beings.

What Aristotle had already recognized in the 4th century BCE, and what Magellan practically proved with his circumnavigation of the globe in the 16th century, received its final visual confirmation through images of the Earth floating freely in dark space—of a beauty that is hard to surpass. Not growing accustomed to this sight, but encountering it again and again with reverence and awe, evokes a humility in thinking about the interconnectedness of existence that hardly anything else can achieve.

When our Earth was still young, about 4.5 billion years ago, it was shaken by a massive collision with a Mars-sized protoplanet. Debris of rock, dust, and molten material was hurled into space, gathered in orbit, and eventually formed the Moon through gravity. This is why the lunar rocks brought back by the Apollo missions so closely resemble those of Earth. Beyond all romance, there is indeed a kind of kinship between Earth and Moon, which has been orbiting it at a distance of around 380,000 kilometers for billions of years—rendering valuable service along the way.

Artemis II is scheduled to launch in a few weeks. For the first time in more than fifty years, a crew will once again travel into orbit around the Moon—still without a landing, but in preparation for Artemis III. The mission follows a so-called free-return trajectory. This special flight geometry makes it possible to use the Moon’s gravity as a natural return ticket: even in the event of a complete failure of the main engine, the capsule would return safely to Earth without additional fuel. The laws of physics serve here as the ultimate backup propulsion system.

Public interest today is not comparable to the hype surrounding Apollo 11 at the time. This could change, however, if Artemis III marks the first time since 1972 that humans set foot on the Moon again. And probably even more so when construction begins on the planned base camp, from which the first two-year Mars expedition could launch in as little as 20 years, or even sooner. Since the moon has no atmosphere, no air resistance, and no gravity, the launch conditions here are much more favorable than on Earth. By then, there will also be flowing water on the moon, which is currently still bound in the ice of the Shackleton crater but can be thawed.

As back then, the purpose of such missions is also being questioned today—not least because of the enormous costs. Yet it has never been spaceflight that prevented us from doing our earthly homework or from taking responsibility for ecological balance and peaceful coexistence.

OUBEY had a clear stance on this. What for some was an irreconcilable contradiction belonged inseparably together for him—in his very own vision of the future of humanity and the Earth. Some of his thoughts on this can be heard in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Jules Verne would probably have taken great delight in it. 🌙

OUBEYs statements can be found in these two rooms at the MINDSPACE:

• On space exploration: https://mindspace.oubey.com/cosmos
• On space colonization: https://mindspace.oubey.com/moebius

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There are six rooms in OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story about OUBEY and what interested and inspired him. I will tell these stories here.

At this point, I would like to thank the Kubikfoto³ team for the great design of OUBEY MINDSPACE, which has already won three prestigious international design awards – most recently the Red Dot Award 2025.

The ribbon was named after the Leipzig mathematician and astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius, whose name thus went down in history. His colleague, the mathematician Johann Benedict Listing from Göttingen, can now only be found in the archives.

Mathematically speaking, the Möbius strip is a “non-orientable manifold.” Top becomes bottom, outside becomes inside, beginning becomes end. In this respect, it not only challenges the established categories of our perception, but also calls them into question. It challenges us to allow new perspectives and to recognize that boundaries are often illusions.

Due to its unique shape, it has become a symbol of what we call infinity. But what is infinity, and what does it mean? Even if we cannot answer this question, the Möbius strip at least offers us the opportunity to realize that there are realities to which the supposed law of nature, that everything must have a beginning and an end, does not apply.

If this exists on a small scale, why not on a large scale?

This exciting question has always preoccupied OUBEY. And when we discussed it, sooner or later we came to the unanimous conclusion that we favor the idea of infinity, even if we ultimately do not understand it and, of course, cannot prove it.

Since its discovery, the Möbius strip has left its own unique mark as a silent mirror of human experience of the world. Numerous references can be found in films, novels, paintings, and scientific theories.

I would like to briefly present two examples that were particularly interesting and significant for OUBEY.

• The Belgian comic artist Jean Giraud, whom OUBEY revered, chose the pseudonym Mœbius for himself. For OUBEY, this was not only a programmatic statement, but also an expression of a strong spiritual connection. As a reference to Jean Giraud alias Mœbius, some of the Sparks in OUBEY MINDSPACE contain colorful allusions to his wonderful comic world.

