Florian Kuhlmann, who works as Mr Coolman, is an artist based in Düsseldorf, Germany, working across net art, code-based installation and generative art. His practice centers on digitality and the networked infrastructures of the internet, and the contexts that emerge around them. He studied audiovisual media at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne from 2002 to 2007, under Dieter Jung, Hans Ulrich Reck, Frans Vogelaar and Peter Zimmermann.
In 2005 he began The Gift, a series of collages made from images taken from the internet and given back to it, all offered for free download on their own websites. A related Configuration series of installations followed, including Massive Structural Overload at DIE GROSSE in Düsseldorf in 2006 and a digital picture frame built from a Mac Mini and flatscreen for a 2008 show at b-l-a-s-t in Cologne.Alongside this work he ran the blog perisphere.de and the project space #digital3mpire in Düsseldorf's Friedrichstadt district.His work was also included in Dadaclub.online, an archive of artists' reworkings of Dada material initiated by the Link Art Center for the movement's centenary, shown at Spazio Contemporanea in Brescia, Italy, alongside original Dada works by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp and Hans Richter.
His series Redefining the Matrix began in 2019 with the solo exhibition “inside out” at Galerie Falko Alexander in Cologne.The series takes the form of TEXTTOKEN pieces, black Arial typography installed directly on gallery walls as unique digital assets.The piece Well The Internet Told Me It Was Ok was shown at Kunsthaus Kornelimünster in 2023 and subsequently entered the art collection of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia.In 2024 Obstruction, a responsive work built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, was shown in the exhibition Western Gods at Galerie Falko Alexander in Cologne.That same year he released the generative artwork TWO HASHES on fxhash, describing it as a visual combination of two hash values standing in for the artwork's DNA.
