"F2F is a traveling show of New Media Art from Finland " shown in Washington at the Finnish Embassy. All of the projects use media and technology in interesting ways. Andy Best and Merja Puustinen created a multiuser domain (a "community" online, wherein participants interact via their "avatars" - as in many on-line game environments) in the gallery, a visitor can interact with the community by entering an igloo using the computer inside. The domain itself is entirely on-line, though what´s happening there can be seen in the gallery via a wall projection.

Marita Liulia´s SOB is interactive in the same sense as a guided tour: the viewer makes choices on a computer terminal that determine the sequence of a "documentary" projected onto the wall - a guided tour of the male psyche. (Another of Liulia´s multi-media works, Ambitious Bitch (1996-98) explores the female psyche.) SOB is sophisticated and funny, though in the gallery it proved a bit difficult to navigate without some assistance from the artist or curator. Teijo Pellinen´s aquarium also relies on the viewer to make choices, but in this case the choices (made via a phone set up between an arm chair and a television) determine the narrative of a soap opera with live actors viewable on the TV.

Two of the projects insert the viewer into a changing projection. Juha Huuskonen´s Mirror ++ uses a surveillance camera that captures gallery visitors and places their image into a projected collage. In Hanna Haaslahti´s The Battle over Indifferent Minds the viewer, standing on a platform in front of a glass screen, triggers a scanner mounted behind the glass. The scanned viewer then becomes part of a projected battle scene that resembles a shadow-puppet play.

Need, by Tuomo Tammenpää, combines the Internet with mail art. The viewer, at home or in the gallery, signs in to a Web site that offers a variety of products that are actually different ways of packaging "need." The site solicits information from the "customer" in order to determine one´s "needs." When a customer interacts with the system often enough, the site mails out a series of cards, resembling trading cards, that describes products (like the "Bio-sculpting Green-clone Double Need Bundle") or solicit further packaging of "need" is quite funny.

Two of the projects used more three-dimensional means to explore the possibilities of digital technology. Kristian Simolin links the gallery viewer´s real space of an archery game. If you manage to hit the target with a Nerf arrow, one of a series of funny and political computer-animations dealing with potential futures for the human (or perhaps the animated) race is triggered. At the opening in Washington, an archer whose accuracy was somewhat lacking managed to activate the system by walking up to the target and bopping it with one of the arrows. In a crowd, as at the opening, this piece was both fun and provocative.

Heidi Tikka´s Mother, Child is perhaps the most interactive, though the less obviously "digital," of the projects. A viewer sits in a chair in the middle of a sectioned-off area in the gallery and lays a white cloth across his or her arms or lap. A baby (actually the artist´s daughter) is projected onto the cloth. Depending on the motions of the seated participant, as well as the amount of activity around him or her, the baby will become agitated or restless or sleepy - or even begin to nurse. Some viewers were able, even amid the noisy opening crowd, to quiet the baby by holding the cloth in their arms and rocking it. The seamlessness and variety of responses and the overlay of both art history and everyday emotional experience make this piece one of the most effective video installations I´ve seen.

"F2F" was intriguing and effective when there was a crowd of people interacting with the works, taking on almost a carnival atmosphere very distinct from the typical gallery opening. It is one of the ironies typical of high-tech art forms that the show was best seen among a crowd of people, rather than in a solitary, interactive encounter. Nevertheless, the show demonstrated a fruitful attention by Finnish artists to the possibilities of digital media, as well as the entertaining and thoughtful possibilities for interactive art in a gallery setting.

By Glenn Harper
July / August, 2000