Ebook: Writing and Unwriting (Media) Art History: Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048
Author: Joasia Krysa Jussi Parikka
- Tags: Individual Artists, Essays, Monographs, Arts & Photography, History, History & Criticism, Arts & Photography, Engineering, Aerospace, Automotive, Bioengineering, Chemical, Civil & Environmental, Computer Modelling, Construction, Design, Electrical & Electronics, Energy Production & Extraction, Industrial Manufacturing & Operational Systems, Marine Engineering, Materials & Material Science, Mechanical, Military Technology, Reference, Telecommunications & Sensors, Engineering & Transportation, Technology, Science & Math
- Series: Leonardo Book Series
- Year: 2015
- Publisher: The MIT Press
- Edition: 1
- Language: English
- pdf
Over the past forty years, Finnish artist and technology pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) has been a composer of electronic music, experimental filmmaker, computer animator, roboticist, inventor, and futurologist. Kurenniemi is a hybrid -- a scientist-humanist-artist. Relatively unknown outside Nordic countries until his 2012 Documenta 13 exhibition, "In 2048," Kurenniemi may at last be achieving international recognition. This book offers an excavation, a critical mapping, and an elaboration of Kurenniemi's multiplicities.
The contributors describe Kurenniemi's enthusiastic, and rather obsessive, recording of everyday life and how this archiving was part of his process; his exploratory artistic practice, with productive failure an inherent part of his method; his relationship to scientific and technological developments in media culture; and his work in electronic and digital music, including his development of automated composition systems and his "video-organ," DIMI-O. A "Visual Archive," a section of interviews with the artist, and a selection of his original writings (translated and published for the first time) further document Kurenniemi's achievements. But the book is not just about one artist in his time; it is about emerging media arts, interfaces, and archival fever in creative practices, read through the lens of Kurenniemi.