Under the moniker “Tofa” – Chris Noelle (*1974) works as multimedia-artist in Linz, Austria. Tofa is a freelancer in the fields of graphic-design, illustration, film, animation, photography, music and projection design.
His explicit skills have led to works for international clients like Sony, Diesel, Smart, T-Mobile, Lacoste, Red Bull and publications in magazines like Vogue, IdN, Die Gestalten Verlag, Page, Art, Streetwear Today and JPeople, shortfilms and animations for Wired UK, IdN and TV-Reports on ARTE TV, ARD and ZDF.
His style has its roots from a passionate mixture of architecture, urban art, animation and graphic-design. Tofa has the talent of simultaniously joggling between different skills and styles to keep the creative output as interesting and challenging as possible.
Besides his freelancing career, Tofa works as Art Director for the legendary technoclub Tresor since 2007, developing solutions for all multimedia related resorts: delivering graphic-design for campaigns since the beginning, developing the online appearance of tresorberlin.com up to being editor in chief for the club´s own magazine “Tresor.iginal”.
Since 2009 Chris Noelle has worked for Beuth University, teaching filmediting and multimediaproduction for architect master students.
Due to his expertice knowledge in visual projections he is in collaboration with software producer Arkaos since 2003. Tofa started visual projections with two VHS decks back in the 1990s´ and grew up with the visual software development over the following decade. Since 2002 he´s performing livevisuals and has collaborated with artists like Flying Steps, Theo Parrish, Flying Beggars, Swayzak, Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Octave One, Clueso, Miss Dynamite, Marky, Metalheadz, Cristian Vogel, Mike Huckaby, Scan 7 and many others. And he performed on festivals such as UrbanArtForms, Impact Eindhoven, sound:frame, Whisper China, Festival of Lights, just to mention a few.
But let’s go back in time and take a closer look on how everything started, as this story is quiet outstanding from others and reads itself more like a myth:
With the age of 17 Chris started his professional career as extreme-sports-pro in bike-trials, riding competitions, jumping on rocks and batteling for international trophies. On the peak of this sports-driven-period, he could look back on countless national titles, 5 years in the Top5 Worldranking and finishing all off with the double Team-World-Champion Title, plus a UCI-Bike-Trials Vice-World Champion Solo Title (1995) and a Guinness-Book record in 1996. This led to attractive sponsoring deals with companies like Chrysler and Scott, having an own fashion-line from his shoe-sponsor Vans. So this was the first crosslink to the graphic world of fashion-design, which appeared a couple of years later to be in main focus of his career.
Besides the sports-career, he started his apprenticeship at Jung von Matt in Hamburg in 1996 to deepen his skills in PR- and advertising-strategies and graphic-design. As this was way to boring for his personal creative approach, he decided to jump on the train of studying fashion-design (1998-2002) with a main focus on CAD illustration and graphic print-designs, before moving back to Berlin in 2002. Since then Tofa is working as freelancer on artistic projects and in collaboration with other artists and clients from different branches of the advertising world.
In 2003 Tofa bumped into the world of light-art photography – a longtime-exposure technique that´s using lightsources to virtually leave traces within a picture. With a scholarship in Tokyo in 2007 at Tokyo Wondersite Gallery, he jumped onto another level and today, Tofa is one of the world leading artists of this genre. To feature this individual, on www.lightwriting.de you can find a deeper insight of his photo-portfolio.
By the time he started working at Tresor in 2007, he became co-founder of The Core., a team of and lighting-designers and multimedia-experts who work globaly on stage-, interior- and lighting-designs. Tofa is deeply involved in ongoing creative solutions for this company: www.thecoreberlin.com
To resume the multidirectional skills of this artist isn’t that easy but this is what you get if you’re in search of someone with an allover-multimedia expertice: strategic online-development, interface design, streaming expertice, graphic illustration, cover-design, animation, music-clips, trailer-animations, audiovisual content production, film, photography, logo-design, corporate-and editorial-design.
