In the year 2020 we are following a long awaited natural disaster in slow motion, but its scope has surprised everyone. Social life grows ever smaller and hanging around at home is reflected in the overconsumption of the news. How many new covid cases?

The invisible risk to catch the disease is made visible by colours glowing bright in the ultraviolet light as door handles, handrails and buttons all seem lethal. In the post-Christmas time window display of the pandemic era, each new day brings new infection spread maps, and by evening one ponders if tomorrow will be any different. By it you can stop and be amazed by your own minusculity and try to understand that in order to help more you need to do less.

The installation has been shown in Oksasenkatu 11 Gallery in Helsinki, Walden Kunstaustellungen in Berlin, Projio Tampere, Finland and it will be part of LUX Helsinki 2022.

In mathematics and physics, Lissajous curves are graphs that depict oscillation and waves and compare the frequency and intensity of two waves.

In a vacuum, energy travels as electromagnetic waves, as oscillating electric and magnetic fields. The combined, reflective and other effects of these energies mould our environment and reality, as well as our visual and auditory sensations.

In these pieces, I study the creation of surfaces and shapes that appear to be simultaneously organic and artificial in images generated using wave patterns.

Artworks are photograms, exposed directly to black and white Fomapan photographic PE paper, using a modified color CRT-tube. The cathode ray (stream of high energy electrons) is controlled with electronic sound waves, drawing the forms and patterns of the images. The ray passes through a tilted lens, creating variation in the sharpness of the images. The visible ”raster” is actually the color-separation grid inside the used CRT-tube. The photographic paper is then hand developed in large baths to enable broad black and white dynamics to each image.

All artworks are unique originals, and are impossible to reproduce because of technique used in making them. An attempt to re-expose and image with same sound, would reproduce a different image.

Maailmankaikkeus is an artistic remediation of the cosmic background radiation or relic radiation, the static we know from the last century of analog television sets and radio. The starting point for the process is an effect of decaying technology; the dead pixels in video projectors which look like a starry sky, random, but clustered. When designin the automatic actors for their
performance/installation, the artists realized that the star artifacts led us towards building images and processes of the universe using light, sound and mechanisms of various kinds. This mis-en-scène uses analog electronics designed and built by the artists.

These circuits are susceptible to interference from radiating energy and thus make the relic radiation visible and audible in the noises,quirks and particularities of the composition. Sound signals are used directly to draw the visuals, video signals are used to make the sounds. This is possible because the difference between an audio and video signal is only the frequency range that
they are usually employed for. By shifting the frequency ranges of the analog signals, we can work with a direct (proportional) correspondence between the audio and video material we generate.

According to contemporary cosmology, the universe came to being because of a little asymmetry in the distribution of matter and anti-matter. The composition and libretto of the acts of the installation are governed by a generative code with an initial asymmetry written into it. This “fault” will accumulate over time creating more and more complex seemingly random structures.

The installation is seen through a large scale teleidoscope.

Analog synthesizer circuits designed and built by the artist, modified CRT-televisions, speakers, ferro-type photographs.

An audio visual installation where a real-time synthesized sound scape is made visible with modified CRT-tube televisions. The analog audio synthesizers sculpt electricity into waveforms that are played as a sound. The same waveforms also control magnetic fields that bend an electron beam inside the CRT-tube. The two tone signals are used to direct the beam horizontally and vertically, drawing so called Lissajous Figures on to the screen.

Since the whole process from electricity to sound and image is analog, it constantly contains small amounts of noise and errors due to, for example, background radiation, magnetic fields, and electricity network fluctuations. Therefore, the artwork is completely time and place specific.

The installation also includes direct exposures from the screens to photographic plates. The ferrotype photography is a direct exposure process where the image is directly exposed to the metal plate without the negative intermediate stage. Therefore, there can only be one copy of every picture that can not be reproduced.

All the techniques used in the work have existed in some form and are in use since the late 19th century.

The installation was shown in LUX In in Helsinki in january 2017, and the ferrotype photos were shown  in Rytmitaju exhibition in art museum of Hyvinkää in 2017.

