Flora & Fauna

One of several experimental films shot in the late '60s and early '70s by the recently deceased computer music pioneer Erkki Kurenniemi, Florence is a dazzling, abstract travelogue shot between Italy, Switzerland, and the artist's home in Finland.

The futuristic aesthetics of Computers Serve offers an illustrative account of the history of computers, their prospects and the risks within, as seen in 1968. The voice-over accentuates the highly topical promulgation set against the dangers of monotonous office work and computer totalitarianism.

In 1965, Swedish composer/musician Jan Bark proposed an experiment for a new kind of 'music for black-and-white TV'. Bark's friend Erkki Kurenniemi programmed the animations. The original version was lost: this reconstruction was made with the help of Bark's diaries, laboratory notes and reminiscences from people involved.

The film stars two computers: Elliott 803 (in the Department of Nuclear Physics, the University of Helsinki) and IBM 1130 (in the computer centre at the University of Turku). At times, the coexistence of man and machine provokes suffocating frustration. This is only the starting point for something more subtle: the art created with computers.

Shot at the Department of Nuclear Physics at the University of Helsinki, the images of The Punched Tape of Life illustrate the beauty of 1960s information technology. These decorative scenes parallel a set of ”summer interludes” which document Kurenniemi’s entourage.

Erkki Kurenniemi was arguably one of the first artists to propose or fantasise about a complete cultural surrender to cyber existence, and his entire career, covering such diverse fields as artificial intelligence, music, engineering, film, dance or rhetorics, testifies to this desire to escape the limits of the human body and transgress into a different dimension, bordering on techno-fetishism. In his 1964 short Electronics in the World of Tomorrow, Kurenniemi presents a slideshow of the most aseptic signs of technological imagination: diagrams, chips, machines, cold surfaces. But footage of human warmth also comes up - mostly in black and white, as if to give humans the status of a memory. Originally silent, the film was in this version endowed with a electronic music piece by Kurenneimi himself: a cold, aggressive soundtrack that could be said to present technology as a potentially menacing affair, although this is a reading that the director would certainly refute.

A spontaneous street movie, a record of ‘swinging London’ where Erkki Kurenniemi had travelled to assess the commercial potential of his instrument DIMI-A.