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12/6/2003

The Dawn of DIMI

Auditorium Santa Margherita, Venezia

Mika Taanila, Pan sonic (Mika Vainio Ilpo Vaisanen), Erkki Kurenniemi, Carl Michael von Hauswolff, evento costituito da proiezioni cinematografiche e concerto

Organizzazione: FRAME (Finnish Fund for Art Exchange), Helsinki, con Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki

The Dawn of DIMI
Erkki Kurenniemi is considered a prophet of artificial-intelligence research, headband videos and artificial reality - often being 10-40 years ahead of his time. He has appeared on topical TV shows and written futuristic articles speculating on the future of mankind and the relationship between man and machines. Mika Taanila's latest documentary Future is Not What It Used To Be features never-before-seen archival material from the early years of electronic art, including excerpts from Kurenniemi's unfinished experimental short films. The film is built around Kurenniemi's maniacal collection project. He constantly feverishly records his thoughts and everyday observations, and the objects and images around him, with the ultimate aim of merging man and machine - reconstructing the human soul. The film puts forward Kurenniemi's idea that, about 40 years from now, quantum computers will make it possible to revive an individual's consciousness using a huge archive of photographic evidence and video footage.

Most of the material heard and seen in the documentary consists of archive segments accompanied by Kurenniemi's own voice. The film footage comes primarily from Kurenniemi's own 16mm short films and extensive TV archives. The film also features Kurenniemi's 8mm home movies, flashes of his incredible Video Diary project and its predecessor, the Cassette Diary, from the early 70s. The contemporary scenes show Kurenniemi at work in his home in Helsinki's Katajanokka. His apartment at Luotsikatu provides continuity of location, as much of the archive material features this same 'researcher's cave'. According to Kurenniemi's own 'principle of individuality', all his work and research - articles, plans, visions of the future, films, home videos, lectures, TV interviews, work at the Heureka Science Centre, compositions and the fantastic electric instruments he has built - reflect the same holistic ideas.

Erkki Kurenniemi has explored various ways of transposing emotional states into direct sound events. The first 'automated instrument' he built was the Andromatic, a synthesizer commissioned in 1968 by the Swedish composers Leo Nilsson and Ralph Lundsten for their newly established Andromeda studio. That same year, an old friend, M. A. Numminen, invited Kurenniemi to design a new kind of electronic 'collective instrument'. The result was called Sähkokvartetti (Electric Quartet), a mind-boggling combination of four instruments in one: a drum machine, violin machine, voice machine and melody machine. After that, Kurenniemi developed a range of digital instruments. The first was called DIMI-A (Digital Music Instrument, Associative Memory), which retrieved stored data based on the contents of memory cells rather than their addresses, thus making the use of the limited memory space more efficient. The DIMI-O (Digital Music Instrument, Optical Input, 1971) transformed video images into real-time music. This worked well, for example, in accompanying dance performances. The musician could also pan the entire audience with the camera, thus involving them in the creation of the events heard in the concert. DIMI-S (a.k.a. The Sexophone) was conceived by Lundsten and technically constructed by Kurenniemi in 1972. With DIMI-S the players held contacts with which the instrument sensed when they touched each other and generated sound sequences dependent on the intimacy of the person-person contact. The contacts controlled the synthesizer. Kurenniemi also designed an instrument called the Electroencephalophone (DIMI-E), in which the electronic sound was monitored by electrodes behind the player's ears, recording changes in the user's brain activity.

In the image a detail of DIMI

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Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) is currently working with music theory and lecturing on the mathematics of music at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.

Mika Taanila (b. 1965) is an artist working flexibly in the fields of documentary filmmaking, music videos and visual arts. In his works Taanila specializes in the futuristic ideas and Utopias of contemporary science. His earlier documentary films, Thank You For The Music (1997), Futuro (1998) and RoboCup99 (2000), occupied the twilight zone between science and art.

Pan sonic was formed by Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen in 1994 in Turku, on the west coast of Finland. Still a three piece group with Sami Salo in the mid 90s, they have since not only lost a member, but also a letter from their name (until 1997 they were called Panasonic). Pan sonic's stripped-down, ultra-minimalist beats and aural artistic concepts are created with the help of custom analogue tone generators created by Jari Lehtinen.

Carl Michael von Hausswolff (b. 1956) is one of Sweden's foremost contemporary experimentalists in both electronic music and visual art. His range of activities includes everything from composing, installations and performances to curating exhibitions and running his own record label, Anckarstrom.

Auditorium Santa Margherita
Dorsoduro Campo S. Margherita 3689
Venezia

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