The Nordic pioneers of New
Media Art
By Björn Norberg and Jonatan Habib Engqvist
In order to contextualise the Nordic Media art
scene historically one should perhaps begin in
the 1960´s. The spirit of
entrepeneurship and geniune curiosty over the possiblities of
technology in
experimental art prevailed and there was money to go around. Curators and
artists started to investigate the possibilities of technology along side
with civil engineers.
Together these groups attempted to break down and
reconfigure any established norms
concerning art by questioning old
techniques, dissolving and reconstructing images.
There were a number of different groups,
institutions and key figures in this development.
Many of them are still
active and constantly gain new audiences and followers through the
younger
generations, but even those organisations and collaborations which no longer
exist
have through their activities in the 60's become a major source of
inspiration for young new
media artists.
In the Begining, E.A.T.
One of the most influential key figures of the
Nordic scene was the engineer Billy Klüver and
his Experiments in Art and
Technology, E.A.T. There has been a renewed interest for this
work in the
Nordic countries lately, partly due to intense discussions on the concept of
artistic
research.
Klüver (1924-2004) was born and raised in Sweden
but moved to Paris in the1950's were he
first met Jean Tinguely (1925-1991).
This would prove to be an important meeting.
Approximately ten years later
they would meet again in New York and embark on a journey
into experimental
art.
Klüver had a PhD from UCLA and was employed as an
engineer at Bell Industries Bell lab in
New York. The director of Moderna Museet in Stockholm,
Pontus Hultén, asked Klüver to
contact Tinguely and see if he needed some
help technically since he was going to make a
large installation at the back
yard of the MoMA. The result was the famous Hommage a New
York, a huge
installation built out of bits of old chairs, bicycles and any kind of material
Klüver and Tinguely could find in the streets and in city dumps. During a
performance night
the installation went down in clouds of smoke.
Later on Robert Rauschenberg asked Klüver for
help with an installation called The Oracle,
now in the collections of
Centre de Pompidu in Paris.
Klüver was not able to help with all the
technology Rauschenberg required but together they
built up an interactive
installation run via radio frequency.
Rumours spread and several artists would address
Klüver with different project proposals.
Klüver started to engage his
colleagues at Bell Labs at night and as the amount proposals
increased
Klüver and some other artists decided to start a pool for artists and engineers
-
E.A.T
Eventually the experiments performed within
E.A.T. became an official activity of Bell Labs
and were magnified in the
project 9 evenings where different artists were invited to make one
project
each with the support of engineers from Bell Labs. Among these artists were of
course
Robert Rauschenberg but also the Swedish artist Öyvind Fahlström
(1928-1976) who made a
performance, or rather a theatrical play, including
many different medias.
Fahlström was a pioneer within the Swedish sound
art and poetry. He was early to realize the
power of mass media, especially
television, and obviously used both paper and TV-shows to
market his actions, gaining a new and bigger
audience. His piece for 9 evenings included
some complicated technological
solutions. For example he asked for snow that fell upwards.
Fahlström became one of the most important
artists within psychedelic art and pop art but has
been of less importance
for the new media scene, except for his work within in the radio
where many
Nordic artists still refer to his work. The work of Billy Klüver has however
been
a major influence. Klüver also became a very important contact for the
Moderna Museet in
Stockholm and it's director Pontus Hultén (1924-2006).
Under his direction the museum
became one of the most dynamic Europian art
institutions of the 1960's and the first important
contribution was the
legendary exhibition Moving Art/Rörelse i konsten from 1961. With the
help
from Klüver, Hultén and the museum invited a number of artists dealing with
different
forms of kinetic art, including the work of Jean Tinguely. The
exhibition and it's experimental
form had an enormous impact on the Nordic
scene.
Tingueley would come back for another exhibition
in 1966 together with Niki de St Phalle
and the Swedish artist P.O Ultvedt
(b. 1927) who's practice could be described somewhere
near Duchamp (the roto
reliefs) and Tinguely. Together with Hultén they started to plan what
to do,
quiet close to the opening of the exhibition. Late in the process they decided
to build up
a gigantic woman in the style of St Phalle in papier maché.
Inside the 28x8 metre sculpture
they placed a multi-medial exhibition
including a milk bar in the right breast and a
planetarium screening of the
Milky Way in the left, a mechanical man watching TV in her
heart, in one of
her arms a screening of a Greta Garbo
movie and in one of her legs there was
a gallery with fake paintings of old
masters. The audience entered the sculpture though her
sex. The
installation, She, became a great success. Hultén would in 1968 curate the Machine
as seen at the
end of the mechanical age” at MMA including pieces of f ex Nam June Paik
before he in 1973 became director of Centre de Pompidou in Paris.
Organising Freedom?
Looking back at the 70's and the 80's there seems
to be a lack of greater initiatives within the
Nordic new media art. There
is a generally a scepticism to computer art and it would take
until the late
80's until even video is widely accepted. Moderna Museet didn't play the same
important role as it did for the field in the 60's. The experiments and
development took place
more among single artists and a few smaller groups
who more or less belonged to the margin,
with a few exceptions, as will be
described below. It would take until the mid 1990's and the
Internet boom
for a larger movement of Nordic new media art when artists started to organise
themselves to share expensive equipment. Important examples are CRAC in
Stockholm,
Atelier Nord in Oslo (which started in 1965 as a studio and
workshop for graphic artists,
included video and digital studios in 1993 and
works with new media exclusively from 1998),
BEK, Bergen Center For
Electronic Arts in Norway, i/o/lab in Stavanger in Norway (who
organised the
first Article festival for unstable art in November 2006) and Muu in Helsinki in
Finland. These organisations help artists with knowledge and equipment but
also run various
projects and curate exhibitions.
In the 90´s there were also a number of
organisations devoted to the production of art projects
and exhibitions
apart from those already mentioned. In Sweden - Electrohype in Malmö
which
produces the Electrohype biennale, Splintermind in Stockholm (shut down their
activites in 2005) produced exhibitions for museums and web TV, Motherboard
in Norway,
PicelACHE in Finland; an annual festival for media art, focused
on activism, open source,
demoscene and VJ:s run by Finnish media artist
Juha Huuskonen, Katastro.fi which is an
artist-run organisation formed in
1998 and M-Cult, established in 2000 mainly focused in
participatory,
wireless and urban-based projects. M-Cult organised ISEA 2004.
Sweden
To describe the history of Swedish new media
there are a number of important independent
organisations that has to be
mentioned. Apart from the Moderna Museet there were a couple
of other
central points in Sweden. One was Fylkingen which started already in 1933 but
then
as an association for classical music. In the 1950's it developed
towards more experimental
music and produced the first Electro-acoustic
concerts in Sweden in 1952. In the 1960's the
scene became more radical and
also started up a studio around electro-acoustic music, EMS.
Both Fylkingen
and EMS is still important scenes for the experimental art forms in Sweden.
One of the private galleries in Stockholm
that soon became well known for a radical attitude
was Galleri
Karlsson.
Sjölander (b. 1937) belongs to the very
pioneers within new media and video art and already
in this first exhibition he understood
the impact that television had on it's audience.
After a television show from the
exhibition, Sjölander's photography contained a raw attitude
against
photography and the naked model, 10.000 people visited the gallery. With this
experience he contacted the Swedish Television in 1965 for another show
where he included
exhibitions in two cities, billboard advertisement in a
third and a TV-production. It was meant
to be a large multimedia happening
but the state television refused to broadcast his production
since they
found it too provocative. Instead he was offered to make another TV-production
where he collaborated with the artist Bror Wikström. Sjölander had according
to himself
already as a teenager experimented with distortions on television
screens and along with the
engineers at the Swedish television the artists
could perform wild experiments in a piece that
was given the title
TIME.