• Perry Rhodan, the weekly science fiction series that OUBEY had been reading since he was twelve, named volume 1700 of the Perry Rhodan series after the inventor of the infinity loop Möbius. After OUBEY had read the magazine, he passed it on to me so that I could read it too. This happened from time to time when he thought a story was particularly important, interesting, or well written. The Möbius novel was written by his favorite author at the time, Robert Feldhoff, who died far too young in 2009.The story is about the search for the keyword to solve the greatest cosmic mystery. It lies about 225 million light-years away from the human galaxy at the site of the Great Void, is ancient, and is simply called MÖBIUS …

And now, for a brief moment, the Möbius loop also appears in a spark of the cosmic space in the OUBEY MINDSPACE when it comes to the phenomenon of time – as a symbol of infinity.

 

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There are six rooms in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story about OUBEY and what interested and inspired him. I will tell these stories here.

At this point, I would like to thank the Kubikfoto³ team for the design of the OUBEY MINDSPACE, which has already won three prestigious international design awards – most recently the Red Dot Award 2025.

Effortlessly, masterfully, and radically, he moved across musical genres, resisting the normative force of the mainstream more stubbornly than perhaps any other musician and composer of the 20th century.

Shaped by Stravinsky, Puccini, Webern, and Varèse, his musical output remains a unique convergence of avant-garde, classical music, rock, jazz, and electronic sound. Whether one likes his work or not, this alone makes him a rarity — and a stroke of luck. Kent Nagano conducted Zappa’s orchestral works; Pierre Boulez attended a Zappa concert in Paris in 1980 Boulez Conducts Zappa: The Perfect Stranger – Wikipedia, which led to a fruitful collaboration. In Europe, Zappa’s compositions found appreciation and recognition unmatched anywhere else, least of all in the United States.

Zappa not only dissolved boundaries between musical styles, he also violated the behavioural codes of a society that preferred the façade of truth to truth itself. In the 1960s and 70s, his fiercely independent spirit unsettled the puritan-influenced social fabric of the United States. It brought him trouble from many sides, yet never stopped him from following his own uncompromising path.

Frank Zappa could be razor-sharp and humorous at the same time — witty, profound, blunt, satirical, political, courageous.
Free in spirit, inventive in composition, and strict with his band while on tour. Admired by some, despised by others, often triggering tumult during concerts — concerts he sometimes ended prematurely or finished with his back turned to the audience.

A notorious chapter in pop history is the 1971 incident at the Montreux Rainbow Theatre, when an audience member threw a flare onto the stage, igniting a fire that destroyed not only the hall but the entire theatre. Deep Purple immortalized the event in their song Smoke on the Water

OUBEY’s fascination with Zappa and his music began in the mid-1970s, when he first heard the album One Size Fits All. A concert by Zappa and the Mothers of Invention in Cologne at the end of the decade was the first major live concert he had ever attended. That Zappa arrived in a limousine seemed odd but acceptable. That he played the concert rather “unfriendly” due to bottle-throwing from the audience was, however, a sobering experience. For a while, other composers and musicians moved to the foreground.

Screenshot from The MIND SPARK “Music – Frank Zappa”

When The Yellow Shark The Yellow Shark – Album von Frank Zappa | Spotify  was released in 1993, his interest resurfaced and matured into a deep appreciation for the work’s complexity, originality, and brilliant live performance with Ensemble Modern. It was the same Zappa — and yet not the same he had seen live at 18. When he learned of Zappa’s early death shortly afterwards, he revisited the discography and rediscovered him all over again.

I vividly remember an afternoon when a fascinating spectacle of sound filled the room — played loudly through the magnificent B&W speakers with tweeters and subwoofer. OUBEY had chosen the speakers and the system after extensive research and countless tests, connecting them with a high-end power cable. Sound quality mattered to him deeply. Years earlier, he had equipped his studio with excellent T&A speakers that remain there to this day.

I listened carefully. I did not recognize the music. It was The Yellow Shark. Until then, OUBEY had only played it in the studio. I asked him what this wonderful music was. “That’s Zappa?” I exclaimed in surprise. It was fantastic. I myself had gone through an earlier Zappa phase — long before I knew OUBEY — with Camarillo Brillo and 200 Motels. From then on, we appreciated him together.

On November 4, 2005, Ensemble Modern — which had collaborated closely with Zappa in his final years and had already performed and recorded The Yellow Shark live under his direction — played the “Shark” at the Konzerthaus Baden-Baden. It was an unforgettable, magnificent concert.

 

Screenshot from the MIND SPARK “Music – Frank Zappa”

Nearly twenty years later, when the question arose which musicians and which original works should appear in the OUBEY MINDSPACE, it was clear to me that Frank Zappa had to be included — ideally with a track from The Yellow Shark. This choice was about both his music and his unwavering commitment to artistic creativity.

