Ikarus syndrom

Ikarus Syndrome
Drawing, Ink on paper
300x140 cm
Since birds are highly visible and common animals, humans have had a relationship with them since the dawn of man. Birds have been featured in culture and art since prehistoric times, when they were represented in early cave paintings. The most known figure that comes to ones mind must be Ikarus, the Hero from Greece mythology that flying to high on borrowed wings, crashed and burned.
In 2006 I had an exhibition in Lahti´s Hiihtomuseum, Finland that was situated at the giant downhill ski jumping tracks I found it more than fitting to make a work about this human ambition. Flying is probably mankind’s greatest dream-it is a deep-rooted topic in ancient literature and still fascinates us today. Sigmund Freud described dreams about flying as a natural progression as we grow. First we crawl, then start to walk continue to run -and from a child point of view- it would be natural to expect to fly next. The drawing “Ikarus Syndrome” is a visual study of what is birdlike in man and what is manlike in birds.
The drawing displays a wide variety of comparing studies such as simple human shelters and bird nest architecture, bird skeleton heads and sport helmets, flight formation and synchronized sport disciplines, bird postures and jumping styles, our diverse anatomy and physiology, fossils and iconographical imaginary.
The several hundred ink drawings are partly strong structured but merge towards the middle into a melting pot of transfigurative chaos in which each species intermingles with each other.

Fieldstudies

Field studies
2004
98 Drawings and ground plans sport fields, board games and child play, ink drawing on paper
150x560cm, growing

Western relations to nature have been characterized by mastery rather than co-existents.
In the field of sport this mind set is especially dominant, manifesting in the fact that our playing fields are anti-nature and have to be- according to the fact that modern competitive sport has to facilitate a near laboratory setting in which its uni- dimensionality can unfold itself under controlled conditions. Pure nature has too much variation, too much noise, so it all has to become mapped, planned and graphical within the sense to keep locked out the immeasurable, unknown and unknowable.
Generally, playing fields are wide expanses of grass, dirt or sand without many obstructions.
A playground is used for playing sports or games; a playing field further refers to any place or context within which competitive activity takes place. It is also used as a metaphorical term in economics as the term “leveled field”, a plateau on which no external interference affects the ability of the players to compete according to a set of established and agreed rules.
In my works I often counter-target this conformity with individualism- a clash of special designed spaces for specific purpose- versus un-manipulated urban/ nature settings and the human urge to reclaim its right to imaginary play and to claim its private space.
Within this working process my idea was to create a collection in which the boarders of established systems in pro sports activities and child play blend into each other and lead the spectator to loose its grip in process of differentiation. Kids game chalk drawings found on streets and parking lots, board games as well as ground plans of sporting field’s stretch into a master plan of human activity. There is no hierarchy in the placing, every game every sport begins with a line that divides, allocates and grows with the complexity of the play.
The work Field studies consists play concepts that have been originated for more than 4000 years. The more than five meter long drawing displays 98 fields and disappears into a thorax like paper dispenser that offer more space for future finds.

Ballroom

Ballroom
2007
Collection of balls (marbles to fist size ball specimens), steam bath with sandblasted Plexiglas membrane, light tubes, oversized glass test tubes with primal colored ball selection

In 2007 I had an exhibition in Wiesbaden in the Gallery of The Fluxus Freunde Wiesbaden e. V
in cooperation with the Finnish artists Sari Palosaari and Mia Rinne. The Exhibition was curated by artist group located in Frankfurt a M called 431 art and the show went under the name “Northbound-installations and media art from Finland”.
The exhibition spaces were located in a former Jewish bath and consisted of various shower and spa facilities that were provided to install spatial artworks. One of the cabins provided me with a stainless steel bath that I modified for the work “ Ballroom”.
Remembering the childhood pleasure of lying within a sea of balls I filled the bath with over thousand unique specimens of balls. These have been collected over the last five years and just were asking for to being presented in this particular way.
The work went together with the work “Pharma CV”, a color sorted selection of balls in oversized glass blown test tubes on the wall.

