P.K: You explained your work like the fusion of the physical and the digital space, and how materials manifest themselves in the digital. Would you like to give us some insights on your process and how you go about doing this translation.
Yes, well there are different ways, depending on the work but they do have some common grounds. For the series of work titled “Park_etc” the visual input was based on surfaces from metal, skin, guts, and digitally generated surfaces. Assigning the surfaces an algorithm, their expansion, growth or decay was dictated by the stock notes of the company Nokia (great dumb phones) before they almost crashed and was sold to Microsoft. The first animation was screened on a 35 m2 led screen on the old head quarters of Nokia in Copenhagen. The buildings are now hosting a technical university and I found it interesting how the future inhabited the vessel of an old tech giant. The notion of life and death seemed so familiar to the sentient world. Once the information was given it was just waiting for the animation to render and then do the artistic tweaks that I feel is always needed in a conceptual work like this. This work keeps on giving by changing input and surfaces. This is a way for me to keep my work alive. I don’t enjoy seeing works as finished but rather in constant motion. Then comes the need to free them and this is where the real fatal consequential decisions are made. At the moment the animation has altered its form as night tale stills, as physical drawings and as physical sculptures. P.K: Could you describe the concept of a telepresent personality?
The acknowledgement of a digital space as a REAL space is important in this matter. Doing a video work with myself as the protagonist published on www sends my presence into the presence of the perceiver. I become split and therefor it is of great importance that the presence in the video work is very, immensely, mega strong. This stuff can stretch time and space if you let it. The connection with the receiver will change the work depending on how they perceive the person in front of them, which channels they have open. Again it’s a way to insist that the work is alive and keeps altering depending on the relation it initiates.
P.K: How do you think Webcams have evolved “identity” in the post pandemic era?
We have a lot of agency behind the screen and I think we will insist on the right to be represented digital on even grounds as physical. So you can have digital identity not as complementary to you physical one but as it’s own. I want to ask this question back ‘cause I really want to hear more opinions about this.
P.K: Your practice is geared around new media, the digital paintings in particular have a queer otherworldly feel to them, but there is something familiar inhabiting the works. Can you elaborate more on this particular tension?
However this pandemic has created a bigger need to be kinetically physical. There are still loads of digital projects but they insist on a heavier physicality and it is great to have been able to hear their call. Sports aesthetics have long been ghosting in my practice and this year send it in full flourish. All these seaweed football players started appearing in my notebook and I became obsessed with their skills. By not having any hands they already aced the sport. I don’t think the tension comes from digital vs physical, familiarity vs otherworldly but from the presence and sincere approach you have to the becoming of the works.
P.K: You are based in Denmark and working internationally. What are some of the differences you see between art scenes in the different places, like for example London and cities in continental Europe? Have the global events of the last year or so been a leveler in terms of exhibition and representational opportunities for emerging artists?
A thing I appreciate and that has become clear is how artists have a need to exhibit and since it is not so easy, they find their own ways. Like picnic exhibitions or parking lot exhibitions. The need to free works have become more radiant and instead of waiting for galleries to take you on, there’s an energy of doers do and this is a situation full of amazing surprises.
My main place of developing work is in a tiny fjord in Iceland where I am also part of running an art school called LungA School. Time and space really stretches here and it becomes clear that you are not producing work for the art scene but you are responding to something that has insisted on your attention. It’s not about finding out what this something is, it’s about your commitment and passion to respond. When spending time in the margin (as opposed to the bigger cities) I am more receptive to what the work and the material are communicating. I actually don’t know if it is fair to take the work out of that context and place it in the city. Maybe I should encourage their return.
P.K: Any exciting future projects planned that you would like to discuss?
I am currently doing an MA at Institut Kunst in Basel Switzerland which is the very opposite of Iceland but this school has really made me fall in love. I have always thought that it was whack how education is so chronological. Education should be cyclical. I was able to do this master at an age of 35 (having a baby while studying) and I’m gonna see if I can do one again in another 10 years. I am finishing this year with my amazing class mates and more than being excited about my own final project I am excited to experience theirs.
Other than that I’m doing some football shoe sculptures for a football magazine and spending a lot of time with my new little one. Thanks for the questions. Was nice to reflect.
