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Form Function Finland:
Interactive Topics - 2000, a productive year
for media art
The turn of the millennium has been an extremely
active and succesful period for the Finnish media art scene.
As digital content is very much in demand by the cultural
policy and technology development sectors, artists have produced
an unprecedented array of work - some even premiering two
works within one year.
This productivity has been fuelled in part by
the European City of Culture programme, and by two major exhibitions,
both premiering new works from Finnish artists. Continent,
co-produced by UIAH Media Lab and Magic Media in Brussels,
showcased new work from Finland, Belgium and France in twin
shows in Brussels and at Helsinki´s Lasipalatsi. F2F
- New Finnish Media Art, produced by the Finnish Foundation
for the Visual Arts, opened in Los Angeles' New Wight Gallery
in September and will tour America in 2000-01.
Finnish works have also won international acclaim.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila´s film installation, Consolation Service,
was awarded the Venice Biennale Honorary Mention in 1999,
and the Vincent prize in 2000. Marita Liulia received a mention
in Prix Möbius International in Paris for the CD-ROM
Son of the Bitch. Laura Beloff´s artist-in-residency
in the Ars Electronica Center produced a new piece, Hame,
which was invited for presentation in Siggraph, the major
international computer graphics event.
In addition to these and some other more established
media artists, many members of the younger generation have
also come onto the scene.
Narrating Communities
In terms of themes, content and context the
new works present a diversity of approaches. Many of them
explore and create narrative structures that go beyond traditional
ideas of storytelling, plot and character by focusing on other
aspects of the representation.
Ahtila´s Consolation Service continues
her interest in multi-voiced narration and the ambiguity of
screen space in a story about the separation of a young family.
Staged in Finnish suburbia, the work makes fantasies and fear
visible by interventions into the narrative space. A man materializes
before his ex-partner to take a final bow, and dematerializesinto
polygons again; a group of friends falls through the ice in
a surreal swimming scene, and the local community 'choir'
silently witnesses a family therapy session.
Aquarium, an experimental interactive television
programme directed by Teijo Pellinen, also invites viewers
to witness and participate in a relationship. It's characters
Ari and Eira, two city singles strained respectively by burnout
and workaholism, resemble communal Tamagotchi pets: during
the one-month screenings, the audience could phone in to incite
the couple to eat, drink, dream and yearn - and possibly affect
their behaviour by encouraging them to break their seclusion
and establish contact with each other.
Aquarium took over a month of night-time programming
by the YLE / Finnish broadcasting company and collected a
loyal following of sleepless TV watchers. On the Internet,
Andy Best and Merja Puustinen have launched their second virtual
community project, Iceborg, where they continue combining
an analysis of the political aspects of the Internet with
a humorous and game like approach. In virtual community design,
the narrative aspects are realized through the building of
a seductive 3-dimensional world and by populating the world
with avatars and bots, interactive discussion agents with
programmed behaviours.
Uncontrolled Interfaces
In interactive art, the interface is the locus
of materialization of the work. Very often, media art pieces
defamilarize our usual notions of the interface: instead of
user-friendliness and transparent control, the works present
us with opaque surfaces and hardly controllable elements.
In interactive installations this exploration also involves
a spatial and bodily dimension.
Hanna Haaslahti interactive video Falling Through
the Force of Gravity invites the user to dance on a sensor
mat. Through dancing movements, the use, will be able to edit
the work. Here the control is only partial - the focus of
use is on improvisation, and by 'jamming' with the projected
characters the user may uncover their physically staged stories.
For Hame, Laura Beloff designed special coats
in which different hysterical states collude with the audiovisual
operations of forward and rewind. The theme of mental states
is also present in Beloff´s Binary Structures, a piece
which simulates the operations of memory through a programmed
structure. The 'contents' of the memory an uploaded by the
users via the Internet. Where as the installation acts as
the 'environment' merit where memory files are mutated, multiplied
and erased. The interface cycles through different states
and the fascinating piece resembles a living being: the user
has to negotiate quite a lot to understand its behaviour.
One of the most emotionally engaging installations
premiered in F2F is Heidi Tikka's Mother, Child. The user
is asked to hold a soft piece of cloth - the kind of fabric
traditionally used in babycare - onto which the image of a
small child is projected. The user becomes involved in the
process of nursing, where abrupt movements or the presence
of too many visitors may cause the child to cry, By casting
the user in the mother's role, Tikka presents an alternative
to the ideas of control and command embedded in interfaces
and invites the user to share the gentle experience of nursing
the little one.
The artists as service provider?
The sharing of experiences is also adressed
in the net project 10th City Share Life, by the artist/programmer
collective katastro.fi. In the project, users from all over
the world are invited to submit and exchange fragments of
everyday life. The website contains video clips of very simple
and sensual acts - rolling down a hill, warming up under a
lamp, feeling different urban textures.
In a similar vein, Jan-Erik Andersson´s
World Wide Chocolate Heart stresses human contact and exchange:
In the Continent exhibition, portraits of the users were printed
on chocolate hearts and eaten in a web-connected communion
of two cities.
The active role of the audience is stressed
in the new works in several ways. The users participate by
contributing proposals for public monuments (Kristian Simolin´s
Virtual Homage, a participatory sculpture Project), recounting
stories of urban incidents (Maari Fabritius´ Street
Memory), uploading memory fragments (Binary Structures), affecting
the course of narration (Aquarium) or by actively building
the world (Iceborg).
This artistic trend is a clear equivalent of
the 'open source' movement in software production and, maybe
symptomatically, the Finn Linus Torvalds received the first
prize in the Net category at Ars Electronica 1999 for the
creation of the LINUX operating system, which was codeveloped
by thousands of programmers all over the world.
The artist's role consists of building the structure
for interaction and exchanges and, subsequently, campaigning
to keep the audience coming. A prime example of this approach
is Tuomo Tammempää's Need, a total campaign comprising
of booth installations, collectible cards spread around the
city and an Internet service. Through the campaign, Tammenpää
Promotes Need, a simulated brand which promises good rewards
for loyal customers...
In the new economy-driven network society, it
is only to be expected that artist, also cast themselves as
service providers. Marita Liulias new Tarot project was initiated
with the launch of a 'wireless magic service' tarot for mobile
phones.
All in all, the new Finnish works refuse to
stay within the confines of galleries and museums, taking
over public spaces, television, the Internet and the wireless
sphere. In doing this, they also beautifully confuse the boundaries
of art, technology, politics, and commerce.
Form Function Finland
3 - 4, 2000
Minna Tarkka
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