OverUnder by Antti Pussinen is an analog synthesizer based sound sculpture, that creates infrasonic sound waves around approximately 16Hz. Over tones of base frequency are created by folding original waveform into itself.
 
Analog sound synthesis based sound works are like sculptures. In a sound synthesis circuit, electricity is forced to form abstract waveforms in electric current. A speaker transforms these electric waveforms into waves in air pressure. Since no data is lost in digital to analog and analog to digital conversions, a viewer can feel and hear the original sculpted waveform in full detail.
 
The power of digital revolution is partly based on evaluating what is relevant information, and filtering out the rest (for example outside of hearing range in digital audio). With this development we are maybe losing some feeling or content that is seen irrelevant, but is still there.
 
 
Since most of the frequencies in the artwork are below hearing range (and below the range of my recorder), a sense of pressure is missing from the video. The low frequencies one can hear are a product of sound reflections inside the gallery room.

The work consists of analog sound synthesizing circuits and a musically balanced random generator.

The random generator composes ever changing rhytmical patterns and puts out extremely short electric pulses to the synthesizer circuits.

All the sounds are then created one by one, when the electric pulse is travelling through the transistors in the circuit. The circuits are designed to imitate hi-hats of a drum kit, thus creating a never ending rhythmical buildup for a song that never starts.

There are no samples, recorded sounds or prearranged compositions, so the sound sculpture creates a unique sound experience for every viewer.

The possibility of hearing the exactly the same composition with same sounds twice is 1 : 79902720000

The artwork has been shown in: Freies Museum Berlin 2013 and Panmediale:Cosmic Death, Transmediale Vorspiel 2014.

A digital surround sound installation, in which actual recorded sounds of satellites move in their orbits around the viewer.

Our life is literally surrounded by satellites, we can view satellite photos from the internet and find a way to a new place we havent visited yet. Our cars, mobile phones and televisions communicate with satellites. They are an abstract form of communication, since they are hard to see with a naked eye. Yet they have become more and more important to our society and daily life. They are also a tool of free information in countries, where the current government halts the access to information from their own citizens.

This artwork has been shown in Walden Kunstaustellungen, Berlin; Westwerk, Hamburg and Ping 12 documentation, Kassel, Germany. All in 2012

In June 2012 We (One Love Group, Antti Pussinen & Kaija Papu) cut off around 700 padlocks that people had hanged as a sign of love to a bridge in Tampere, Finland. We used the locks as a material to make a solid 140 Kilo cube of love that was displayed in Tampere Kunsthalle, only one week after the cutting action. also a video of the process was shown as part of the installation.

The artwork is about love. If the padlocks would somehow contain the love that the people felt when they locked their locks in the handrail of the bridge, we would have 140 kilos of solid love. What is the Half-Life of love? Can one destroy love, or is it like energy, ever changing its form?

We have both worked in public space before and with the artwork we wanted to raise questions and rethink our own methods.

The artwork got a lot of media attention in Finland and continued the discussion of ethics of art. It also Sparked discussion about legality of art and other projects in public place, and what kind of art state owned museums can show.

I like shooting. But i’ve never shot anything other than cardboard targets and plastic toys. Great White Hunter project started in summer of 2011 when i tried again my favourite childhood pastime. I remembered that as a child, i didn’t think of killing or hunting as i pressed the trigger. Around 20 years later that thought was very present.

The artwork consists of 7 images photographed through a rifles scope sight and 14 cardboard practice targets shot by the artist on different days during 2011-2012

Great White Hunter has been shown in The Finnish Labour Museum as part of Pirkanmaa Trienale in 2012

The artwork is about mathematics of composition and possibilities in contemporary generated music.

After seeing and hearing a lot o sound art that was often just noisy and drony. And after experiencing a lot of interactive artworks where usually the interactivity was a linear direct process, like press a button or walk into a room where a camera tracks you, we got interested if it could be done differently. Together with a Swiss digital media artist Dominik Eggerman we decided to design and build a beautiful, complex, and musically interesting interactive sound installation.

