15.12.2022 — 8.1.2023

Joonas Hyvönen:
Escape Character

Escape Character

It is the year 2042 and the most absurd assumptions about a cigar-shaped comet passing through the solar system have been proven correct. The so-called first connection has been established and communication has gone surprisingly smoothly, until in a political exchange of words someone forgets to add the emoji 😜 marking its sarcastic tone.

The foreign culture abandons humanity, but it leaves behind a new way of communicating, which revolutionizes human’s worldview  on a personal as well as on a societal level. Escape Character is an animated film that follows four characters who try to form their own relationships in this changed world: an artist desperately searching for a form to deconstruct the new ‘language’, a politician whose typo started the whole crisis, and twins born into a world already dominated by this form of communication, through whom the story is experienced, and on whose shoulders others place perhaps unfairly high expectations.

The realization of the work has been supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.

The work is screened every 45 minutes during the gallery’s opening hours:

12:00 / 12:45 / 13:30 / 14:15 / 15:00 / 15:45 / 16:30
Length of the film: 35 min. 07 sec

Joonas Hyvönen (b. 1990) lives and works in Helsinki. Hyvönen often works narratively with digital technology and phenomena, especially using 3d animation. Hyvönen graduated with a master’s degree in visual arts from the Academy of Fine Arts of the University of the Arts in 2016 and participated in exhibitions in Finland and abroad.


There are three steps to the media art space Mediabox, but the work is also available for viewing on a tablet by request.

Mediabox is Forum Box gallery’s space dedicated to media art. The program is co-curated with AV-arkki.