Carsten Busse said of his motif, which he developed specifically for the Vienna Light Show: "A touch of humor is perfectly acceptable..." The original from which the light graphic was developed is a paper cutout. Paper cutting has played a significant role in Carsten Busse's work since 2019.

His first works in this technique were created as early as the 1990s in the context of his activities with the artist group solitaire factory. Paper cutouts have repeatedly complemented the group's installations and performances. In 1994, the installation "The Plague," featuring hundreds of black paper butterflies, was realized at the Goldfish Gallery in Leipzig. That same year, the installation "The Peaceful Dimension of Catastrophe" was created at the Ultimate Academy in Cologne. Among other things, it shows three blocks with identical paper cutouts of cups, skulls, and squares. A (negative) paper cutout also appears in the installation "Inner World Protection," a collaborative project with Andreas Hanske at the Bern Municipal Gallery. In the art project "Marinus," a woodcut portrait of the Reichstag arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe, taken from the front page of a Dutch council communist newspaper from the 1930s, is used several times as a paper cut. In an exhibition at the Leipzig Art Association in 2002, this paper cut reached a wall-filling dimension of approximately five meters in height. A smaller version of the same motif was presented in 2003 for the exhibition "Adieu Avantgarde. Welcome Home" at the Ludwig Forum for International Art in Aachen.