They were nott able to work directly with the video signal so they
had to
transfer the monitor to film and then back on video to create the effects.
In 1966 Sjölander started to collaborate
with the journalist Lars Weck in a project called
MONUMENT
where they worked with television in Sweden, Germany and France. The result
was broadcast in USA along with several countries in Asia and Europé. It was
seen by an
estimated audience of c:a 150.000.000 viewers and is described in
Expanded Cinema by Gene
Youngblood.
Sjölander and Weck used images of famous
paintings and celebrities such as the King of
Sweden, the Beatles,
Charlie
Chaplin, Picasso, Mona Lisa and distorted them so they
where
hardly recognizable. Stills from the film were then transferred to
papers, magazines posters,
textiles and paintings by the Swedish artist Sven
Inge de Monér and a record with the
soundtrack by the Swedish group Hansson
& Karlsson was released. All together it became an
enormous project, in
line with the ideas of the multi-medial project Sjölander had been
working
on before. Sjölander is still active as a painter, conceptual and web artist.
Teresa Wennberg (b. 1944) had a very different
attitude to the computer compared to other
pioneers since she at an early
stage stressed that the computer had an artistic expression in
itself,
discussing computer graphics as 'objects'. She left Sweden for Paris in 1974
where she
found a different attitude to technology than at home.
Around 1978 she started to work with video and
came in to contact with Ture
Sjölander and
they started the Video Now (Video Nu) association in
Sweden which was important for the
development of video art in Sweden. In
1983 she started to work with digital images and since
1998 she has been
working as artist in residence at the Royal University College of
Technology, KTH in Stockholm and their
VR-Cube environment. She is however probably
more well known outside of
Sweden.
In 1996 the Swedish artists Karin Hansson (b.
1967) and Åsa Andersson-Broms started the
organisation Temporart Art [A:t]
with a first net art exhibition with 20 Danish and Swedish
artists. Three
years later they organised the exhibition Best Before at Tensta art gallery that
had a great impact on the Swedish scene. Among the artists in the exhibition
one could find
Ola Pehrson, (1964-2006).
Ola Pehrson participated with his piece Yucca
Invest Trading Plant where a yucca palm was
connected to a computer via
electrodes. The impulses the palmtree gave to the Internet
connected
computer resulted in trade on the Swedish stock market. In this piece he linked
the
market to the nature in a very intelligent way - not only through the
installations but also with
market terms such as growth and off shots. A
year later he created the NASDAQ vocal index
which was a choir piece for 8
to 24 different singers where each singer represented one
company stock on
NASDAQ receiving “notes” in real-time according to the currents
downloaded
from the stock market. Pehrson also did some collaborations with the Interactive
Institute in Stockholm, a huge research institute with several departments
for technology
development.
The SMART studio (which changed name to simply
Art & Technology in 2006) is maybe
most famous for their Brainball
installation. It was created by a team of artists and engineers,
among them
Arijana Kajfes and Thomas Broomé (b. 1971). The game is played by two
persons sitting on each side of a table and wearing sensors measuring the
brain activity. The
point is to get as low activity as possible. If you
reach a lower activity than your opponent a
ball will start to roll forward.
The game is over when the ball reaches one of the short ends of
the table.
Arijana Kajfes was artist in residence at the
Interactive Institute and during the time she
worked with her Occular
Witness project where she made a research on aspects of light seen
from a
physicist’s point of view. The project received an honorary mention at Ars
Electronica
in 2006 along with another Swedish project, SOBJECT by Italian
born Alberto Frigo (b.1979)
now living in Stockholm. For three years he has
been photographed every object he has used
with his right hand. The result
can be seen as investigation of his relation to objects and a
large database
of over 100.000 images so far.
Another method for documenting ones life can be
found in Mikael Lundberg (b. 1952). In
Lifeline he tracked his movements
using a GPS device for one and a half year (2004 and
2005). Ten years
earlier he had his remaining life time calculated and created Lifetimer a
digital clock that counted down the estimated time in seconds.
Although she is of Swedish origin Lisa Jevbratt
(b. 1967) might be better known outside
Sweden. She moved to USA in 1994 and
started to work with e-mail art in her project Hej
Gud (Hi God). A year
later she started to work with web-pieces. She should definitely be
regarded
as one of the early pioneers even if she didn’t belong to a net-art group. She
still
lives in the USA,. She is employed as Associate Professor at the
University of California and
a member of the artists group C5. She often
produces web-based work with a typical 'meta-
web' touch. For example, in 1:1
from 1999 she created a database that used a webcrawler to
collect all URL:s
in the world. She soon discovered that the web was growing faster than the
database.
In Infome Imager Jevbratt used a crawler to
collect different information about web sites such
as their length, when
they were made, which network they belong to and what colours were
used. This information was then selected by
a computer and images functioning as statistical
diagrams found were
created.
Recently Jevbratt had a piece, Rösten (The Voice)
commissioned from the Swedish National
Public Art Council which might be the
first commissioned web piece in Sweden. Here she
displays all keywords typed
in the internal search engine of the councils website. The words
are
displayed in chronological order and are shortcuts to relevant information
belonging to the
keyword.
One of the founders of CRAC is the Swedish artist
Peter Hagdahl (b. 1956), currently
professor in media art at the Royal
University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. Peter has
for a long time been
focused on the complexity of actions and interactions in society between
people and technology and in different virtual spaces. His public project
created for the
University College for Teachers in Stockholm, Dream
Generator, consists of several sensors
placed in the university. The sensors
pick up the activity inside the school and the information
generated is used
as data input for a 3D-animation which starts to move according to the data.
Hagdahl has influenced the Nordic scene intellectually and practically, as
the initiatial force
behind CRAC, the new media laboratory Mejan Labs (in
2006) and as a professor at the
university.
In the 1990’s Hagdahl made a number of
collaborations with Carl-Michael von Hausswolff
(b. 1956) who not only is
one of the most important names of Swedish sound art. but also a
visual
artist of importance. He has in a number of installations been working with
radar
equipment and oscilloscopes to describe reality through these
technologies.
In his composing he has been working with
everything from tape recorders, DAT and radio
frequencies to more updated
technologies such as samplers and lap tops in order to create
noise
compositions. C-M von Hausswolff was given an honorary mention in the Digital
Music category at Ars Electronica 2002.
Iceland
Another important pioneer of new media and video
from the Nordic countries is of course
Steina Vasulka, born in 1940 in
Reykjavik in Iceland. In the 1950's she came to Prague to
study violin where
she met the Czech engineer and filmmaker Wooody Vasulka. In 1965 they
moved
to New York where Woody started to work in the film industry and Steina
free-lanced
as musician. Woody had started to make experiments with
electronic images and sound and
brought some of the equipment he was working
with within the company home and Woody
and Steina started to experiment with
video technology.
For Woody the video technology offered a way to
question narratives and he was amazed by
the possibilities of video
feedback. Together and probably thanks to Steina's background as a
musician,
they also started to connect audio inputs to the video in order to create
different
effects.
They realized that both the audio and the video
signal consisted of waveforms and that these
could be exchanged, in turn
generating interesting results that could be processed to a
complete piece.
In 1971 they started the Kitchen which became a
home for experimental video, music and
performance projects and discussions.
From working closely with Woody during the 1960's
Steina started focus on
her own work in the 1970's. Her All Vision and Machine Vision series
are
today considered as milestones within the new media art. She started to separate
the
videocamera from the human view in different installations. She used a
mirrored sphere
placed on a crossbow and at the end of the crossbow there
were two cameras, one in each end.
