I work with painting, photography, installation, performance and video. My art practice has a conceptual and analytical undertone, and humour is an important part of it. The concept of language is also central to my work. I am influenced by popular culture, and I try to reflect upon contemporary visual culture in terms of confusion or bewilderment. On the other hand, there is a humoristic lightness or irreverence in my work that is mainly influenced by comics and slapstick movies. In essence, my artwork tries to both represent and make linguistic sense of the continuous flow of mass media imagery that surrounds us today
A key ingredient in my way of working is what I like to call «the artist as anti-hero» – i.e. – the artist who desperately tries to create profound, deep-felt and groundbreaking work, but who usually fails miserably.
My residency in Turku focuses on a fictitious software company I have set up, ‘Apocalypti Technologies’, and their groundbreaking software product: ‘Theosis’. This computer programme is initially inspired by the Jorge Luís Borges short story “The Library of Babel”, in which the Universe is metaphorically described as a vast library containing all possible 410-page books of a certain format, i.e. every imaginable text in every imaginable (and unimaginable) language. The programme, which is fully operational, transfers this idea to the computer screen. It is designed to run through and configure all possible combinations of all possible pixels in all possible colours, thus revealing every possible picture representable on a computer screen.
Wherever you look, whatever you remember from your past, whatever you imagine in your head – ‘Theosis’ will be able to configure its exact visual representation in full colour on your computer screen. It goes without saying that there is a humoristic aspect to ‘Theosis’ and its astronomical uselessness: The total number of pictures configurable through this programme is a number containing 5681750 digits. (As a comparison, the total number of elementary particles in the Universe, according to scientists, is a number with 77 digits. One million, 1000000, contains 7 digits.)