To use the music, I needed an author’s licence. I could only obtain it from Zappa’s family, who have preserved his musical legacy since his death. To my delight, the licence was granted without difficulty, and I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the Zappa family.

The MindSpark, in which we now hear a one-minute excerpt from “Uncle Meat” from The Yellow Shark is, for me, not only a musical highlight but — through the previously unpublished painting from OUBEY’s computer-art series Zosch and Zorro — also a visual one within this room of the OUBEY MINDSPACE.

“ZZZ” – OUBEY Computer Art

Through the integrated Frank Zappa quote, it also reflects OUBEY’s own view of the relationship between art and the market: “I think that any artistic decision that is based on whether or not you are going to make money is not really an artistic decision. It’s a business decision.”

To anyone who wants to learn something genuine about Frank Zappa, I highly recommend Thorsten Schütte’s documentary Eat That Question – Frank Zappa In His Own Words .

 

The OUBEY MINDSPACE consists of six rooms. Each contains five different Mind Sparks, each offering impulses of its own. Behind every Spark and every impulse lies a story that tells us more about who OUBEY was — and how he was. These stories are told here by me.

My thanks go to the team of Kubikfoto³ for the outstanding design of the OUBEY MINDSPACE, which has already received three prestigious international design awards — most recently the Red Dot Award 2025.

It takes material form and shape in an external space — that is where it comes into the world.

This space can be a studio. For OUBEY, however, during the early years of his creative work, it was always the apartment in which he happened to be living. When we moved into our first shared home, a beautiful old apartment, the largest and brightest room became his first true studio.

Even before that, in his tiny apartment on Brunnenstraße, he had created magnificent paintings in very limited space — such as The Journey of the Monads, Green Painting, and Morphogenesis. It was there that he showed them to me for the first time. I was deeply impressed.

An explosion of creative energy occurred in his first real studio, in our apartment on Roonstraße. It was as though countless paintings had already been waiting inside him to finally see the light of day: Einstein’s Tears, Zero Field, Samurai, the triptych 27 Cube Memory System, and many more were created there between 1984 and 1987.

The move to his first studio outside our home gave his creativity yet another boost. Markus Lüpertz and Uwe Lindau had worked there before him. The landlady, an older, widowed, and very determined lady, liked to tell stories about her experiences with OUBEY’s “predecessors.” Lüpertz, she said, once wanted to give her one of his paintings — but it hadn’t looked like art to her, more like the suits in the window display of Karlsruhe’s largest men’s clothing store. So she had refused it.

In this studio on Sofienstraße, OUBEY began working with the Amiga 500 computer. That’s why an original photo of this studio — showing the “digital studio” — appears in the Spark section of the OUBEY MINDSPACE, which explores art and computer technology. There you’ll also find a quote by OUBEY on the relationship between art and computers — a statement whose fundamental insight reaches far beyond its time and remains just as valid and significant in 2025 as it was then.

With the PhotonPaintings he created on the Amiga 500, he held his first and only, very successful exhibition in 1992, titled MINDKISS – The PHOTONPAINTING. I later named the MINDKISS project after this exhibition in 2005. In case you wonder why the catalogue cover names a Wendelin Koehler as presenting artist, you will find the answer at the same Spark as mentioned above.

In this studio, OUBEY also painted with oil on canvas for the first time. However, he found that this technique was unsuitable for realizing the images that already existed in his mind, as he put it. Even computer work reached its limits of materialization — enlarging the image files to formats of adequate size was enormously complex and unaffordable.

OUBEY dreamed of one day printing them with a plotter on enormous canvases, or projecting them onto large white walls or waterfalls using laser technology—early ideas for an immersive 360° presentation of his art. This is just one example of how far ahead of his time he was in his imagination. But at that time, for an artist with limited financial means, that dream was still far out of reach. Today, when we publicly present his great late work GENESIS as an immersive 360° room projection, we are following in the footsteps of his thoughts.

Then he was given notice to vacate the studio. It was a hard blow. He knew how difficult it would be to find another suitable — or even halfway decent — space. As I had done in 1987, I searched tirelessly for a new studio for him. And once again, after months of searching, I was lucky enough to find a good one — larger, brighter, closer to our home, and affordable. When I told OUBEY about it, he had serious doubts. But the moment he entered it for the first time, it was immediately clear that this was his space. What a stroke of luck!

Take your time for the experience of a virtual 360° visit at OUBEYs studio.

