Tuomas A. Laitinen

home

Single-channel videos



Protean Sap, 2020, (Trailer), video duration: 10:03

Protean Sap, 2020,  project website


Protean Sap is a single channel video and a collection of augmented reality filters. The work creates a strange, dream-like reality where geometric formations encrust objects and bodies, paired with a mysterious ‘Seer’’s text. The forms are drawn from protein chains of viruses, bacteria, and microbial life. These shapes are then changed through simulations into masks and ceremonial artefacts which are morphed in a hallucinatory way. 


In the video, the metaphor for protean change is a tide pool; an intertidal zone influenced by the moon and the sun. This is an ecosystem that requires many adaptations from its inhabitants. Furthermore, it could be said that the intertidal zones can be seen as a gauge for the change that is happening in the oceans. These places are looked at as models for studying ecological change in general because the effects are seen at a more rapid pace. The protein chains link us to our past and our future, and in the work they are mediated through a "looking device" and a seer, who utters recipes and predictions. The seer personifies our constant yearning to predict the future: to give weather forecasts, predict fluctuations in the stock markets, or predict the warming of the planet and its consequences.

Sapiduz, 2020, stills

HD video

Duration: 11:03

Alchemy manuscripts, machine learning system, animations

Blend 01 (Chromatophores), 2020 (Trailer)

HD video

Duration: 6:02


A machine learning system is attempting to produce an image of a being that blends to the environment. The video is part of a series of experiments made with a collection of images of Cephalopod camouflage. The mutating textures are mimicking how these animals can morph their bodies in myriad ways.

Haemocyanin, 2019 (Trailer)


Since 2016, one strand of Tuomas A. Laitinen’s artistic practice has touched upon the research into cognition and consciousness in other-than-human minds, focussing on octopuses in particular. 


This endeavour is emerging through different forms: glass objects made for octopuses, multiple video and audio works, and a series of glyphs—made both as a font and with glass—derived from research on octopus arm movements. In the videos, an octopus is exploring the glass objects, structures made to speculate on the possibilities of interspecies communication. 


In the video, glass is also present in the form of computer-generated objects that simulate the qualities of the material, and further distorting the image plane and consequently moving it to a more hallucinatory state. At the core, it is a work about radical difference and adaptation to environmental changes.

Dossier of Tentacular (project management), 2018

Single channel video

5.1 sound, duration 04:54


A soothing soundtrack of the ocean waves accompanies a doodle narrative that touches upon environmental cataclysms and the rituals of knowledge production. Eventually, the molecular takes over as a determining scale, and the blank paper mutates into a delusion.

The Powder of Sympathy, 2015

HD video, stereo sound

Duration: 8’36”

In the collection of Kiasma – Museum of Contemporary Art

The video tracks the mythical and chemical characteristics of copper. Beginning with its healing properties, and then progressing to its conductive role in the development and continuity of electricity-dependent modern societies, the work’s occasionally disrupted images dissolve into entropy. The Powder of Sympathy refers to a 16th century recipe that used copper sulfate as a main ingredient. It was believed that with this recipe, one could heal wounds through the air.