Erkki Kurenniemi

<p>With a radical imagination, the work of Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) refutes a common sense that bases technology in frigid thought.</p> <p>A mathematician, nuclear physicist, and expert in digital technologies, Kurenniemi established the electronic studio at the Department of Musicology at Helsinki University in 1961–62. He collaborated with the composer Terry Riley on the first Happening to take place in Finland, with the artists group Dimensio and protagonists of the underground music scene, such as M. A. Numminen and the band Sperm. In the late 1960s, he made non- narrative short films that he hesitated to call art; a kind of expanded cinema, they dealt with speed, perception, and the transformation of bodies. He also ran Digelius Electronics, a short-lived company that in the early 1970s manufactured industrial microprocessors and electronic musical instruments. Among the many instruments that he built for the university and Digelius—synthesizers, effect devices, video organs, and sequencers—was the DIMI-S (1972). In order to play this “group sexophone,” four performers were connected as if to a hookah, holding electrodes and creating a transcutaneous circuit by touching one another, thereby activating a synthesizer. By generating changes in the electric impulses of the players’ bodies, sounds would be activated through collective biofeedback, synaesthetically manifesting the proximity of body, emotion, and electroacoustic phenomena…</p>