It took quite a while before he had set up this new studio in a way that made him feel comfortable — something that was an absolute prerequisite for his painting. There was a couch, a large satellite TV, a small open kitchen, a bathroom, a big bed, and a lemon tree I had given him as a housewarming gift.

Then, in 2003, came the next explosion of creativity: large-format paintings, oil on coated fiberboard — GENESIS and StarPixelClusters. I had never before seen OUBEY so consistently and continuously productive. He was completely at one with himself. And for the first time after twelve years of withdrawal, he was ready for another exhibition.

I still remember vividly how, after his fatal accident, I entered the studio alone for the first time in August 2004 — with the greatest respect, knowing that I would never have entered it without OUBEYs presence while he was alive. Because that was his space — his most personal realm of freedom. Yet the lemon tree needed water. Every three or four days.

And so, in time, OUBEYs studio became our space.

 

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There are six rooms in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story that tells us more about who OUBEY was and what he was like. I will tell these stories here.

Many thanks to the great team at Kubikfoto for their fantastic co-creation and their outstanding performance by the audiovisual production of the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Together we are delighted that the achievement of the OUBEY MINDSPACE has been awarded with three international awards, including the prestigous Red Dot Design Award 2025.

 

Not a temporary stay in an ISS research station, but a permanent relocation? Perhaps the question should be rephrased: When will humans first relocate to space?

OUBEY already spoke in 1992 about how the rapid increase in the human population on Earth is at the expense of all other living beings on this planet. And that humanity should leave Earth and move to space – in the long term.

The idea that we humans could approach space, where our Earth floats and revolves around the sun once a year, travel there or even live there for a certain period of time, has been around for a very long time. Fantastic science fiction stories, but also scientific studies, have repeatedly encouraged us not to dismiss this idea as fantasy, but to believe in its feasibility.

Manned space flight has shown us how it is possible to overcome gravity, leave the Earth’s atmosphere, and venture into the space of our solar system. Scientific projects have repeatedly investigated what it might look like to settle humans in a space colony. Based on the findings of an MIT study, a project was launched at the University of Karlsruhe in 1979 under the direction of Prof. Fritz Haller, which dealt with the “environmental design of prototypical space colonies.”

The aim was to design a “space colony” for 1,000 inhabitants, which would serve as their permanent home, workplace, and living space. Not a stationary base on another planet such as Mars, but an “orbital,” a huge spacecraft floating freely in space, in which 1,000 people would find an artificially created home. This presents not only a technical challenge, but also a challenge in terms of designing the social space and the social framework for coexistence on this island in space.

When they are substantial, such designs therefore always border on social utopias, the realization of which is likely to be far more probable over the next fifty to a hundred years than many people would like to believe today.

It was precisely at this time that OUBEY began studying architecture at the University of Karlsruhe. Meeting Fritz Haller and learning about the visionary projects he and his students were working on was a stroke of luck for OUBEY, with far-reaching consequences. He was inspired and enthusiastic about Haller’s project assignments, but above all by the free-spirited nature of his personality. OUBEY approached the task of designing a new type of folding chair by focusing not on the design of the chair itself, but on the mathematics of the joint. The result was what OUBEY called the rotation vector. Haller did not criticize him for this, but on the contrary found it highly interesting and suggested that OUBEY should continue working on it. However, he then decided to pursue the freedom of art. Nevertheless, OUBEY was never able to forget his encounter with Haller and his visionary projects.

The colonization of space is not only a historic challenge from a technical, architectural, and social-psychological point of view. It will be a test of the intelligence of the human species and its ability to actually learn from the experiences of its own history. Whether we are capable of doing so or whether we will instead export our outdated, destructive patterns of thought and action into space remains to be seen. Doubts about this seem justified.

However, cooperation between human and artificial intelligence could prove to be a unique historical opportunity and become a decisive success factor in this pioneering achievement. I would love to know how OUBEY would assess this today.

In the MINDSPACE Spark on the topic of “space colonies,” we learn why he was already convinced in 1992 that humans should move to space – and he tells us this in his original, recorded voice.

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There are six rooms in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story that tells us more about who OUBEY was and what he was like. I will tell these stories here.

Many thanks to the great team at Kubikfoto for their fantastic co-creation and their outstanding performance by the audiovisual production of the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Together we are delighted that the achievement of the OUBEY MINDSPACE has been awarded with three international awards, including the prestigous Red Dot Design Award 2025.

 

 

 

The 31st Speyer Kulturbeutel Festival will then raise the curtain in the Old Town Hall on October 4. Preparations are already underway.