Mappa Mundi

Mappa Mundi
2003- ongoing
Collection of unfolded balls from the field of sport, 12 Glass Frames, 140x160x8cm

Along active games the most highly developed global ones - are played with balls. When I slowly started to collect those items it became aware of the multiplicity of ways in witch they were formed and shaped.
It all started with a “Hacky Sack”, a fist-sized ball that was made out of triangular patches and had a label saying, “Made in Guatemala!” Cutting it open I found that it had a filling of black granulate that I later identified as being of volcanic origin. Something struck me than. I bought a ball made in the opposite side of the world, that was filled with a substance taking from the very heart of this country. It was a fascinating poetic thought and I was hooked.
I have to confess that it became an obsession and I have gathered more than a thousand individual items. Mappa Mundi is a collection of these balls that I collected on many years and journeys all over the world. The collection Mappa mundi was a starting point for a series of works that inhabit the idea of being ongoing collections. In the processes of collecting, ones own taste and vision, forms the individual core of a distinctively collection policy. While selecting I define unique objects belonging to a certain category and quality and therefore they are accepted into my private collection. Each one of the balls must have been played and has to have an individual construction pattern. Having fulfilled this terms the items are cut and unfolded along its sewing lines. Alienated in this way and presented in glass displays, they more likely seem to remind of ritual objects than belongings of the field of play and sports.
With their fillings of volcanic granulate, rice, seed, bones, reindeer fur, sound mechanisms, liquid and handwritings, each ball seems to reveal a new secret. It helped me mapping some unknown territory- so also the name of the work is related to this. Mappa mundi means Map of the World.
In my working method I sympathize with a 17th century tradition of creating ones own “Wunderkammer”, a cabinet of wonder, or a wonder-room. In their historical definition these collections often contained a mix of fact and fiction, cabinets were filled with preserved animals, horns, tusks, skeletons, minerals, as well as other types of equally fascinating man-made objects: sculptures wondrously old, wondrously fine or wondrously small; clockwork automata; ethnographic specimens from exotic locations.
As a artist/ collector I am got a lot of inspiration from the publishing’s and writings by “The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge”, that was founded in 1660 and is known simply as the Royal Society. I understand this movement as a group of renaissance people that were collectors preserving the old and searching the new, traveling to foreign countries engaging with other cultures and were constantly generating knowledge through hands on experiments.
Mappa mundi- a ongoing collection in the sense of this world is a very inspiring but also difficult work to handle. Consisting of ten segments it is rather big and not suitable to be shown in many galleries spaces. Furthermore I would not consider about selling it in pieces because the single frames compliment each other and are a growing collection, unique in this sense.
It consists out of ten segments with three further in preparation. Nevertheless there has been an offspring of works originating from the main collection. The last one was a big size format 150x 300 cm that was put on display at the 3rd Beijing Art Biennale in Beijing 2008.

Enemy mine

Enemy mine
2006- ongoing collection-not yet exhibited
Eye pleasing objects assembled and reassembled by material collected from sporting and play activities that resemble anti personal mine-like objects,
Colourfull and eye pleasing rotating 3 D animations from anti personal landmines to be exhibited on various small LCD screens