Piezo Kompozition 1 is a never ending 16 instrument music generator that builds a composition based on an algorithm designed by Dominik Eggerman. The piezo elements used in the sensors make them extremely sensitive for pressure changes and movements on the sensors.
The algorithm looks for continuity in the data between the 16 sensor mats (people walking from one mat to another) and rhythms and rhythm changes in the data (people dancing, nodding and shifting weight on a single mat) and then compares data with a balanced random generated rhythm and harmony maps. The output is a composition that is interactive while still keeping same rhythmical structure and harmonies for one song.
The 16 instruments used in the installation are placed around the installation using 8 speakers and a subwoofer so the viewer feels like being in the middle of the band.

In practice we found that the installation works like an instrument and one can quite quickly learn to play it and play with it.

Since it was in a way a prototype for us, we wanted to keep its “in the middle of process” esthetics when showing the artwork.

The artwork has been shown in: Freies Museum Berlin, Walden Kunstaustellungen, Berlin

The process for the artwork started when i was visiting a friend that lives in the middle of the forest in Finland. He told me that he has a powerful laser pen (one that burns eyes faster than we can blink) as self-defense against the suspicious neighbours that live 5 Km away. I told him that I could make him a laser turret robot that he could control wirelessly or over internet.

That idea of conquering fear of other people by building a laser shooting robot got stuck in my head, and 3 months later i had my first prototype ready. During the process I often thought that maybe fear of people is making dystopian future controlled by killer robots into a realistic scenario.

The artwork has been shown in: Hyvinkää Art Museum, Finland, Kouvola Art Museum, Finland 48 Stunden Neukölln
Freies Museum Berlin, Suomesta Galleria, Berlin, Westwerk, Hamburg, PING 12 dOCUMENTATION, Kassel and in Walden Kunstaustellungen ,Berlin.

Contemporary Radio is an interactive installation, where contemporary radio broadcasts (in the time of exhibiting) are used as material for interactive soundscape. The work plays with taking old media, processing its messages with contemporary computer and putting it back in to the old media and creating a moving surround sound experience. First version of Contemporary Radio was about the situation in Egypt and Cairo during 2011 revolution. With radio correspondances, radio speeches of Hosni Mubarak and interviews from demonstrations.

A big, illuminated installation surprises the viewer. At first it seems like a beautiful and a mesmerizing night time cityscape: realizing the material of the buildings takes the themes of the artwork into deeper levels. Medicine City is made of tens of thousands used and empty medicine aluminium packages (pill blister packs).

The artwork is about medicalization of our society. It is also about how cities can be seen as a medicine for loneliness and light as a medicine against fear.

Installation has been shown in:
Tampere City Art Museum,Finland, Suomesta Gallery Berlin, Germany, Kuopio City Art Museum, Finland, and in LUX Helsinki Festival, Finland

”Céci N’Est Pas Une Photo”

Because of the current corona virus shutdowns, here is a virtual tour of my latest exhibition in Luisa Catucci Gallery, together with Mathilde Nardone. For the sake of clarity i show here mostly my own works and the whole virtual exhibition is opening in Gallery Luisa Catucci website.

The dialog between the work of the Belgian artist Mathilde Nardone and the work of the Finnish artist Antti Pussinen, resemble more to an ancient dance, rich of contrasts and counterpoints spinning around a familiar melody. 

Even if the final result is easily mistaken with a classic photograph, both artist Antti Pussinen and Mathilde Nardone are not working with camera and lenses to create their art. Antti uses a personalized peculiar version of the ancient technique of Photogram to trap Lissajous curves onto photographic paper, and Mathilde composes her Nature Morte directly on the screen of a scanner. Antti transform the dynamic to static, while Mathilde catches the static and reveal its inner dynamic. One works in black and white, the other present the whole pompous color range of the floral world. The Finnish artist catches the unseeable frequencies waves and present them in their instantaneous forms of futuristic space design flavor, the Belgian artist picks carefully selected flowers to tell us about unknown stories out of her family history, facing themes concerning the whole humanity. In a way we could say that both artists are presenting the opposite of what at first seems: what looks like an abstraction is actually a tangible and unique shape of an existing matter, and what looks like a very recognizable form is actually a metaphysical metaphor. The contrasts are dramatic and yet harmonic, like a Tao including darkness and light in the dance of existence.