Between the afternoon and evening performances, Dagmar Woyde-Koehler presented her project “Mindkiss” to Kulturbeutel visitors. With this extraordinary interactive exhibition, she brings the Karlsruhe artist Rudi Wendelin-Koehler, alias Oubey, who died in an accident in 2004, back to life. The virtual journey of discovery into the artist’s different thought spaces is particularly emotional when Oubey’s original voice can be heard. Even though it is recreated by AI, it still has a strange sound for his widow, especially since it is deceptively real, as she says.

A space of thought by Oubey.

Woyde-Köhler lived with Oubey for 21 years and has made it her mission to share his legacy with the world. The exhibition offers a glimpse into an uncertain future and insights into the past as Obey saw it. It tells of the cosmos and the beauty of the underwater worlds and of the 1000 stars that the artist wanted to create. Almost all of them shine brightly at the viewer between two toiletries bags.

Ellen Korelus-Bruder in DIE RHEINPFALZ, October 13, 2025 (excerpt)

The artist’s name is OUBEY. And the question of the sources of his inspiration is answered by a virtual experience space: the OUBEY MINDSPACE. In an interactive, playful way, visitors can discover what inspired and excited this artist—from astrophysics, space travel, and science fiction to philosophy, evolutionary history, and poetry to music, film art, and the world of comics. Through immersive narratives, visual content, and personal insights, visitors can get to know OUBEY’s world of ideas and understand the interdisciplinary connections that are expressed in his art.

The experiential journey takes place on two monitors—a large screen on which thoughts come to life in colorful images, accompanied by soundscapes, pieces of music, and sounds. And a touchscreen in front of it, where everyone can freely choose which of the six atmospherically completely different rooms they would like to visit first. Once in one of the rooms, further worlds open up, which can be accessed by clicking on a point. There are also artifacts from the artist’s everyday life and some background stories are told.

The artifacts can be found by clicking on small hidden Polaroid photos. Once all twelve have been found, a link to an OUBEY MINDSPACE playlist on Spotify opens. It contains all the music tracks from MINDSPACE in full length, as well as many other tracks by musicians, composers, and singers who were of special significance to OUBEY.

This is the first time I have presented OUBEY MINDSPACE to the public in this way. Since its premiere at the ZKM Karlsruhe in March, it has been available to people all over the world free of charge on the internet. More than a million people have visited it online since then. Now, for the first time, I can experience the immediate response of other people to this innovative form of presentation. For me, this is just as intense an experience as visiting OUBEY MINDSPACE is for guests.

“For us, it was an adventure to digitally reinvent OUBEYs world,” said Ole Leifels from Kubikfoto³, the team that worked with me for two years to design and then produce OUBEY MINDSPACE. Incidentally, they were recently awarded the coveted Red Dot Design Award for this. He added: “The MINDSPACE shows that technology doesn’t have to be cold. It can be moving, arouse curiosity, and build bridges between art, science, and the public.” All guests of the Kulturbeutel who have visited the OUBEY MINDSPACE have confirmed that this is the case.

This year, the Kulturbeutel Festival in Speyer’s Old Town Hall is offering its guests the OUBEY MINDSPACE as a surprise outside the official program. This unique experience space is hidden behind a black curtain at the entrance to the theater. Anyone can visit it every day between 5:00 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., and admission is free.

The OUBEY MINDSPACE’s guest appearance in Speyer ends on Sunday, October 12, at 7:30 p.m.

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WOCHENBLATT SPEYER, October 6, 2025

 

It was leaning against the wall of his tiny apartment and exerted an irresistible attraction on me from the very first moment.

OUBEY told me the title was “The Journey of the Monads” and explained that monads are the smallest, animated, self-moving, indivisible particles in the universe, both spirit and matter at the same time. Although physically separate, they are all forever connected to each other through communication. He was fascinated by this metaphysical understanding of the universe and the creative genius of the mind that produced it.

Then he talked about Newton and criticized the limitations of his mechanical view of the world, which implied that everything was reversible. Fortunately, Einstein had corrected this by classifying Newtonian mechanics. Natural processes are irreversible. Recognizing this makes a decisive difference in understanding the world and its dynamic complexity. Nobel Prize winner Ilya Prigogine, whose groundbreaking book “Dialogue with Nature” he had just read, would agree.

Leibniz, Newton, Einstein, Prigogine – a fast-paced, impressive lecture, delivered off the cuff on a sunny afternoon! When OUBEY shared the intellectual context of his thinking and work with me, and often with others, those were magical moments – usually in the truest sense of the word.