Land mines are controversial because they remain dangerous after the conflict in which they were deployed, killing and injuring civilians and rendering land impassable and unusable for decades. As of 2007, a total of 158 nations have agreed to a banning treaty.
Thirty-seven countries have not agreed to the ban, including China, Finland, India, Israel, Morocco, Pakistan, South Korea, Sri Lanka, and the United States. Finland remains the only country in the European Union (EU) that did not want sign, ratify or accede to the Mine Ban Treaty.
The President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) responded to the news of this delay with an editorial in a Finnish weekly magazine, appealing to the government to accept the conscience of humanity because, “When States anywhere in the world remain outside of this norm, they provide a justification for the continued use of anti-personnel mines everywhere.”The international community clears approximately 100,000 land mines each year. During the same period between 2 and 5 million new land mines are laid. Land-mine proliferation thus adds each year two or more decades to the1100 years that would already be necessary of having all these land mines to be cleared at the current state.
Land mines are in reality a weapon of mass destruction, in slow motion, because they indiscriminately kill or maim massive numbers of human beings over a long period of time. Some of the largest numbers lie in wait in Africa and Asia. Virtually all combatants use land mines. The countries most devastated by land-mines are probably Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia and Afghanistan that have an estimated 10-15 million mines in place, -dangerously are also the about 1 million mines along the Iraq-Kuwait border and around the Iraqi city of Basra. Which the US and its allies have laid.
Land mines cause enormous pain and suffering. It is clear that many of these have been randomly scattered in inhabited areas precisely to cause civilian casualties and terrorize the population. Adults caught in the blast of an anti-personnel mine often survive with treatment, though they usually lose a limb. Children are less likely to survive because their bodies are so vulnerable. There are basically two types of land mines: anti-tank and anti-personnel. The most dangerous to children are the anti-personnel mines that explode even under the gentle pressure of a child's hand or foot. These come in a bewildering array of shapes and colors that can seem an interesting discovery for a curious child. One of the most infamous is the 'butterfly' mine, designed to float to the ground from helicopters without exploding, but with a shape and color that also make it a deadly toy.

Collection

Collection
2004
Hard-shell protection parts originating from various sport uniforms, visual sorted

Collecting is considered to be very personal and in the process of selecting we also reveal a lot of our self. Rules or method are usually formulated during active search, some type of limitation is a natural part of an individual's selection process. Most artist are also collectors and it is not only about the possession of certain items but its always hints towards a work in progress. I have several such collecting projects; usually it takes me years before some actual work originates out of these. It is also acquired knowledge in this activity that I find valuable, one gets to know the whole lifecycle starting from the producers, facilitators, users and the final steps of disposing or recycling methods. I work a lot with items originating from the field of sports and have often hinted towards finding sponsors in the industry that could shortcut the collecting process but somehow I like the feel of an authentic find. I dig the authenticity of a well worn out soccer ball or a merciless battered protector plate having survived years of heavy impact by collision of players or other objects.
So this work consists of authentic wear gutted out of helmet, shoulder pads, elbow pads, mouth guard, protective gloves, heavily padded shorts, a 'jock' athletic protector, shin pads, chest protector, neck guards, face masks and specialized equipment designed to protect the player in action.

Skinned polygones

Skinned Polygons
2001-2004
60x70x6cm
Collection of unfolded bodies, Twelve out of eighteen pieces
Paper, Steel needles, Collagen, Ink, Graphite drawing on Aquarelle paper

