Erkki Kurenniemi
1941 - 2017
Electronics in the World of Tomorrow
Erkki Kurenniemi
Erkki Kurenniemi was arguably one of the first artists to propose or fantasise about a complete cultural surrender to cyber existence, and his entire career, covering such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, music, engineering, film, dance or rhetorics, testifies to this desire to escape the limits of the human body and transgress into a different dimension, bordering on techno-fetishism. In his 1964 short Electronics in the World of Tomorrow, Kurenniemi presents a slideshow of the most aseptic signs of technological imagination: diagrams, chips, machines, cold surfaces. But footage of human warmth also comes up - mostly in black and white, as if to give humans the status of a memory. Originally silent, the film was in this version endowed with a electronic music piece by Kurenneimi himself: a cold, aggressive soundtrack that could be said to present technology as a potentially menacing affair, although this is a reading that the director would certainly refute.
Electronics in the World of Tomorrow
Elämän reikänauha
Erkki Kurenniemi
Shot at the Department of Nuclear Physics at the University of Helsinki, the images of The Punched Tape of Life illustrate the beauty of 1960s information technology. These decorative scenes parallel a set of ”summer interludes” which document Kurenniemi’s entourage.
The Punched Tape of Life
Firenze
Erkki Kurenniemi
Pirkko Peltonen, Paavo Lehtonen
One of several experimental films shot in the late '60s and early '70s by the recently deceased computer music pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, Florence is a dazzling, abstract travelogue shot between Italy, Switzerland, and the artist's home in Finland.
Florence
Computer Music
Erkki Kurenniemi
The film stars two computers: Elliott 803 (in the Department of Nuclear Physics, the University of Helsinki) and IBM 1130 (in the computer centre at the University of Turku). At times, the coexistence of man and machine provokes suffocating frustration. This is only the starting point for something more subtle: the art created with computers.
Computer Music
