Finland has become lately famous as the most wired country in the world. No place is more throughly digitalized, and cyber-communication (think Nokia) is an even bigger growth industry there than here. So you´d expect Finnish artist to be responding to, even seizing he new means of production. And, given the legendary stoicism of Scandinavians - and Scandinavia-adjacents like the Finns - you´d expect the resulting artwork to be comparatively un-showy. Indeed, for all its bells and whistles, its cybertaining bounce and variety, its clever exploitation of the new magic, the work displayed in "F2F" has a modest, pleasant, even reassuring infra-spectacularity to it. (In Hollywood terms, we´re talking indie spirit.)

Now trying to overwhelm, the installations engage us not just because they depend on our interaction, but because they do their thing at eye level, figuratively speaking. Nothing daunt or overawes, although Heidi Tikka´s interactive baby - a virtual infant giggling, crying and doing very alert baby things - projected onto a hand-held swaddling cloth wows most viewers (and spooks the rest). Rather, the stories and games, images and structures, parables and parodies advanced by the nine installations (a tenth, Laura Beloff and Maex Decker´s evidently ambitious HAME/ [a dress], wasn´t working in the show´s first week - hey, 90 percent operational ain´t bad for cyber art) all set their stages and lay out heir gimmicks simply and directly.

The tale telling runs from Andy Best and Merja Puustinen´s sci-fi IceBorg to the interior urban realism of Teijo Pellinen´s Aquarium (excerpted from Finland´s first interactive TV show); the polemics range gently from Marita Liulia´s SOB, a feminist fable about masculine drivers and fears, to the knowingly cartoonly future-predicting of Kristian Simolin´s hit2Morrow and the antiwar shadowbox of The Battle Over Indifferent Mind by Hanna Haaslahti; the satire is found in Tuomo Tammenpää´s Need, a wicked masquerade of contemporary packaging and marketing (right down to the faux-Pokémon collectible cards); pure spectacle resides in the resolutely low-key phosphenes-on-screen mirror++ of Juha Huuskonen; and for pure poetry - pure language, pure alphabetism, even - there´s the sculpture-projection of letters crafted onto one another by Leena Saarto.

Certain of these works, of course, have online component, or at least documentation; their URLs are listed below. At UCLA´s New Wight Gallery, 1100 Dickson Art Center, NE corner of campus, near Sunset Blvd. & Hilgard Ave.; thru Oct. 6. (310) 25-9007. Need at www.needweb.org, IceBorg at www.iceborg.com, SOB at www.medeia.com, Aquarium at www.akvaario.net, mirror++ at http://katastro.fi/~juhuu, HAME / [a dress] at http://jomasounds.firtfloor.org/lady/hame.html

written by Peter Frank
LA WEEKLY 29.9.2000