Who is Wolfgang Schindler - What happened? In 1962 I was born in Hamburg, Germany and I still live here today. My first years I lived with my parents in their house, nothing unusual about that, but this house stood under the flightpath of the nearby international airport. My father also worked as a photographer for his company, and so it was almost inevitable that at the age of ten I began to capture those large loud fast-moving shiny things on film.

Photographing planes flying by makes you think about all possible meteorological and astronomical effects and events, because everytime you take a picture of an airplane, you take a picture of the atmosphere and the sky. So my theme expanded, and as I wondered about wind and light I found myself leaving home under the flightpath and entering a world full of art and arts, spectacles, and predictable wonders of light and wind best seen under eclipse paths.

To align my artistic interests with the economy of the outside world I worked in the office of a record company for two years and then studied art at Hamburg's Hochschule fuer bildende Kuenste HFBK, a college for fine arts. After finishing with a diploma I became the manager of a large showroom for contemporary art named KX. The place was run by a group of artists and existed for almost twenty years until the funding was cut and the building was sold to an investor who wanted a supermarket instead of an art gallery.

Before I got into eclipse chasing I spent quite a lot of time in England and northern Germany as part of the crop circle scene, a strange blend of artists, mystics, and scientists. Here is a link to a report I wrote about one of our last experiments (auf Deutsch) in which we tried to find how to lay down a geometrically relevant pattern in a wheat field at night and discovered much more than expected.