Originally my interest in spherical geometry came from Cartography, the study and practice of making representations of the Globe on a flat surface. Quite soon I was fascinated by spherical geometry that deals with polygons (especially triangles) on the sphere and explains how to find relations between the involved angles. This is of great importance for calculations in astronomy and earth-surface and orbital/space navigation.
The most familiar spherical polyhedron is the football (soccer ball), thought of as a spherical truncated icosahedron. Many of the cutting forms used for the work were found in contemporary ball design and went along with the collection Mappa Mundi that I was building up parallel to this work. Contrary to the unfolded balls- that were supposed to alienate in their unfolded stage- I wanted to give the skinned polygons some hint to their former spherical shape, a visual code so to speak. I especially liked the unfolded cutting form of a classical Mercator style globe were one can fit the parts together by aligning the continental shapes to each other. North and South Pole give a clear
sense of up and down and North America is to the left and East Asia to the right. I was searching for an equivalent image that would work in a more abstract but basically similar way.I found it in the simple image of text and its simple classifications of linearity. Linear writing systems are those in which the characters are composed of lines, such as the Latin alphabet.
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols, within our understanding of text it comes in the Latin alphabetic form. It is cultural as well as cognitive anchored and understood as a- left to right pattern and going from the top to the bottom of the page. The text images that I used were unique for each polyhedral design and based on a written text that I manipulated with a set of Photoshop filters to a point that they were unreadable but still recognized as an continuing text face.
I was building spatial paper models of the polygons and marked the direction of the text direction as if it would run around a balloon shape, spiraling from up to down. When these models were back in a flat unfolded shape the text image was of course aligned along the curves of its former spatial form. Through this visual presentation the observer gets a clue how the fragments are connected to each other. The text was applied to the material collagen by using mirrored ink jet prints in the stage when the material has been moisturized and can be imprinted. Through its special structure it will suck in the ink without that it would further spread into a fuzzy blur.
Likewise the skin is the bodies most outer boarder, the material of the skinned polygons is a fragile layer tissue called collagen.
Collagen is the main protein of connective tissue in animals and the most abundant protein in mammals, making up about 25% to 35% of the whole-body protein content. Collagen is one of the long, fibrous structural proteins it is responsible for skin strength.
From the Greek for glue, kolla, the word collagen means, "glue producer" and refers to the early process of boiling the skin and sinews of animals to obtain glue. Egyptians already used the Collagen adhesive about 2000 BC, and Native Americans used it in bows about 1500 years ago.
The collagen that I used was medical collagen that derived from young beef.
I obtained a great amount of it during a job doing nightshifts in a pharmaceutical company that were making anti wrinkle masks. Like most artist I do get exited discovering transitory materials used in industrial processes, there is so much material that we never get to see. Collagen was right away a big brainstormer. The material comes in 1-3 mm A3 sheets and is white, foam like and odorless. Similar to wood it seems to have an internal pointed structure, meaning one direction that one can easily rip. Moisturized it becomes flexible and can be stretched.
The polyhedral cutting forms that I used, started as construction drawings on paper and remains as underlying image. (I always liked to keep the process visible.)The wet collagen was fixed with needles to the joints of the construction drawing, Within a several day long drying process the material started to shrink. This way all the straight lines turn into curves as the tension forces start to work within the construction.
I especially like this point of the creation. From here an uncontrollable random element takes over the mathematic and geometrical concept. It’s out of my hands and I enjoy becoming the exited and surprised observer.

Libary

Library
2001
Idea-sketch for a work in the meeting room of a new media company in Germany.
Not realized

The images of this work originated when I was working on a proposal for a company working in the development of new media. Digital libraries belong to an emerging new culture. Thereby questions concerning production, collection, classification and dissemination of knowledge arise. How is the integrity and sustainability of these collections economically, technically and culturally guaranteed?
A digital culture does not mean that, say; the culture of the book will disappear. Different media having different qualities do not replace each other; -oral culture did not disappear with the invention of writing or with the appearance printed works.
Libraries, digital or otherwise, are just one element in a larger circle through which infomation travels from production to ultimate consumption. They fuse in a stream of synergy with other authors, publishers, distributors and user communities.
But libraries have to come to symbolize and to exemplify the values we impute to the entire circle.
What we say about digital libraries and how we understand them embodies and signals our attitude toward the place of information in our culture. To this extent, it is potentially of great significance how we construct digital libraries and how we talk about them and who is includedin the conversation.
The photographs for this image were taken the University library of Finland, Helsinki that underwent major changes at this point. It was in a transitory state at which it changed from a functioning library to an architectonical showcase, the books were moving out external storage places and were digitalized. Future plans for the beautiful main room of the library were to completely free it from his previous function. It was meant to become a “piazza academia”- a meeting point for discussion and science- what made it interesting for me to work with.
The high resolute image is a collage assembled by many 100 shots that I took in the summer 98/99 at the location. The images were digitized, puzzled together and forged to a panorama view. The interior was stripped free from reading desks and microfilm units and other irritations associated with functioning libraries. The image doesn’t have a deep sharpness that creates an alienating and artificial atmosphere.
The image was supposed to be printed on an UV resistant material that replaces the sunscreens of the window. With a simple switch the amber colored world would decent and change the atmosphere of the location.