It was not Leibniz, but his rival contemporary Isaac Newton who achieved fame and fortune during his lifetime. This fact reinforced OUBEY’s critical assessment of public perception when it comes to the question of adapting to the spirit of the times and the respective power relations.

Unlike Newton, Leibniz was not particularly adept at making a personal impression on the wealthy patrons of his time that would have brought him fame and fortune. Busy day and night with his ideas, studies, experiments, and writings, he was not a man of the public. Nevertheless, he gained recognition and admiration in his time, but only a few recognized and understood him for what he really was: a universal genius.

For all these reasons and more, it was clear to me that there had to be a place for Leibniz and his monadology in the OUBEY MINDSPACE.

Interestingly, in the same year that OUBEY MINDSPACE celebrated its premiere, a film was released in cinemas that brings us closer to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as a thinker and as a human being. “Leibniz – Chronicle of an Unfinished Picture” is the title of this film by Edgar Reitz.

The film is challenging. That’s a good thing. Skillfully staged in the style of a chamber play, it provides insight into Leibniz’s relationship to art and truth while focusing on the creation of a portrait painting of Leibniz.

The commissioned established court painter, embodying the zeitgeist of the early 18th century, wants Leibniz to allow himself to be portrayed as he imagines him. Despite sincere efforts to please the artist, he does not succeed. The attempt fails. “You are no friend of art,” says the painter. “But the best friend of truth,” replies the model.

The court painter is replaced by a young artist, still unknown, disguised as a man. She is concerned with the truth in the picture. She first looks for the right light in the room, wanting to bring Leibniz’s essence to life in the picture. With her statement, “What I don’t understand, I can paint,” she leaves him, who tries to understand everything, speechless with amazement for a moment.

“The reason for art is art itself,” the film has Leibniz say. A principle that OUBEY has always followed in his artistic work.

OUBEY would have paid close attention to Edgar Reitz’s film. On the one hand, because he admired this director of the ten-part series “HEIMAT,” a true masterpiece of cinematic storytelling. On the other hand, because this outstanding director dedicated his late cinematic work to the brilliant mind with whom OUBEY felt so connected.

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There are six rooms in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different Mind Sparks, which in turn contain different impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story that tells us more about who OUBEY was and what he was like. These stories are told here by me.

In these cosmic nebula formations, of which there are countless in our universe, the exploded “dust” of dead stars collects and becomes the birthplace of new stars. Some call it cosmic recycling, others call it the nursery of the stars.

While we can only see the Eagle Nebula, 7,000 light-years away, through the eye of space telescopes, the Horsehead Nebula, due to its relative proximity to Earth, can be discovered and marveled at from here with a sufficiently powerful telescope.

In 1987, OUBEY dedicated a painting to the Horsehead Nebula which never ceases to amaze when viewed up close. Only then can you see the wafer-thin veins in the graphite-gray crackle of the dust clouds, revealing the dull shimmer of gold in the cosmic background. Above and through everything float bright red cloud formations that surround the core of the image.

The painting was created without a single brushstroke or any other manual intervention by the artist. As always, the coated hardboard panel lay horizontally on the floor during the creative process. This not only eliminated the artist’s signature, but also reduced the external influence of Earth’s gravity to a minimum. “It is important to me that my paintings are free of the artist’s signature,” said OUBEY himself. For this reason, he never signed any of the paintings from this creative period. All of his ‘painterly’ works from the 1980s were consistently created according to this principle. In “Horsehead Nebula,” he achieved a precision and depth of detail unlike any other painting.

OUBEY was not concerned with creating a replica. Photographs taken by space telescopes serve that purpose. Rather, he sought to find an artistic expression for his inner image, his vision of the Horsehead Nebula, and thus to honor this wonderful cosmic place in his own way. After all, the dust of dead stars in space not only constantly gives rise to new stars. All life on this earth, including our own species, owes its existence to this very special substance.

“This is truly cosmic art,” someone said when they saw this image. It is an expression of OUBEY’s deep connection to the cosmos, which he developed at a very young age. However, it would never have occurred to him to describe his work as “cosmic art.” Art is art. The cosmos is the cosmos.

Thus, both can be found in a Spark from the OUBEY MINDSPACE: the cosmos in the form of the Horsehead Nebula and art in the form of OUBEY’s painting of the same name.

In the early years of the MINDKISS project, when I spoke to people who knew the art world much better than I did, I found that there was a widespread belief that art had to be classifiable. Some people, quite kindly, said that a name was needed that would briefly sum up the approach or orientation of OUBEY’s work.