As they were filming a spherical mirror
they could project their entire surrounding space,
360°. She also started to experiment with
the violin run through an audio synthesizer in order
to affect video signals
in her project Violin Power.
In the middle of the 1970’s the Vasulkas started
to collaborate with programmers which lead
to development of digital tools
such as Digital Image Articulator/Imager, used in several
pieces from the
1980's. Steina would in the mid 1990's work as artistic director at STEIM in
Amsterdam where she together with Tom Demeyer developed one of the first VJ
soft wares,
the Image/ine.
Steinas pioneering work is of great importance
for the development and understanding of both
video and new media art and
has inspired many artists. Both her and Sjölanders art was for
example great sources for the Swedish artist group Beeoff when they, in 1996
started to
experiment with analogue and digital video in combination with
Internet streaming. This
resulted in the nonTVTVstation project and the
streaming organisation Splintermind that
includes a network of a large
number of artists, galleries, museums and organisations all over
the world.
Participating in ISEA 2004 and the Parisian La Numèrique festival at La Villette
science parc the same year.
In Iceland Steina has few followers and there are
quiet few new media related artists. Some of
them, such as net artists Paul
Thayer and Ragnar Helgi Olafsson (b.1971) have organised
themselves in an
association called Lorna. Olafsson is famous for his piece Web waste where
the web visitor is invited to upload his/her computer trash bin to
Olafsson’s piece. The waste
is exposed as it is in a mess of text, images
and sound. Olafsson has also worked with
interactive video installations.
Another Icelandic artist Finnbogi Petursson (b. 1959) has
received great
attention for his sound art installation that all of them connect to the
minimalism of the 1960's. For the Venice Biennale in 2001
he created the installation
Diabolus where he used the interval between two
tones that the Vatican church banned in the
middle ages. The interval is
called 'dialolus in musica' but the reason why it was banned isn’t
necessary
because that it was expected to call forth the devil. Some music historian think
that
it just was thought to be a very unnatural combination of tones. In
Diabolus Petursson built up
a small building, narrow as a corridor, where he
had to sound sources. One was a speaker with
a 61,8 hz tone and the other an
organ pipe driven with a 44,7 hz. The two tones represented
the diabolic
interval but also created not hearable 17hz sound wave, an effect he also uses
in
installations as Dream and Sphere where the very low frequencies affect a
water surface. The
minimalism he has in common with the Danish artist Jeppe
Hein (b.1974) who in his
installation Invisble Labyrinth created labyrinths
where the walls was just infrared light. With
a special headset you felt the
walls as vibrations if you walked into them. The form of the
maze changed
from day to day and had famous patterns such as PacMan or the labyrinth
outside the hotel in Kubrick's film The Shining. In 2002 Hein smashed the
white cube of a
gallery with a ball of metal with the diameter of 70 cm. The
ball was moving in the empty
space, activated by a sensor and the appearance
of the visitor, crashing into the walls, corners
and heaters of the gallery.
Denmark
The Danish artist Mogens Jacobsen, b. 1959, has
in some studies on time and dynamics in
video reached results that reminds
of Steina Vasulka’s work. Lately he has been working with
an own software
that allows him to regard the video as a 3D object in a space more than a
chronological sequence of frames. Jacobsen belongs to the first generation
of artist that
understood the possibilities of the computers, to make art
with the computer exclusively
without the need to make a print or to
transfer it to a stable media to get an artistic result.
Of course this
is thanks to their chance to work with computers powerful enough but also it
belongs to a shift intellectually where they saw that computers had a value
in themselves and
didn’t have to be transferred to traditional techniques.
This can f ex be compared to digital
pioneers such as the Swedish artist duo
Beck & Jung, Sture Johannesson, Ann-Charlotte
Johannesson, Kars-Gunnar
Bodin, Sven Inge de Monér and Torsten Ridell who used
computers to design
images that were then transferred to graphic prints or painting. One odd
example worth to mention is Göran Sundqvist (b. 1937) who was computer
engineer at SAAB
in Sweden and was from 1958 working with the development of
pioneering computers as
SAAB D2, D21 and D22. Those were the first
transistor based computers in Sweden. He
came in contact with composers at
Fylkingen in Stockholm and for fun and for demos of the
machine he let it
compute some music pieces. He also programmed a few games on it and
made
some digital images, but they had to be photographed to be preserved since he
used an
oscilloscope as a monitor and of course had no print options.
Mogens Jacobsen didn’t experience the same
attitude problems as Wennberg even if the
computers of late 80's or early
90's definitively had their limits. For three years in a row,
from 1993 to
1995 he received an honorary mention at Ars Electronica. The first two years in
the category computer graphics and in 1995 in the category interactive art
where he with the
installation The Entropy Machine finally managed to free
the computer from the traditional art
techniques.
He had by then gone through a process where he
looked for a possibility to use the computer
in a way that wasn’t just a
substitute for 'the pen, the brush and spraycans' since he had seen
it’s
possibilities with interactive communication, advanced information processing
and
simulations.
With The Entropy Machine he worked with the ideas
of cloning, hormone therapy, DNA etc.
that emerged during the
biotechnological revolution of the 1980's and lead to many different
applications during the 1990’s. This installation consisted of five framed
images and a metal
box with sides of fabric. There was a monitor inside the
box surrounded by petridiscs
containing cultivations of bacteria. The box
functioned as a “information greenhouse”
together with a computer that chose
among 40-50 different images that were screened on the
monitor. A cellular
automata algorithm changed the image on the monitor through every
generation
it passed. After a while it started up with a new image and algorithm chosen
according to the temperature inside the box. Since the temperature was
crucial for the growth
of the bacteria it had a double function, it
stimulated both the cultivations and the digital
images.
The same year Jacobsen was involved in the
founding of the Danish organisation Artnode
which has since then been an
important node for new media activities in Denmark. It
functions as a
intellectual resource with articles, as a producer of exhibitions and net art
and
as an archive and gallery for net art.
This is remarkable early - the same year as
äda’web started and one year before Rhizome.
Danish Artnode is still very
active and should not be confused with the Swedish organisation
with the
same name.
In Denmark two artists groups have developed very
large projects that mix activist thinking,
business strategies, design and
technology. Superflex is maybe a more 'relational' art group
but their
project Karlskrona2 from 1999 showed early on the possibilities virtual
environments can offer. They built a virtual copy of the Swedish city
Karlskrona and the
inhabitants in the real city could create avatars to
inhibit the virtual city. As avatars they were
able to change the city and
rebuild it. The project showed on how virtual space could be used
as a democratic tool in city planning and how it
could be used to catch up ideas from the
inhabitants of a city.
N55 is a Copenhagen based artists group that
started with an aim to rebuild the city from the
within and are working with
different activist projects that merges technology, design and
architecture.
In 2000 they created FLOATING PLATFORM and N55 SPACEFRAME which
together
functioned as a working space and home for the artists group. They have created
alternative architecture for mobile and compact living but also created
ROCKET SYSTEM
which is a rocket that can spread flyers from an altitude of
5200 metres.
Norway
Norwegian artist Stahl Stenslie (b. 1965) became
the father of cyberex after his Cyber SM
project in 1993. The project was
aimed at creating a system for real-time, visual, sonic and
tactile
communication over telephone lines. Stenslie created two 'stimulator suits' that
two
people could use to physically touch each other over distance. In 1993
he used the suits to
connect users in Paris and Cologne.
