Lift Up Your Voices
12 min / 2023 / Experimental Drone-, VFX- and collage techinique video installation
Voice from the noplace of an all-embracing algorithm addresses humanity in its last gasps. Punctuated by a song based on a stanza from Emily Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” the Voice invites us to break bread and pray together, and to face the deadly consequences of our human desires. Finally, the Voice implores us to lift up our own voices against the hell of misbelieving.
I am a media artist based in Rovaniemi / Finland (born in 1981) and my works often revolve around symmetry, playing with horizons, the fragile Arctic nature, and juxtapositions of omens and visions with current phenomena. Flowing nature imagery, poetic recitations, minimalist music, and disruptive montages are the cornerstones of my expression. By stringing together ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) loaded scenes, I craft audiovisual incantations with the intention of instilling transformative power. Although I strive for a purifying artistic experience, I am working on a kind of propaganda film.
Nature, as well as colossal structures built by humans and the pulse of the city, appear to me as conscious entities, sometimes as a mysterious interface between the visible and the invisible. Isolation, mystery, and flow are qualities that my works hallucinate into form. They are delirious odes to nature’s mystical features and tempting invitations to venture into the forest with new eyes.
My video art can be found in museums, galleries, cinemas, as well as events as installations and façade projections. At events and festivals, I create video installations and engage in artistic collaborations, where I combine media art with performances, choreography, poetry, and music.
Environmental issues and humanity’s conflicted relationship with nature are recurring themes in my works. I also reflect on humanity’s level of consciousness and the choice we have at every moment to sensitize our inner selves at the crossroads of our path and reach for a higher state of awareness as a species.
Although it often feels like individuals have no significance in the great dough that is being kneaded, we are still part of a larger consensus, a neural network where every individual resonates with their own vibration and potential, electrifying this mycelium of collective consciousness. Perhaps that is why I aim to address the viewer with my works as if they were on an intense trip, so that within the short duration of my pieces, I can impart a leveraged force that each person can interpret in their own way, based on their values, and in the best case, leave something simmering in the heart of the beholder.
The images and footage I work on often draw inspiration from aesthetics and style not only from nature trips but also from my psychedelic journeys, where consciousness seems to breathe and awaken into new realities, diving into new mental landscapes, experiencing wonder and contemplating life, and encountering the sacred, beautiful presence of oneself and the universe. I let the universe resonate within me, and my selfhood dissolve into it.
There are three steps to the media art space Mediabox, but the work is also available for viewing on a tablet by request. Please don’t hestitate to contact our staff if Mediabox is inaccessible for you.
Mediabox is Forum Box gallery’s space dedicated to media art. The program is co-curated with AV-arkki.