From a marketing perspective, this may seem plausible. However, the incredible diversity of OUBEY’s work makes such categorization impossible. This is not a problem for the MINDKISS project. On the contrary, its approach itself represents a diversity for which there is no label.

One person who immediately recognized this when encountering an original OUBEY painting and expressed it both analytically and emotionally was Prof. Peter Kruse. The video impressively shows how he approached the painting, which was completely unknown to him until then.

It was not until many years after the creation of the “Horsehead Nebula” that OUBEY returned to the theme of stars with his StarPixels. He announced in March 2004 that he would paint a thousand stars. That year, I finally gave him a telescope for Christmas. One with which he could see the Horsehead Nebula with his own eyes from the Black Forest.

They created the basis for most of today’s coal deposits. The oldest fossil finds date back to the Lower Devonian period, around 400 million years ago.

When I once had the opportunity to visit a coal mine 800 meters underground, I discovered the imprint of a fern in a piece of coal out of the corner of my eye as I crawled through a narrow seam. I was so fascinated and moved by this rare find that I picked up the piece, held it in my left hand, and continued crawling through the seam with the fossilized fern in one hand.

 

There are many artifacts from OUBEY’s everyday life on display in the OUBEY MINDSPACE. The fossilized fern, which I still cherish to this day, is not one of them, because as an artifact it is part of my own life.

But to our delight, OUBEY and I agreed one day that ferns are our favorite plants. They are simply fascinatingly beautiful: how a broad, huge frond grows out of the snail-shaped shoot, with many small seeds neatly lined up on the underside, which ensure the plant’s propagation. A masterpiece of nature!

OUBEY was also very enthusiastic about the changing aesthetics of the fern as it grew. He used the fern to explain the Fibonacci sequence to me, which the Italian mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci discovered in various plants in the 13th century, after the ancient Greeks and Indians had already discovered the mathematical series itself – without, however, applying it to the plant world.

But what impressed him most was the fact that this plant has survived all the natural disasters of the last 400 million years and is therefore not only a fossil, for example a piece of coal, but also a living testimony to evolutionary history in the wild.

It was clear to me very early on that OUBEY MINDSPACE definitely needed a “spark” relating to evolutionary history, which would naturally also give the 400-million-year-old fern a moment of attention and respect. The image in the header shows the fern as it appears in the Mind Spark on evolution.

There are six rooms in OUBEY MINDSPACE. Each of them contains five different one-minute Mind Sparks, which in turn contain various impulses. Behind every Spark and every impulse is a story that tells us more about who OUBEY was and what he was like. These stories are told here by me.

 

 

 

When the extraordinary artist and man OUBEY was unexpectedly torn from life at a young age, a valuable treasure was left behind: his artistic work. The first approach of the MINDKISS project was to make this “hidden treasure” of his life’s work visible and to collect resonance on it.

The public interest in OUBEYs art grew, and so did the curiosity about him as a person and as a personality. For years I answered questions about him simply: “Look at his paintings. You’ll find everything that’s really important about him in his art.”

At the same time, deep inside me arose the desire to give others appropriate access to OUBEYs fascinating interdisciplinary world of knowledge and thought. Appropriate both in terms of the curiosity of the questioners and of OUBEY himself who can no longer answer their questions directly.

A classic biography was out of the question for me. Instead, I wanted to create a playful way of discovering and getting to know OUBEY in his many seemingly contradictory facets – as close and authentic as possible to his nature and his own desire to research and discover.

For years, I searched for a suitable concept. The experiments with virtual reality and AI technology in the MINDKISS project between 2019-2022 finally gave me an idea: to create an interactive experience space in which everyone can immerse themselves in OUBEYs world of thought in an entertaining and aesthetic way.

As OUBEY himself was a technical pioneer and had already created innovative computer art on the Amiga 500 in the 1980s with his PhotonPainting, I knew that he would like this approach – if only it could be implemented in a highly professional manner and meet his own high standards of what he himself described as “reference class”.

Fortunately, I found exactly the right partners at exactly the right time to realize this bold idea. When Ole Leifels and the Kubikfoto³ team agreed, the great adventure of working together creatively began. It was an intensive process of congenial design, filled with enthusiasm and the pure joy of doing.

The result is called OUBEY MINDSPACE and celebrated its premiere at the ZKM Karlsruhe on March 25, 2025. Since then, the project has already reached thousands and thousands of people worldwide via the social web. This enormous response fills me with joy – not only because of the impressive numbers but also because it has created a new, universal access to the world of OUBEY. A form of expression that does him justice in terms of both content and art and is already inspiring people of all ages.