HC Gilje (b. 1969) has been devoted to real-time
video processing for many years. He started
with Steina and Demeyer’s
Image/ine and later went on to MAX. Working with these tools he
points out
that he can work in real-time but still have full control over both structure
and
context. He tries to focus on perception and conception of reality using
the technology. In
1999 he started to investigate live aspects of video with
music, dance and theatre as references
since these art- forms had a history
of improvisation and real-time. He has since been working
on his own and in
the VJ group 242.pilots and as a part of the Norwegian dance company
Kreutzerkompani.
Finland
The Finnish new media scene woke up very late and
it wasn’t really until the 1980's when the
first video piece was made. It
was by Marikki Hakola (b. 1960) and the Turppi-group -
Earth Contacts from
1982. But new media was not really established in Finland until the mid
1990's. There was however one early and important figure on the Finnish
scene: Erkki
Kurenniemi (b. 1941)
Kurenniemi isn’t only a true pioneer of the
Finnish scene but belongs to the pioneers of the
global new media. Already
in the 1960's he composed computer-generated music and
designed his own
synthesizer -the Andromatic (1968), purchased by the Swedish composer
Ralph
Lundsten. Since then Kurenniemi moved between art and science, music, film,
computers and robotics. Around 1970 he worked with a number of original
synthesizers in the
DIMI (Digital Music Instrument) series. In 1971 he
collaborated with dancers around his
DIMI-O, a type of video synthesizer
which used the motions of the dancers to generate a real-
time soundtrack.
Other DIMI:s were DIMI-A which was played by using “electric pens”, the
DIMI-S which was played by four people touching each other and the DIMI-T
that generated
sounds by measuring the brain activity of the player.
Kurenniemi has since then been working
with Artificial Intelligence the aim
to merge man and machine.
When video became established in the 1980's a
number of video artists entered the scene.
Among them of course Eija-Liisa
Ahtila (b. 1959) who has established herself as a major
international video artist. Marita Liulia
(b. 1957) was the first Nordic artist to work with CD-
ROM and received an
honorary mention at Ars Electronica with Maire from 1994. She also
had a
great success with her piece Ambitiuos Bitch from 1996 where she investigated
femininity. This piece was followed by Son of a Bitch (1999) where she
worked with
masculinity in the end of the millennium. She created a virtual
apartment of the psychoanalyst
Jack L. Froid in Quicktime VR where one is
guided game by the virtual butler Esco through a
milieu that works in a
similar fashion to an epical computer. Froid who is an expert on
masculinity
has left the apartment empty for our investigation of the ideas of the modern
man.
New media art is now well established within the
Finnish art. None the least thanks to a
number of small and vivid
organisations and festivals such as the artist group Katastro.fi, the
mew
media festival PixelACHE, artist run organisation MUU, M-Cult (who produced ISEA
2004) and AVANTO festival but also thanks to the contemporary art museum
Kiasma who
has organised a number of important exhibition and bought several
pieces to their collection
and who had a media curator when they were
established in 1998. Around them a number of
young artists have developed
their practice.
The British born artist Charles Sandison (b.
1969) moved to Tampere in Finland in the mid
1990’s. He has described
himself as a writer born in an artist’s body and creates digitally
generated
installations that combine the possibility of computers with concrete poetry.
For
Living Room from 2001 he wrote a soft ware that simulates human
behaviour using Artificial
Intelligence. Using computers and projections he
fills a space with words moving, living and
reproducing. They move around,
interact with the room and chase or avoid each other, and if
they meet they
meet they either eliminate each other or create new words.
He uses a few words, each with a special
behaviour: MALE (they are hunting for FOOD),
FEMALE (avoids MALE until they
have eaten FOOD), MALE hut FEMALE to reproduce,
FATHER replaces FOOD. When
the population has grown to big a deadly VIRUS is spread
and all words will
die when they have reached a certain age. In a similar installation, Good &
Evil, from 2002 he uses only two words, GOOD and EVIL. Both of them try to
expand on the
expense of the other. When they collide one of them
disappears.
Summary
Summarizing the Nordic new media art scene and
starting with the 1960's it is obvious that
the important development takes
place among artist collaborations with a great exception for
the dynamic
first period of Moderna Museet under the direction of
Pontus Hultén, and
perhaps Kiasma in Helsinki when it opened in 1998.
Artists have gathered together sharing
expensive equipment around common
ideas generated by new technology and certain
movements in the society in
general. One example is what happened around the Internet boom
in the mid
1990's. Also some large companies, where artists had a chance to experiment with
new technology have played an important role. Examples are f ex SAAB and the
Swedish
state television in the 1960's. Hopefully this survey of the Nordic
new media art can show on
some characteristics that can be compared to the
global scene in general. The latest decades of
great exchange with the
international scene has of course meant that the Nordic art scene
might have
lost a Nordic identity, if there ever was one. However looking at the history
some
of the artists mentioned above must be seen as really pioneers, even in
an international
perspective, and deserves to be a part of the international
new media canon.
PART FIVE:
TELEVISION AS A CREATIVE
MEDIUM
Expanded Cinema by Gene
Youngblood
Jud Yalkut: Paikpieces
Recognized as one of the leading
intermedia artists and filmmakers
in the United States, Jud Yalkut has
collaborated with Nam
June Paik since 1966 in a series of films that
incorporate Paik's
television pieces as basic image material. Yalkut's work
differs from
most videographic cinema because the original material is
videotape,
not film. They might be considered filmed TV; yet in each case
the video material is selected, edited, and prepared specifically for
filming, and a great deal of cinematic post-stylization is done after
the videographics have been recorded.
In addition to Paik's own slightly demonic
sense of humor, the films
are imbued with Yalkut's subtle kinaesthetic
sensibility, an ultra-
sensitive manipulation of formal elements in space and
time. Paik’s
ARTSCILAB 2001
Videographic Cinema 329
Jud Yalkut: Paikpieces. (Left column)
Beatles Electroniques. 1967. VTR/
16mm. film. Black and white. 3 min.
(Right column) Videotape Study No. 3.
1968. VTR/16mm. film. Black and white.
5 min.
ARTSCILAB 2001
330
Expanded Cinema
electro-madness combined with Yalkut's
delicate kinetic consciousess
result in a filmic experience balanced between
video and cinema
in a Third World reality.
The two films illustrated here— Beatles
Electroniques and
Videotape Study No. 3— are part of a forty-five-minute
program of
films by Yalkut and Paik, concerning various aspects of Paik's
activities.
The other films include P+A-I=(K), a three-part homage to the
Korean artist, featuring his concert Happening performances with
Charlotte Moorman, Kosugi, and Wolf Vostell; his robot K-456
walking on
Canal Street in New York; and his color television abstractions.
Other films
in the Paikpieces program are Cinema
Metaphysique, a nontelevision film in
which the screen is divided in
various ways: the image appears on a thin
band on the left side, or
along the bottom edge, or split-screen and
quarter-screen; and two
other films of Paik's video distortions, Electronic
Yoga and Electronic
Moon, shown at various intermedia performances with Paik
and Miss
Moorman.
Beatles Electroniques was shot in
black-and-white from live broadcasts
of the Beatles while Paik
electromagnetically improvised distortions
on the receiver, and also from
videotaped material produced
during a series of experiments with filming off
the monitor of a Sony
videotape recorder. The film is three minutes long and
is accompanied
by an electronic sound track by composer Ken Werner,
called Four Loops, derived from four electronically altered loops of
Beatles sound material. The result is an eerie portrait of the Beatles
not as pop stars but rather as entities that exist solely in the world of
electronic media.
