Anni Saijonkivi

Anni Saijonkivi: Undercurrent behind my recent works is something about re-imagining the spirituality such ways that it would fulfill the needs of (atheistic/godless) modern self-made cyborgised humans.These days I have been observing religious/spiritual behavior as constructs which fulfills sociological needs of communities. I think we focus too much towards individual experience -at least here in Finland- instead facing the reality about our existence as communal beings. I have been working with a human-nature relationship and find this new angle interesting as world opens and we reach toward each other again.

Website: http://www.annisaijonkivi.fi/

Proposal:

Digital entities for natural world/ Natural entities for digital world I’ve been recently creating some kind of synthetic godlike beings to summon forth our remaining relationship towards nature. We have grown apart and became cyborgs with our external memory banks and endless representations of realities that we enjoy from safety of home trough our screens. Yet there is a thirst for connection, togetherness and belonging. For these needs I’m becoming a techno shaman and calling upon our old forms of togetherness. I become a conduit and bring sublime beings to reality. My proposal in short would be Yggdrasil. Yggdrasil will be a digital sculpture, to be viewed via an app or other virtual reality interface. Yggrasil is a reincarnation, a version, a meme or an illusion- depending of a spectators worldview. In most of the cultures we have a mythology about a world three. I feel that this correspondence states that we have a deep basic need for shared stories which connect us to (other) natural beings. It will be located somewhere in the real world. You will need to travel to it. Due it’s immaterial nature the artwork could easily be exhibited in a museum exhibition and in a carefully picked location in our finnish archipelago in the same time. I feel the need to carry our oldest mythologies onward to our newest digital platforms. _ Digitization is not a change that is coming, but something we have been living with for a long time. Things that used to be physical are now digital. At the same time, there is a growing awareness of the different ways in which the brain processes the data it receives from a real paperback book or smartphone screen. There are differences. Human beings have developed to live in physical reality. We are adapted to look at the horizon, walk over uneven terrain and use our hands. We could recognize materials with just the sense of our fingertips, yet we mostly touch the smooth surface of a smartphone. I have studied the history of sculpture, specifically from the perspective of the changing relationship between material and immaterial. The history of three-dimensional visual art is different from that of two-dimensional visual art precisely because a three-dimensional work of visual art is not only drawn on a two-dimensional picture surface, but is part of REALITY because it is directly expressed by an existing mass. This is why sculpture can create forms, spaces and PLACES that two-dimensional art, by its very nature, cannot. _ I have been interested in the intersection of game art and fine art to create experiential and temporal works. In recent years I have participated in lectures, seminars and, among other things, in Taike's SPHERE project, where I have worked on the possibilities of digital art. I am particularly interested in the interface between game art and visual art. Most of the work I have been doing in recent years has been modelling. I never use ready-made models, "assets", but do everything from scratch by hand. On the one hand the process is a painstakingly slow, on the other hand I get everything exactly the way I want it. There may be found echoes of the tradition of ready-made and found object in how I choose not to use ready made parts or found data in my pieces. In a heart I still am a builder, with my hands in clay. As an artist I identify myself as a sculptor. My main method over the years has been to combine video projection with installation. Now I want to develop my 3-dimensional video work so that I can soon realease my ideas from the captivity of two-dimensional surfaces back into space. Technological advancement will soon allow the overlapping of 2 and 3 dimensional worlds and the creation of an artificial environment in a new way. Our sense of reality will need to change, adapt.