Four media art works by AV-arkki’s artists were selected for the special programme “Techno(s)cene“, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Athens Digital Arts Festival, held in Greece from 16–26 May 2024. The programme includes Pink Twins’ The Transient (2023, in featured image), Arttu Nieminen’s Lift Up Your Voices (2023), Teemu Raudaskoski’s Visual Meditation (2021), and Marja Viitahuhta’s Blossom (2020).

What is The Transient? It is that fleeting moment when you question what you are seeing, when uncanny valley takes over and when harmonious wildlife is revealed as a monstrous result of cloning and obsessive manipulation of nature. Or the moment when you ignore the lure of the real and give in to the overwhelming beauty of growth, the blooming of spring and the glow of midsummer night. Real, based on a true story, artificial, imaginary, a natural paradise, an apocalyptic corruption of nature. The Transient is all of these things and more.

In Arttu Nieminen’s Lift Up Your Voices, voice from the nonplace of an all-embracing algorithm addresses humanity in its last gasps. Punctuated by a song based on a stanza from Emily Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain”, the Voice invites us to break bread and pray together, and to face the deadly consequences of our human desires. Finally, the Voice implores us to lift up our own voices against the hell of misbelieving.

Teemu Raudaskoski’s Visual meditation is an abstract animation. Its organic visual world prompts us to stop and remind us of the diversity of nature around us and its uniqueness.

Marja Viitahuhta’s Blossom is a video collage about biodiversity, made entirely from free online material. Time-lapse animated blooming flowers are forming new shapes due to the mirror effect enforced on them, accompanied by a soundtrack composed out of sounds from the rainforests and a heart-beat backbone to the score. On the one hand, the work admires the beauty, diversity, sensuality and fragility of nature, as well as it on the other hand mourns the current loss in biodiversity and our often instrumental relation to nature.

Athens Digital Arts Festival, 16–26 May 2024, Greece

More information: ADAF

AV-arkki has promoted and distributed Finnish media art since 1989. AV-arkki’s promotional efforts have made the artists’ participation in this event possible. If you want to hear the latest news from our distribution, subscribe to our newsletter!