ARTSCILAB 2001
Videographic Cinema 331
Ture Sjölander, Lars
Weck, Sven Höglund* :
Video Monument in Sweden
In the fall of 1967,
intermedia artists Ture Sjölander and Lars Weck
collaborated with Bengt
Modin, video engineer of the Swedish
Broadcasting Corporation in Stockholm,
to produce an experimental
program called Monument. It was broadcast in
January, 1968, and
subsequently has been seen throughout Europe, Asia, and
the
United States. Apart from the technical aspect of the project, their
intention was to develop a widened consciousness of the communicative
process inherent in visual images. They selected as source
material the
"monuments" of world culture— images of famous
persons and paintings.
The program was created in the form of a
black-and-white
videographic film, made with the telecine projector from
other film
clippings and slides. The films and slides first were recorded on
videotape and then back onto film for further processing. Image
distortions occurred in the telecine process of recording film on
videotape. The basic principle involved was the modulation of the
deflection voltage in a flying-spot telecine, using sine and square
impulses from a wave-form generator. With the flying-spot method
used by
Swedish television, the photographic image is transformed
into electrical
signals when the film is projected toward a photocell
with a scanned raster
as the source of light. The deflection voltage
regulates the movement of the
point of light that scans the screen
fifty times per second.
In the production of Monument, the
frequency and amplitude of the
flying-spot deflection was controlled by
applying tones from the
wave-form generators. Thus image distortions
occurred during the
actual process of transforming original image material
into video
signals, since the scan that produces the signals was
electromagnetically
altered. In principle this process is similar to methods
used by Nam June Paik and others, except that the Swedish group
applied
the techniques at an early stage in the video process, before
signal or
videotape information existed.
After the videotape was completed from
various film clips, a
kinescope was made, which was edited by Sjölander and
Weck into
its final form. The result is an oddly beautiful collection of
image
ARTSCILAB 2001
332 Expanded Cinema
The King of Sweden as
seen in
videographic
film Monument (1967),
by Ture Sjölander and
Lars Weck.
Videographic Cinema 333
Paul McCartney in Monument.
sequences unlike any other video art. We
see the Beatles, Charlie
Chaplin, Picasso, the Mona Lisa, the King of
Sweden, and other
famous figures distorted with a kind of insane electronic
disease.
Images undergo transformations at first subtle, like respiration,
then
increasingly violent until little remains of the original icon. In this
process, the images pass through thousands of stages of
semicohesion,
making the viewer constantly aware of his orientation
to the picture. The
transformations occur slowly and with great
speed, erasing perspectives,
crossing psychological barriers. A
figure might stretch like Silly Putty or
become rippled in a liquid
universe. Harsh bas-relief effects accentuate
physical dimensions
with great subtlety, so that one eye or one ear might
appear slightly
unnatural. And finally the image disintegrates into a
constellation of
shimmering video phosphors.
More than an experiment in image-making
technologies,
Monument became an experiment in communication. Monument
became an image-generator: newspapers, magazines, posters,
ARTSCILAB 2001
334 Expanded Cinema
record albums, and even textile factories
began using images from
the videographic film. Sven Höglund, a well-known
Swedish painter,
entered the project after the film
was completed*. He made oil
paintings based on the Monument
images because he found them
"parallel to my own creative intentions; I had
for a long time been
working on problems concerning transformations of
forms. My
painted versions of the images became another phase of the
experiment in communication called Monument.
"Other phases were silk-screen prints,
illustrated magazine
articles, posters, giant advertisements. In each phase
Monument
experiments with pictures in their relation to spectators. The
common denominator is the mass-media picture, especially the most
commonly seen pictorial representation, the television picture. The
pictures in the film are so well known to the public that they have
been
invested with symbolic meaning. People recognize them and
are able to retain
this identification throughout all the transformations
and variations of the
electronic image."
ARTSCILAB 2001
Published
nov. 2006.
The Artist that invented Computer
Animation
Aapo
Saask on the artist
Ture Sjolander
On an island aptly named Magnetic
Island off the coast of Australia, a Swedish artist lives in exile. Just
like so many others in today's media-landscape, he was first praised and
then brought to dust. However, he has left a lasting imprint on the world.
As early as the 1960's, he made the first electronic animation. Had he
been an inventor, he would have been celebrated as a genius today, but
because he is a predecessor in the world of art, things are different. In
that world, the great ones often have to die before they are
recognized.
We all know how Disney's famous cartoons were made:
thousands of drawings, filmed in sequence. Even today some films are made
this way. However, electronic animation has opened up a new world within
the film industry and it has also made computer games and countless
graphic solutions possible in business and science.
Pixar, which
used to be part of Lucasfilm and then sold to Steve Jobs in the lat
1980's, made the first completely computer animated film called "Andre and
Wally B" in 1983. The first feature length fully animated movie was Toy
Story from 1995. It was made by Pixar and distributed by Disney. Disney
had already started to use computer animation in Little Mermaid from 1989,
and then on through Aladdin, Lion King, Pocahontas, etc In those fantastic
movies the pictures were however first drawn on paper and then scanned
into computers for painting and cleanup and superimposition over painted
backgrounds.
Decades earlier, in 1965, Ture Sjolander’s
electronically manipulated images were broadcasted by the Swedish
Television (SVT). Among other things, Ture Sjolander was experimenting
with the question of how much the portrait of a person could be changed
before it was unrecognizable, something which has pioneered the amazing
morph-technique that is used today.
Gene Youngblood, who, alongside
with Marshall McLuchan, is the most celebrated media-philosopher of today,
devoted a whole chapter in his book Expanded Cinema, 1970, (Pre face by
Buckminster-Fuller) to the experiments of the SVT. Expanded cinema means
transgression of conventions as well as mind-expanding transgressions and
new definitions. Sjolander’s broadcasts were not technically
sophisticated, but they were ground-breaking.
The film mentioned by
Youngblood is "Monument" (1968) by Ture Sjolander and Lars Weck. The
other earlier televised pioneering animation were "TIME" (1965/66) by Ture
Sjolander and Bror Wikstrom, and later "Space in the Brain" (1969) by Ture
Sjolander, Bror Wikstrom, Sven Hoglund and Lasse Svanberg. Whereas most of
the modern-day artists fade into oblivion, Ture Sjolander has found his
place in the art history by the making of those films.
Ture, a lad
from the northern city of Sundsvall, had instant success with his opening
exhibition at the Sundsvalls Museum 1961. He moved to Stockholm in the
beginning of the 1960's. At an exhibition in 1964 at Karlsson Gallery his
imagery upset the public so much that the gallery immediately became the
trendiest place for young artists in Stockholm.
In 1968, he created
another scandal, when the film "Monument" was televised in most European
countries.
For a couple of years, Ture Sjolander was celebrated in
France, Italy, Switzerland, Great Britain and the USA.
In Sweden
there was a lot of jealousy. The Museum of Modern Art and the National
Gallery of Sweden, to name a few, bought his works, but the techniques he
worked with were expensive and after a few years, he found himself without
resources. Instead he started to work with celebrities such as Charlie
Chaplin and Greta Garbo. They taught him that exile – mental and physical
- is the only way to escape destruction for a creative genius. He moved to
Australia.
Ture Sjolander's works include photos, films, books,
articles, textiles, tv-programs, video-installations, happenings,
sculptures and paintings – all scattered around the Globe. Tracing will be
a challenging and exciting task for a future detective/biographer and
web-archaeologist's.
But mostly, his work consists of a life of
questioning and creation. This is what sets him aside as one of the great
artists of the 20th century.
Another forerunner in the art world,
the internationally celebrated Swedish composer Ralph Lundsten, says in an
interview in the magazine SEX, 5, 2004: "In those days (the 19th century),
a painting could create a revolution. Today people look idly at all the
thousands of exhibitions that there are.’ Hmm. Oh, really. How clever he
is’, and they yawn… If I were a visual artist, and if my ambition was to
create something new, I would devote myself to the possibilities of the
computer."
