Protey Temen

Meet The Artist:

3 August 2026

Meet The Artist:

Protey Temen

3 August 2026

Q: Coming from a family of biologists, how has scientific thinking influenced your art? Has your artistic research led to any personal discoveries?  

A: The family library was probably the strongest influence on me: encyclopedias, atlases, and reference books. I was especially drawn to the illustrations — leaves, the structures of organisms, and different ways of describing the world. My grandfather contributed mathematical problem books and endless crosswords. My grandmother, who inspired me to become an artist, had a mixed collection ranging from art books to newspapers about UFOs.   Over time, all of this formed a single system of ideas that I still work with today. One important discovery was that different systems of knowledge can describe the same reality in very different ways while remaining surprisingly similar at their core.

Q: You value perfection and order, while Berlin is known for contrasts and chaos. How did this connection develop, and why did Berlin become the right place for you?  

A: I do not experience Berlin as a chaotic city. To me, it is a calm, measured place with a high degree of regulation — one of the calmest major cities I have lived in. There are many contrasts here, but you can decide how deeply you want to immerse yourself in them.

"Berlin’s structure reminds me of a sponge: the city consists of many adjacent zones, and you can move between them almost without barriers. This gives me a sense of order and freedom at the same time."

Q: In Endel, the app you co-created with your fellow founders, digital sound and time work closely together. It has even adapted techno to help with anxiety and support people with ADHD. What technology is behind it, and why can it affect the nervous system so positively?  

A: Techno is only one of many soundscapes available in Endel. Our roots lie in minimalist and ambient music. Endel is based on scientifically informed generative technology: each soundscape develops in real time and adapts to the user’s context, including the time of day, activity level, and heart rate. For each soundscape, we build a different acoustic structure depending on the kind of attention or cognitive state we want to support.  

Q: Founding a company and being an artist pull in different directions and require different approaches. When does the artist in you take over from the entrepreneur, and when does the opposite happen?  

A: Endel has several co-founders, and each of us focuses on a particular professional area. I work as the art director and, together with my team, I am responsible for creating and continuously developing the company’s visual language. We create Endel’s visible body and bring imagery into the technology. Sometimes we describe this as adding magic to a service.

Artistic thinking is not optional for me; it feels more like the core operating system. Depending on the task, I add methods for organising production processes or making long-term decisions. When strategy, resources, and a large team are involved, intuition alone is not enough. But I also eat soup according to the rules of etiquette, rather than as a performance.

Q: Is there a routine or habit you discovered that unlocked something important in your work?  

A: I need to spend a great deal of time alone: observing the life of the city, watching clouds move across the sky, and looking at the elaborate patterns on the inner surface of my own head — somewhere between the cerebellum and the frontal lobe.   Sometimes they appear directly in front of my eyes. Sometimes they sink deeper, and then it is important not to frighten them away. Observation is the foundation of my practice, while the production process itself can be expressive and open to chance.

Q: What places in Berlin do you keep returning to?  

A: There are several cafés I have visited since my earliest trips to Berlin. For almost seventeen years, I have looked at the city through the same windows and watched the streets, the rhythm of life, and the people change.   I know the streets of Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte almost by heart. Later, I moved to Wilmersdorf and began studying its calmer rhythm. Later still, I found a studio in Neukölln, and now I am gradually getting to know that part of the city.   I return to all of these streets at once.