Past Projects

ISEA2004: International Symposium of Electronic Art

Between 2000-2004 I worked as the programme chair of ISEA2004, a new media art and culture festival I initiated with m-cult. ISEA2004 took place between Helsinki, Tallinn and a cruiser on the Baltic Sea. Mare Tralla was the chair for Tallinn, while Amanda McDonald Crowley led an amazing production team in Helsinki. Through the project, I was very pleased to have realized an event which had a strong thematic focus, a sense of critical interdisciplinarity and a thoroughly international participation. Read more from the event web site.

Hygeia Revisited

A media art project with Susanna Paasonen for ISEA98 in Liverpool consisted of a shop window installation and a web site dealing with racism and sexism in product advertisement. As you stroke each visual collage layer, new elements emerged as if wiping a window clean. The project was chosen to Thames & Hudson book Best Web Graphics of the Year.

Polar Circuit Workshop series

Between 1997-2000 I conceptualised and organised three media art and theory workshop residencies in Tornio and Rovaniemi. These 3-8 week events were organic, workshop oriented environments for producing collaborative and individual projects. Almost 200 artists took part. A networked following event, Solar Circuit, took place in Tasmania, Australia in 2002.

Internet Wildlife Organisation

A conceptual net project that deals with disappearing forms of practice and expression on the net. The reverse side of google... Sticker + website project presented at Tasmanian Art Museum, Hobart, Australia, 2002.

Muu Media Base

As the director of Artist Association MUU, my main acocmplisment was the founding of the first artist run media lab, M2B, Muu Media Base. Besides running a production studio and the first artist run Finnish server with the help of Paul Garrin (muu.autono.net), the base also hosted many workshops for example by Heath Bunting, Olia Lialina, Alexei Shulgin and others.

Net.Sauna

Presented at Ars Electronica 1997, net.sauna was an irc-based performance and installation with a sauna as a space for irc-chat. Theory-Sauna dialogues with Toshiya Ueno, Lev Manovich, Adrianne Wortzel, and Andreas Broeckmann. Collaborators John Hopkins, Liisa Vähäkylä, Terhi Penttilä realized their own performative sessions as part of the project.

Amorph festival

Also as a director of Muu I came up with the name Amorph! for a performance and media art festival to be organized in the context of Tampere Theatre Festival. Kati Åberg produced it both times, with strong input from Roi Vaara and Irma Optimisti. Later on after I had quit working at Muu, the festival was moved to Helsinki and it no longer had a media art branch but more clearly a focus on contemporary performance art.

Ground Zine

A collection of net projects and writing created in collaboration with Susanna Paasonen. Active 1997-1999.

Metropolitan Dreams

An installation at Hakaniemi metro station in Helsinki with Susanna Paasonen. The project dealt with Helsinki´s longing to be a metropolitan city. Stations on the single metro line in the city were named after larger cities. Collaborating artists, amongs them Nigel Helyer, Steve Bradley, and Adrianne Wortzel contributed billboards and audio tracks. Sounds travelling across the metro platform created a feeling of passing by cars, also conversations recorded at other metro systems were heard. The web based metro map received millions of hits from Moscow metro hobbyist site alone; Hakaniemi station was named after Moscow.

Sound Calendar

A curated series of 24 sound art pieces for the Finnish National Radio and 8 railway stations, 1 piece per day December 1-24th. My own project included a digital relay sound recorded from Finnish television. Radio technicians from the company had forgotten it also works on radio - shutting down the entire Finnish radio system for 10 minutes. My day as an accidental radio hacker...