In 1974, Sherman Price of Rutt Electrophysics, wrote to
the Swedish Television Company (SVT): "Video Synthesis is becoming a
prominent technique in TV production here in the United States, and I
think it will be interesting to give credit to your broadcasting system
and personnel for achieving this historic invention."
He was
referring to Ture Sjolander's revolutionary work in the 1960's. No one at
the SVT could at that time imagine the importance that this innovation
would have for television, and hereby lost a lead position in the
computer-development business.
Amongst the younger generation of
computer animators, few know that they have a Swedish predecessor.
Many
engineers were probably working away in their cellars in those days,
trying to do the same thing, but Sjolander was the first person to show
his results on the air. If any of you would like to have a look at the
Godfather of animation, you can find a glimpse of him by
googling.
He did not seek to patent his inventions and he has made
no money from it. However, he has made it to the history books as one of
the great precursors of art - and perhaps also of technology - of the 20th
century.
For the past decades, Ture Sjolander has mostly lived in
Australia, but he has also worked in other countries, such as Papua New
Guinea and China.
After a couple of decades of silence, Sjolander's
groundbreaking work was shown at Fylkingen, the avant guard media and
music hide out in Stockholm in the spring of 2004.
In the autumn of
2004, some of his recent acrylic paintings on canvas were exhibited at the
Gallery Svenshog outside of Lund, Sweden. This was to commemorate the
forty years that have gone by since his last (scandalous) exhibition at
Lunds Konsthall. Many artists take a pleasure in provoking the established
art world. Ture Sjolander also provokes the rest of the
world.
COPYRIGHT © BY AAPO SAASK
ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED.
THIS TEXT MAY BE QUOTED
WITH PROPER
ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
http://www.media.homestead.com/
|
"the origins of video
art" pages: 116, 117, 118 and 181, 182 and
183.
A HISTORY of
VIDEO ART
by Chris
Meigh-Andrews
During the period between 1965 and
1975, which could be considered as the defining period of video art, there
was significant research activity amongst artists working with video to
develop, modify or invent video imaging instruments or
synthesizers.
The first generation of video
artist/engineers include Ture Sjolander, Bror Wikstrom, Lars Weck, Eric
Seigel, Stephen Beck, Dan Sandin, Steve Rutt, and Bill and Louise Etra, in
addition to the well-documented collaborative work of Nam June Paik and
Shuya Abe.
The work of these pioneers is
important because, in addition to exploring the potential of video as a
means of creative expression, they developed a range of relatively
accessible and inexpensive image manipulation devices specifically for
'alternative' video practice.
TURE SJOLANDER AND
MONUMENT
In September 1966
Swedish artists Ture Sjolander ( 1937-, Sweden) and Bror Wikstrom
broadcast Time, a 30-minute transmission of electronically manipulated
paintings on National Swedish Television. Sjolander and Wikstrom had
worked with TV broadcast engineer Bengt Modin to construct a temporary
video image synthesizer which was used to distort and transform video
line-scan rasters by applying tones from waveform generators. The basic
process involved applying electronic distortions during the process of
transfer of photographic transparencies and film clips. According to Modin
they introduced the electronic transformations using two approaches. The
geometric distortion of the scanning raster of the video signal by
feeding various waveforms to the scanning coil, and video distortion by
the application of various electronic filters to the luminance
signal.
Sjolander had begun working with
broadcast television with the production of his first multimedia
experiment The Role of Photography, commissioned by the National Swedish
Television in 1964, which was broadcast the following year. With the
broadcasting of Time, his second project for Swedish television, Sjolander
was well aware of the significance of his work and importance of the
artistic statement he was making:
Time is the very first video art
work televised at that point in time for the reason to produce an
historical record as well as an evidence of original visual free art, made
with the electronic medium - manipulation of the electronic signal - and
exhibited/installed through the television,
televised.
In 1967, Sjolander teamed up with
Lars Weck and, using a similar technological process, produced Monument, a
programme of electronically manipulated monochrome images of famous people
and cultural icons including the Mona Lisa, Charlie Chaplin, the Beatles,
Adolf Hitler and Pablo Picasso. (Separate text of this work as
below)
This programme was broadcast to a
potential audience of over 150 million people in France, Italy Sweden,
Germany and Switzerland in 1968, as well later in the USA. Subsequently,
Sjolander produced a Space in the Brain (1969) based on images provided by
NASA, extending his pioneering electronic imaging television work to
include the manipulation and distortion of colour video imagery. A Space
in the Brain was an attempt to deal with notions of space, both the inner
worldof the brain and the new televisual space created by electronic
imaging.
Sjolander, originally a painter and
photographer, had become increasingly dissatisfied with conventional
representation as a language of communication and began
experimenting with the manipulation of photographic images using
graphic and chemical means. For Sjolander, broadcast television
represented truly contemporary communication medium that should be
adopted as soon as possible by artists - a fluid transformation and
constant stream of ideas within the reach of millions.
The televised electronic images
Sjolander and his collaborators produced with Time, Monument and Space in
the Brain were further extended via other means. The television system was
exploited as a generator of imagery for further distribution processes
including silkscreen printing, posters, record covers, books and paintings
that were widely distributed and reproduced, although ironically signed
and numbered as if in limited editions.
It seems likely that these
pioneering broadcast experiments were influential on the
subsequent work of Nam June Paik and others. According to Ture
Sjolander, Paik visited Stockholm in the summer of 1966 and was shown
still images from Time while on a visit to the Elektron Musik Studion
(EMS). Additionally, Sjolander is in possession of a copy of a letter
dated 12 March 1974 from Sherman Price of Rutt Electrophysics in New York,
acknowledging the significance of Monument to the history of 'video
animation', and requesting detailed information about the circuitry
employed to obtain the manipulated imagery. In reply, Bengt Modin, the
engineer who had worked with Sjolander, provided Price with a circuit
diagram and an explanation of their technical approach to the project,
claiming he 'no longer knew the whereabouts of the artists
involved'.
THE PAIK-ABE
SYNTHESIZER
The Paik-Abe Synthesizer, built in
1969 is one of the earliest examples of a self-contained video
image-processing device. As we have seen, Ture Sjolander and his
collaborators had brought together video processing technology in
temporary configuration to produce their early broadcast experiments,
Paik's synthesizer was a self-contained unit built expressly and
exclusively for the purpose. The instrument, or video synthesizer, as it
came to be known, enabled the artist to add colour to a monochrome video
image, and to distort the conventional TV camera image.
-.......
Extending a dialogue that they had
begun in Tokyo in 1964, electronic engineer Shuya Abe and Nam June Paik
began building a video synthesizer in 1969 at WGBH-TV in Boston, possibly
spurred on by the work of Sjolander in Sweden.
from Chris
Meigh-Andrews book,
A HISTORY OF VIDEO ART,
Publisher BERG, Oxford-New York. First Edition October
2006
representative video
art works
pages 181, 182 and
183
MONUMENT, TURE
SJOLANDER AND LARS WECK (WITH BENGT MODIN), 1967
( BLACK AND WHITE,
SOUND, 10 MINUTES. COMMISSIONED AND BROADCAST BY NATIONAL SWEDISH TV,
1968)
Monument, characterized
by Ture Sjolander as a series of 'electronic paintings' is a free
flowing colage of electronically distorted and transformed icoic media
images. Set to a similarly improvised jazz and sound effects track, images
of pop stars, political and historical celebrities and media
personalities, culled from archive film footage and photographic stills
have been electronically manipulated - stretched, skewed, exploded,
rippled and rotated. The relentless flow of semi-abstracted monochromatic
faces and associated sounds seems to both celebrate and satirize the
contemporary visual culture of the time. In its fluid mix of visual
information it generalizes the television medium, draining it of its
specific content and momentary significance. It creates a kind of
'monument' to the ephemeral - all this will pass, as it is passing before
you now.
