JOHANNES WINKLER ( 1984, Black Forest) is a German composer and media artist based in Essen. His work unfolds at the intersection of contemporary music, text, image, and code — creating hybrid forms that trace a narrative of sensual perception, rhythm, and cultural resonance. He engages artistic disciplines and traditions with conceptual clarity and a distinctive expressive audiovisual language.

His works have been presented at Musica Acoustica Beijing, ZKM Karlsruhe, Fournos Center Athens, and the JOE Festival Essen, among others. He received the Karl Marx Prize in 2018 and won the ZKM SuperCollider Code Marathon. Together with A. Wijayan, he co-founded 'Netzwerk Konnakol Deutschland'. → See full list

TUPLETMACHINE

Contemporary Music Ensemble, Software Environment | Winkler - Nowak - Wijayan
2023 - 2025

www.tupletmachine.de

Tupletmachine is an experimental field for algoRhythmic exploration. It merges contemporary ensemble work by members of the Konnakol.de network with a custom-built software-environment for composition and advanced rhythm pedagogy. At its core, Tupletmachine is a hypercultural practice — shaped by a love of sensual arithmetics, complex rhythmic structures, and the 'carnatic impulse' of intercultural friendships emerging from Germany’s Ruhr region.


www.tupletmachine.de

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WINKLER.SINGULARITY

transmedial Project Space | Essen, GER - Installationen - Konzerte - Prints
2023 - 2025

www.winkler-singularity.de

WINKLER.SINGULARITY is a transmedial research and art project operating at the intersection of music, computation, visuality, and rhythm. It serves both as an autonomous artistic space for collaboration and as an open archive for emergent systems linking body, machine, and sound. At its core lies the question of how systems — visual, auditory, artificially intelligent, and intercultural — can evolve a language of their own through feedback, transcription, and intuition:

a tactile arithmetic, a way of thinking in pulses and patterns, drawing from carnatic counting techniques and contrasted by expressive visual worlds. The project manifests in publications, installations, concerts, prints, and software.


www.winkler-singularity.de

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SCORE OF INFLUENCE

transmedial musictheatre for instagram
2018 - 2025

Blog Article: SCORE OF INFLUENCE

  show 2D score

Since 2018, a dynamic process on social media has given rise to so-called Slide Compositions — musical and video miniatures originally conceived as Instagram posts. These works emerged across multiple accounts, mutually influencing each other and ultimately evolving into larger forms beyond the confines of the platform. Among them:

  Antenne I - III
Klavier-Zyklus für Social Media (2023)

  Goldei Variationen
Lecture Performance Antizipation, Folkwang Universität der Künste, Ex-Machina (2023)

  Quantisiertes Blau
für transmedialen Oszillator, Meer und Social Media - Lecture Performance, Dreifaltigkeitskirche Borbeck, Ya Festival (2022)

  counting time-bits of Stravinsky
für carnatic neo-counter, bitcrusher und social media - WDR3 Studio Neue Musik (2022)

TETRALEMMATIC ROSES

winning soundart piece at Karl Marx international composition competition | Birmingham Contemporary Music Group
2018

Blog Article: Tetralemma Klänge: 1, 2, 3, 4

In 2018, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, in collaboration with the Association for the Promotion of the Karl Marx Anniversary Programme, launched the international composition competition Marx.Music – Wilde Lieder. Together with my composer colleague and soprano Elisabeth Anna Maria Kaiser, we won in the SOUNDART category with our piece tetralemmatic roses for a birthday.

To mark Karl Marx’s 200th birthday, we dedicated a series of metaphorical roses to him — each one shaping Elisabeth’s voice as a resonant filter inside her mouth, transforming her singing into sculpted sound.


Blog Article: Tetralemma Klänge: 1, 2, 3, 4/

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NETZWERK KONNAKOL DEUTSCHLAND

Teaching and Researching advanced carnatic rhythm techniques
2018 - 2025 +

www.konnakol.de

Our diverse team, based in Essen (NRW), brings together outstanding performers, composers, and transdisciplinary collaborators. Together, we explore and teach how fundamental and complex rhythmic structures can be deeply understood and creatively shaped through South Indian vocal counting techniques (Konnakol / Carnatic rhythm / rhythmic solfège).

We offer both in-person and online seminars at music universities, academies, conservatories, schools, and conferences. In 2018, Anushaant Nayinai Wijayan (co-founder of T.C. Fine Arts Academy Germany) and Johannes Winkler (composer and media artist) founded the Netzwerk Konnakol Deutschland, developing educational materials, videos, and a modular course system tailored to the needs of Western musicians, composers, conductors, dancers, and music educators — inspired in part by Rafael Reina’s PhD work at the Conservatory of Amsterdam.

www.konnakol.de

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Johannes Winkler * 1984, Blackforest, is a german contemporary music composer, artist, concept developer and cultural ambassador. He lives and works in Essen. Since 2017 he has been re-composing his wide ranging work as a transmedial music-theatre along contemporary music, moving images, text, software and experience.

Winkler has won the international sound art prize 'Karl Marx' BCMG (Birmingham/ London/ Trier), the ZKM Supercollider Code Marathon and is the initiator and lecturer of the South-Indian/-German Network Konnakol Germany. With hundreds of 'slide compositions' on social-media accounts, he influences his future works. Portrait in WDR 3 Radio Studio Contemporary Music.


READ FULL CV (.pdf)

contact@johanneswinkler.de

Impressum / Datenschutz

Johannes Winkler, 2025