EXTRAWEG

"No matter what you do, to show and share it with other people is fundamental."

Oliver Latta is a berlin-based motion designer and illustrator, his work features groundbreaking 3D, 2D and live action imagery that challenges your idea of reality. His grand online following confirms his admiration with technology and the ability to formulate art through modern culture.

Extraweg – Oliver Latta
Visual Artist
City of residence, BERLIN, GERMANY

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Q & A:

COL: How old are you and where are you from?
EX: I’m German, born and raised in Kotten, a small town from East Germany, I currently live and work in Berlin though and on July 31st of next week I'll be 31 years old.

COL: What do you do?
EX: I work as Motion Designer doing commercial work for international clients at Extraweg Studio and I create personal and non-commercial stuff as Extraweg which is my alias as a 3D artist.

COL: How long have you been doing it?
EX: Well, it's been a long time already. After my studies in the Bauhaus University I moved to Berlin where I have spent the last years working for an important production company, but that was before opening my own Design Studio that I run together with my partner Bruno. And as creating personal stuff, I always had the hobby or the need to create new things, from clothes to home decoration and now the videos everyone knows.

COL: What’s your first artistic memory?
EX: I grew up surrounded by nature and as a child I spent a lot of time outside. I remember myself getting up early to see the morning fog, it was very aesthetic, very cinematographic. That mix of nature, calm and haze always fascinated me and I guess discovering old trees, observing deers or simply exploring started the interest on me in photography trying to capture the magic of what I was experiencing.

COL: What inspired you to pursue a career in art?
EX: One day I decided to upload these oddly satisfying videos that I was doing, and it turned out that out there started to be a lot of people watching. The thing is, this is the only way I find to express how I feel about some things.

COL: Do you remember your first work of art?
EX: Before getting myself so much involved in 3D, I was very inspired by the work of Christophe Huet, a French photographer who does magic with the photo editing by transforming other people images into completely amazing new ones only by using Photoshop, 3D techniques and CGI. His work is great, but I realized that the beauty of 3D is that you can create a whole new world from scratch where everything is possible and the only limit is your own imagination.

COL: What is your relationship with fashion?
EX: Fashion says a lot about everyone cause it allows us to express ourselves. Everyone of us with no exception has to choose how we feel about it and since the moment we get up in the morning what we decide to wear or not to wear clearly has an impact on the way others are going to see us and that is important even if we choose not to care about it. Back in my student days, already under the name of Extraweg I started designing t-shirts that I used to sell through Internet and today fashion is an industry that I like to work with since it has to be reinventing itself all the time and brands are constantly trying to find new visual languages or trends, what makes it very interesting when it comes to 3D where the only limit is your own imagination.

COL: What does the word “collective” mean to you as an artist?
EX: My work as an artist often is very individual, I spend many hours (probably too many) in front of the computer, but I have always on my mind the people and the relationships between them. The collective is essential in our society, we are individuals that nevertheless we could hardly create great things alone. We need each other to get the best out of ourselves.

COL: What is the best and worst thing about being an artist?
EX: On one hand I enjoy the freedom I have to experiment and try new stuff trying to express myself but on the other hand is hard to live with the feeling of never having something completely finished that also probably you won't ever get paid for. I don´t know, I guess I'm a perfectionist.

COL: Who do you admire?
EX: I tend to admire everyone who is capable of living in their own way, whatever it may be, without the need to necessarily have to fit. I guess, I admire people with personality. I love creative and humble people, who do things solely motivated by passion and the enjoyment of just doing them, especially nowadays when seeking fame and recognition is an aim in itself for a large part of society.

COL: How important is the ability to expose your art to you and your creative field?
EX: No matter what you do, to show and share it with other people is fundamental. We should all be more open to share and receive feedback cause that is what really makes us evolve. For me, it all started thanks to Instagram, which is great cause it allows me to reach a huge amount of people all over the world and receive thousands of comments which certainly is amazing but at the same time, I can't control how, when and where they consume the content I create, so showing what I do at an exhibition like Collective, allows me to control all that factors and get in touch physically with the people.