Archive film footage and
photographic stills of familiar faces and people, such as Lennon and
McCartney, Chaplin, Hitler, the Mona Lisa - the 'monument' of the world
culture - flicker and flash, stretch and ooze across the television
screen. In some moments the television medium is itself directly
referenced, the familiar screen shape presented and rescanned, images of
video feedback and, at one point, its vertical roll out of adjustment,
anticipate Joan Jonas's seminal tape, although for very different
purposes. The work anticipated a number of later videotapes, particularly
the distorted iconic images of Nam June Paik.
Gene Youngblood described
the psychological power and effect of these transformations i his
influential and visionary book Expanded Cinema (Youngblood
1970):
Images undergo
transformations at first subtle, like respiration, then increasingly
violent until little remains of the original icon. In this process, the
images pass through thousands of stages of semi-cohesion, making the
viewer constantly aware of his orientation to the picture. The
transformations accur slowly and with great speed, erasing perspectives,
crossing psycological barriers. A figure might stretch like a silly putty
or become rippled in liquid universe. Harsh basrelief effects accentuate
physical dimensions with great subtlety, so that one eye or ear might
appear slightly unnatural. And finally the image disintegrates into a
constellation of shimmering video phosphores.
Sjolander and his
collaborators at Sveriges Radio (the Swedish Broadcasting Company) in
Stockholm had worked together on a number of related projects since the
mid-1960s, beginning with The Role of Photography, Sjolander's first
experiment with electronic manipulations of the broadcast image in 1965.
This project was followed with the broadcast of Time (1966), a
thirty-minute transmission of 'electronic paintings' produced using the
same temporarily configured video image synthesizer that was later used to
create Monument.
The system that Sjolander
and his colleagues used involved the transfer of photographic images (film
footage and transparencies) to videotape using a 'flying-spot' telecine
machine. This process produced electronic images which they transformed
and manipulated by applying square and sine signals with a waveform
generator during the transfer stage, often using this process repeatedly
to apply greater levels of transformation.
For Sjolander and his
collaborator Lars Weck, the broadcasting of Monument was the epicentre of
an extended communication experiment in electronic image-making reaching
out to an audience of millions.
Kristian Romare, writing
in a book published as part of an extended series of artworks which
included publishing, posters, record covers and paintings after the
broadcasting of Monument, describes the scope of Sjolander and Weck,s
vision and aspirations for the new image-generating technique they had
pioneered:
SCAN
MODULATION/RESCAN
In this process images
are produced using a television camera rescanning an oscilloscope or CRT
screen. The display images are manipulated (squeezed, stretched, rotated,
etc.) using magnetic or electronic modulation. The manipulated images,
rescanned by a second camera are then fed through an image processor. This
type of instrument was also used without an input camera feed, the
resultant images produced by manipulation of the raster. Examples of
this type of instrument include Ture Sjolander,s ' Temporary " Video
Synthesizer (1966-69), the Paik/Abe Synthesizer, and the Rutt/Etra Scan
Processor (1973).
----Original Message
Follows----
From: Christopher Meigh Andrews
Date: Wed, 01 Jun 2005 12:14:19
+0100
Ture,
As you rightly
say, there is a sense in which the American artists have
written
everybody else out of the history of video art. I would like to
put
some people (such as yourself) back in! I would like to use an image
or
two from the stills of Monument that I have found on the web, but
they
are very low resolution. Would you be willing to e-mail an image
of
greater resolution? (300dpi would be best- jpeg or tiff, if
possible)
also, i attach a little form so that you grant me the rights
to
reproduce the image in the book. Is this OK? if so, please fill it
in
and send it back to me.
I would like to do more than simply
paraphrase what Gene (Youngblood)
has written in Expanded Cinema, which
as you say is what M. Rush has
done. Any chance that you can tell me a
little bit more about your ideas
with Monument and how it began? I will
of course piece togther what I
can from the web site, and from what
Aapo Saask has written. I also will
talk to Brian Hoey and Peter
Donebauer. i also have the Biddick Farm
catalogue from the exhibtion at
Tyne & Wear, which has a little info.
All best wishes to you-
and i will certainly send your regards to Brian
&
Peter!!!
Chris
Dr. Chris Meigh-Andrews PhD (RCA) MA,
HDCP
Electronic & Digital Art Unit
38 St. Peters
Street
Preston PR1
7BS
|
Ture Sjölander. Konstnär. Sundsvall och
Australien.
PIONJÄR INOM
VIDEOKONSTEN
Ture Sjölander, född 1937 i Sundsvall, är konstnären som
efter debuten 1961 på Sundsvalls museum
blev uppmärksammad experimentell avantgardekonstnär i Stockholm, gjorde många
och än mer uppmärksammade konstverk och sedan flyttade till Australien.
Han har en diger cv och har uttryckt sig i mängder av
tekniker. ”… Hans
produktion består av fotografier, filmer, böcker, artiklar, textilier,
TV-program, videoinstallationer, happenings, grafik, skulpturer och målningar.
Framför allt består den av ett ifrågasättande och skapande liv. Det är detta som
får honom att framstå som en av 1900-talets största svenska
konstnärer”, enligt en
artikel i konsttidskriften KONSTPERSPEKTIV
av Aapo Sääsk , nr1/05.
Dessutom är han en riktigt skön personlighet, tycker
Kulturguidens reporter som har varit i Australien och träffat honom. Läs mer om
hennes möte med Ture Sjölander här…Ture Sjölander är en mångfasetterad
person, inte bara till sin personlighet. Även hans konstutövande är mycket att
greppa - så mycket har han producerat i så många olika former, varav en del
banbrytande.
Dessutom är hans privata livsöde en sak för sig. Tures son
kidnappades 1993 då sonen var tre år, och har sedan dess inte setts till. Med
allt vad som följde i den historiens spår…
Så vad ska man välja att berätta om denna man och konstnär som varit verksam i världens alla
hörn, men har sina rötter på Östermalm i
Sundsvall…?
Sällskaplig ensamvarg
- Jag är lite av en ensamvarg som varken har eller behöver människor
nära, beskriver sig Ture.
Uttalandet förvånar mig, för han är så social, spirituell,
kommunikativ att det motsäger det. Som att han möter mig med en stor varm
bamsekram och ett brett leende då vi ses första gången. Och bjuder in mig att bo
några dagar i hans hem.
De följande dagarna får jag, när Ture guidar mig runt, inte bara
uppleva omgivningarna kring orten mellan hav och flod på Australiens östkust där han
bor. Under våra vandringar på den ena platsen vackrare än den andra får jag även
ta del av privatpersonen och konstnären Ture då han berättar öppenhjärtigt om
sig och sitt liv.
Många ansikten
Har man mött Ture Sjölander har man mött många ansikten, i flera
olika åldrar. Han har glimten i ögat, som vore han en buspojke på sju år. Om det
är på fullaste allvar eller bara ett av hans många lustiga infall som får honom
att stapla tre par glasögon på näsan, är inte lätt att veta… Samtidigt är han
klok och allvarlig - som en 100-åring med stor erfarenhet av livets många
skeenden och innehåll.
Allt på samma gång. Han är motsägelsefull, anarkistisk, rebellisk, en
provokatör och en humorist.