This has always been OUBEY MINDKISS’ aspiration. For 15 years we came closer to it step by step. Now the OUBEY MINDSPACE represents a great leap forward in terms of public attention and interest – and yet it is also just the beginning. A significant part of OUBEYs work still lies hidden and is waiting to see the light of day and be discovered in the coming years.

My hope is that this growing public resonance will also generate media interest and partnerships with suitable institutions to bring OUBEYs art and the spirit that lies within it even further into the world. That would be wonderful, appropriate to the work – and certainly in keeping with its spirit.

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With many thanks to Kubikfoto³ for the congenius collaboration. The header is a screenshot of the OUBEY MINDSPACE: https://mindspace.oubey.com

 

 

On August 2, 2004, the RHEINPFALZ reported on a traffic accident on the B9 between Römerberg/Dudenhofen and Schwegenheim. A truck crashed into a small car that was parked on the hard shoulder with its hazard warning lights on. The driver of the car was the young artist Oubey, whose real name was Rudi Wendelin-Köhler from Karlsruhe. It was a shock for everyone close to him, but especially for his wife Dagmar Woyde-Köhler, who lives part of the time in Dudenhofen. Despite her bewilderment, she quickly realized: “I didn’t want to sell his artworks; fortunately, I wasn’t financially forced to do so. I wanted to continue to make his art accessible to people to the best of my knowledge and belief.”

The art collection, which Dagmar Woyde-Köhler has since carefully exhibited and managed, consists mainly of paintings. Oubey preferred to work with a mixture of pigment paints on hardboard. But he also always saw himself as a pioneer who experimented with new art forms, as Dagmar Woyde-Köhler recounts: “As early as 1987/88, he was experimenting with a drawing program on an Amiga. My husband always wanted to create multi-layered and diverse art, but never wanted it to seem arbitrary.”

Oubey enjoyed commercial success early on, selling all of his artworks at his first exhibition. A major career in the traditional art market suddenly seemed possible—and the pressure on Oubey grew: “I noticed that he was very happy about this, but it also preoccupied him. He told me that if I continued like this, I would lose the source of my art, so I advised him to take a break from exhibitions,” says Woyde-Köhler. Instead, the artist worked in his studio for years. In 2004, an exhibition was finally scheduled to take place, the first in twelve years. But then the accident happened.

 

Philippines and New Zealand

Woyde-Köhler soon decided to launch the “Mindkiss” project and continue to make Oubey’s art accessible to people in exhibitions and on the internet. “I see myself as a collector, especially of reactions,” says Woyde-Köhler, describing her work. “Because something completely new emerges from the reactions to his art.”

And indeed, Dagmar Woyde-Köhler has been able to reach people all over the world through her husband’s art and her project, which is named after her husband’s first exhibition. In 2023, there was a four-month exhibition in Manila in the Philippines, Woyde-Köhler met US astronomer Seth Shostak and collaborated with graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister. She also visited a Maori school in New Zealand.

Everywhere she went, people looked at Oubey’s art with fascination and found inspiration and stimulation, his wife asserts. “But the best thing is actually all the encounters and interesting conversations that are facilitated by Oubey and his art. He would definitely have been delighted to see what his art does to people and would certainly have liked to be part of these conversations,” says Woyde-Köhler.

 

Interactive project planned

Depth and inspiration have always been what made Oubey’s art so special. Woyde-Köhler describes her husband’s work as follows: “His art is an ode to the joy of discovery. He always had a keen interest in interdisciplinary subjects and combined scientific interest and philosophical approaches in his works. He was firmly convinced that everything is connected.” This approach has now led to great success and recognition around the world. Even though Dagmar Woyde-Köhler does not measure the success of her project in terms of fame or numbers: “For me, success means reaching as many people as possible with Oubey’s art. Especially those outside the art scene who would not otherwise engage with it.”

To guarantee this, Dagmar Woyde-Köhler continues to plan projects and exhibitions. Exhibitions are currently being planned in Helsinki, Barcelona, and Milan. She is also working with her partners on an interactive web experience called “Mindspace,” which is scheduled to launch in March 2025. “Here, we want to focus on Oubey as a person and his interests,” explains Woyde-Köhler. Despite all her many projects, she manages her husband’s legacy with great responsibility and intends to continue fulfilling her promise to carry on his art.

 

DIE RHEINPFALZ –Marco Biallas – August 14, 2024

Photo: Andre Bakker