MARIA KOSKIVIRTA
The Universe Is a Machine, 2025
8 min 25 s
The Universe Is a Machine explores the idea of reality as mechanical, automatic and perhaps indifferent; it challenges the idea that the universe is alive, magical or spiritually meaningful, but rather cold and predetermined – like a machine running without emotion or meaning.
The film consists of a series of slowly evolving, fragmented visual sequences. Its pacing is deliberately measured and lacks narrative resolution, maintaining a continuous but non-linear flow. The film builds itself out of residues: liminal architectural voids, torn skin under macro gaze, a beam of light scanning, searching, failing to land. Reflecting on dissemination of the body and space as well as noting this idea of disembodiment, the shots collected are intended to take apart elements; to reveal loss – to shed light on disappearance.
The language of the film hovers between prayer, warning and resignation – fragments drawn from personal loss and collective tragedy. Ultimately, the text illuminates the loss of autonomy, as the speech accepts mechanical inevitability and offers suicide as the final act of existential freedom; understanding violence not as an event, but as a structure.
Maria Koskivirta (b. 1999) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki who holds a BA-degree from Prague (FAMU) and is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at the Academy of Fine Arts. Her practice focuses on the spectacular, deceptive, and presumably (non) magical aspects of society, blending fact and fiction in her works. Touching upon the hyperrealistic nature of lived reality, Koskivirta seeks to reveal in her work the inherent tension between revelation/opacity and fact/phantasm. In these works, the illusory aspects of vision are revealed: reclaiming vision as an uncanny terrain – one shaped as much by what is hidden as by what is shown.