Man brukar tala om konstnärssjälar, men det känns i detta fall för
tamt. Hela Ture är lite som ett konstverk, han själv. Som en bildkonstens
Torsten Flink fast utan det mörka vansinnet, men med samma genialitet i den
artistiska galenskapen.
Hem igen… kanske
Ture lever ensam ett ganska stilla och lastfritt liv i sitt lilla
hus. Som han för övrigt funderar på att byta till ett större.
- Så jag får plats med en ateljé så jag kan måla igen. Fast jag röker
ett par cigaretter om dagen, säger han på sitt speciella sätt, pratades om flera
saker samtidigt.
Tanken att återvända till Sundsvallstrakten lockar honom också, även
om han inte kommer att ge upp Australien och livet där.
- Men ett konstprojekt där hemma vore kul… Finns det något intresse
för det, tror du?, funderar han.
Just nu jobbar han mest på nätet där han gör internetkonst. Hans
internetkonst har många sidor, extrema mängder nivåer och sammanlänkningar. Men
alla är olika sidor av samma sak. Precis så som han själv är.
Rapp i tal och tanke
Ture är så snabb i tanken och i sina associationer att det till att
börja med är svårt att hänga med i hans resonemang och diskussioner. Han svär,
resonerar och skrattar högt i samma mening.
Han är ju så komplex och motsägelsefull, och han är även allt mellan
sina egna ytterligheter. Det tar en god stund att hitta hans tanketakt och hans
sätt att prata med vilt hyperassocierande utvikningar, bisatser och kast.
Därtill hans humoristiska infall.
När jag väl fått kläm på de bitarna är det otroligt kul att
konversera Ture, och samtalen inspirerar den egna tanken. Det gör mötet med
honom så roligt och spännande.
Från det ena till det andra
Han kastar sig mellan resonemang om sin syn på konst och sitt
förhållningssätt till sin egen konst, över till då han var i Nya Guinea och blev
kompis med en inföding.
- Fast ingen av oss förstod den andres språk blev vi goda vänner och
jag bjöds hem till hans familj och by, berättar Ture.
Vidare till kvinnorna i hans liv och hans två vuxna döttrar, därifrån
till då han vid ett tillfälle fann sig skakandes hand med Marlon Brando då han
hälsade på en kompis i USA som skulle presentera sin granne. Ytterligare vidare
till anekdoter från hans barndom och kärleksfulla ord om hans älskade mamma och
pappa i Sundsvall.
Livstragedi
Och sedan till den tragiska historien om hans son som blev kidnappad
som treåring för 17 år sedan, och då Ture mitt i sin desperation och sorg över
detta själv blev oskyldigt
häktad.
Det här är två saker han inte glömmer. Sin son har han aldrig
återsett och såren efter att själv ha blivit misstrodd är djupa.
Med synen i centrum
Ture Sjölander har både mött och arbetat med ett flertal
”kändisar” och även mött ”vanliga”
människor, dessutom har han rest en hel del. Därmed har han mycket att berätta.
Mycket handlar om hans förmåga att se. Inte bara att se människor,
utan att överhuvudtaget se. Att uppleva sin tillvaro med ögonen som främsta
verktyg.
Vikten av det visuella är något han ständigt återkommer till. Hans
synsätt och referenspunkt är också han själv och hans ögon, med vilka han girigt
slukar sin omgivning. Med eller utan glasögon…
Självbevis
Utgångspunkten för de flesta av hans resonemang är hans eget
perspektiv på saker och ting, och han menar att det viktigaste i livet är att
förverkliga sig själv. Och att den
egna bekräftelsen väger tyngst.
Vi pratar om behovet av att bevisa sig och sitt inför andra. Att
bevisa, kunna påvisa, saker som finns och har hänt runt omkring en
osv.
- Huvudsaken är att man vet själv, menar Ture eftertänksamt och
eftertryckligt.
Ointressanta konstobjekt
Då vi talar om konst och kultur menar han att det måste in på alla
nivåer i samhället.
- Konsten och kulturen är ingen handelsvara att tjäna pengar på eller
värdera ekonomiskt, utan ett förhållningssätt till tillvaron och verkligheten
som en ytterligare dimension, menar Ture.
Därmed är han djupt engagerad i förestående val i både Sverige och Australien.
- Det är också en del av min konstnärliga verksamhet och som jag
personligen är opolitisk tycker jag därmed att mitt panorama är något vidare än
genomsnittsmänniskans, säger han.
Om själva konstverken menar han att de inte är det intressanta i
sig.
- De är bara objekt, anser han. Utan det viktiga är processen i sig;
att testa nya vägar, nya tekniker - nya ”whatever”, som han säger.
Monumentalt konstexperiment
Som Monument t
ex, som gjordes av Ture och Lars Weck i mitten av 60-talet. Ett konstexperiment
som är en historia för sig. Dels genom vad det är, dels genom hur det gick till
både i och runt det hela. Så omfattande
att jag överlåter på läsaren att själv söka info, t ex på nätet.
Men att verket med elektroniska animeringar inte bara är en
föregångare till videokonst, utan även rent tekniskt en föregångare verkar de flesta vara överens om.
Liksom att Ture hör till pionjärerna inom konstarten.
Elektroniskt måleri
- Jag själv slog fast definitionen elektroniskt måleri och
elektronisk konst. Som jag fortfarande anser vara en relevant definition av vad
mina experiment rörde sig om; den absolut första elektroniska animationen,
kommenterar Ture och nämner att det absolut första televiserade
"videokonst"verket i världen är ett annat av hans verk, Time.
I Monument är ”filmen” inte
det egentliga konstverket, vilket Ture anser många felaktigt uppfattat det som.
Utan det är själva genomförandet av den elektroniska akten som var det
konstnärliga experimentet, medan filmen mer är en dokumentation av det som
skedde. Ett avtryck.
(Det skrivna) ordets makt?
Sedan detta om ordet. Även det något Ture ofta återkommer till. Han
är ”döless” på
det skrivna ordet och tycker värderingen av det är minst sagt överdriven. Han
tycker det är för mycket ord och för mycket fokus på orden.
- Och jag gillar inte journalister, säger han och kastar mig med ett
pillimariskt leende en retsam blick.
Ändå är hans internetsidor fulla av bevis, bilddokument och
–
ord. Och han berättar att om det är något han samlar på så är det just dokument
av allehanda slag.
- Jag har lådvis, kilovis, säger han. Och viftar med handen åt något
obestämt håll där allt detta förvaras.
Parallellt med sin avsky för det skrivna ordet samlar Ture alltså på
dokument. Han är verbal och argumenterar och diskuterar, han skriver på nätet
och har publicerat böcker som inte bara innehåller bilder utan även text,
skriven av honom själv. T ex en om Greta Garbo och han har även jobbat på en bok
tillsammans med Charlie
Chaplin.
Motsägelsens logik
Motsägelsefullt? Kanske, men 100% kompatibelt om man är Ture
Sjölander - där motpoler, kontraster, ytterligheter och spänningen som uppstår
däremellan är på något sätt är hans signum, tänker jag då jag efter några
intensiva dagar vinkar hej då till honom från bussfönstret.
Och jag undrar stilla, men en smula oroat, hur jag ska kunna beskriva
denne komplexe person och konstnär med hans egna hatobjekt de skrivna orden.
Ture Sjölander, liksom hans konst, måste ju egentligen upplevas.
Text och foto: Gussie Ericsson
Läs mer på
http://artinvest.homestead.com/bukowskis_stockholm_auktion.html
samt t ex
www.gretagarbo.de/
(där det även finns ett antal officiella
länkar av Ture och hans CV, plus artiklar)
Komplex = som består av många delar vilka hänger samman på ett
svåröverskådligt sätt