Interviews med Jussi Angesleva

For me, art and design is a continuum, where the same "crafts" skills are applied to different context. One more personal, the other more to the audience needs. I grew up making things, and this carried to my career. I like to balance between fields, technological innovation, creative expression, commercial, cultural, but always together with curious people. I've been lucky find ways to express myself in commercial, academic and arts contexts.

I wear many hats. My studio ART+COM has been innovating in the field of spatial communication over 3 decades, finding poetic, critical and elegant ways to employ emerging technologies in storytelling. At the Berlin University of the Arts, I've taught digital media design, Product and process design and New Media. Right now, I am looking at a completely new cultural context, in the deep end of tech boom in California.

I very much like what Philip Tabor once articulated on stage: Designer's role is to read newspaper every day. To be curious and informed. And then in practice, find ways to find relevance, create elegant solutions that resonate with their meaning, technological beauty, societal impact and usefulness. The thing is, designer's work is obvious in retrospect. Once the idea is out there, if it is good, it is natural. And it is easy to think that it's the right solution that someone found. I strongly believe that we define reality with design.

I love working with team of experts from different fields and in settings where I can balance between speculation and concrete impact. Lot of my work exists in museums and exhibitions. Those are spaces where one can suspend disbilief, and create fragments of near future, moments that flow in a way that we are not used to. And they can point the way how the rest of the world might one day be able to work. So, this kind of inspiration, innovation and meaningful storytelling is where I am most at home.

That changes almost daily, as design is something that is part of our lives. And since we change, the most meaningful also shifts. But if you insist, one example of a favourite right now, because I've recently moved to california, is the Eichler architecture. From it's humble origins of "affordable housing for the middle class" to the currently unaffordable design icon, and the whole bay area politics, shift from Victorian to modernist world view and the simply elegant details.

It was an interactive installation translating a media-art work to a spatial, experiental, and sculptural exhibition in Museu de Serralves in Porto.

The whole thing of my kind of making is that it is in between. So, in that sense, I would say it is the "workshop" where digital fabrication, writing code, lathing, milling and manual making are all in harmony.

When in a right kind of group, without a sense of short term time pressure, but long term purposeful goal.

Rethinking the process, and speculating on the perception by the audience later.

The same kinds as I feel when I'm not designing.

Often my works take several years from concept to completion, and during those years, there's countless iteration of ideas. So, when you see the final thing, and you have the process in mind, it is definitely a deep contemplation of the journey.

There's really so many parameters, from innovation, business success, user satisfaction, exposure, warning example etc. But I would rather say that it is most important to be explicit about the success metric early on, and stay sensitive to that. Everyone in a team have different aspirations, and listening to those, but also being vocal of the bigger picture both help the collective effort being succesful.

Effort/resource to the effect. Or simply bang for the buck. (where buck is not only money)

As I alluded above, the role of a designer is to be in touch with the world and the bigger societal challenges. Ideally, what a designer can do, especially in the more researchy, academic setting, is to provide a vision, a sort of goal towards one can inspire others, even when not everything is yet solved.

On one hand the term design has been expanded to much more broad business sense. That is now an integral part of it. But what comes next, I am curious to see how the new machine-learning assisted approaches will impact design field: on one hand, you have superpowers to create faster, more efficiently etc. but at the same time, being in control of what you generate, when an AI has been trained by countless previous works, it is extremly important to find the right balance: what kind of things are best automated, and when it is better to slow down.

In January, in Hokkaido. It was most wonderful. For the next round, I am indiscriminate ;). it's not where,but what.

My inspiration is fundamentally from the everyday and from trying to understand emerging technologies, and their impact on the everyday.

I'm certainly very hands-on, prototyping kind of designer, who excels in teams. I know I have a kind of superpower in instilling sense of purpose, and affording license to others, when the creative process is in fragile state.

Yes, I have recently moved from Berlin to the Bay Area. To say that the environment affects my design, would be an understatement. It is so fundamental in the way we see the world. I realise that I'm busy with completely different questions than before.

Well, I always work, ideally in a good company ;). Well, joke aside, most commonly, my role is to create something bespoke and new, and therefore it is paramount to have a good connection with the client, so that the basic purpose, and success metrics are clear.

Well, there's something to be said about meeting people, and getting to know the personality. Often, when you look at the portfolio, and try to divine what would that give you, you're leaving a lot of potential unexplored, because it is exactly the things that have not yet been done, that can be the ground breaking new. And those things come from good collaboration, and hence, when working with good chemistry.

Every project is drastically different, so the process is very flexible. But let's say it like this. From conversations, inspiration, looking for references, reading, understanding the client world, and then iteratively sketch, visually, as text, as 3D , physical and so forth, the ideas are brought to the table, discussed and debated, revised and iterated. And through that, the core gets more and more focussed. once it's clear, then the detailing and the nitty gritty "hard work" can commence. And the project turns to marathon, from the initial sprint.

My Genelec speakers, Eames Chair, the (Eichler) home itself, Block-lamps by Harri Koskinen (like the Genelecs) and Martin & co backpacker.

Family, computer work, studio/workshop/visit to studios, more computer, inspiration.. repeat

Document and archive. You'll thank me 20 years later ;)

Well, it's hard to switch off from work, as everything around can be part of the professional life.

Ask others. Don't decide what is good. I mean, do good, but evaluate from a third person's perspective.

meta skills. skills about learning , and knowing what is worth learning, but also when to work with others. Find your focus, and have enough interest in related fields so that you can communicate efficiently.

There's so many that I cannot really list them here.

Poorly. When you're in a project, it can be all-consuming. The good thing is, when you have kids. There's higher forces that pull you out, and connect with the rest of the world.

between 6 months and 8 years.;

inspiration.

When given artistic freedom, but tight budget/time constraint, and 100 percent trust that you do the right thing.

BMW, London Science Museum, Artis, Lafayette, Audi, OttoBock

Transdisciplinary. So, kinds of works that rarely can stem from a single brain.

That's the big question. I don't know right now. The last two decades I've been wearing many hats (Professor, Creative Director, Independent artist) Now, in "new world", I look forward to focus, but also to leverage this breadth. Where will it be, remains to be seen.

Both. Sometimes self initiated, sometimes consulting, sometimes through a studio, but almost always as a part of a larger team. (I've ran teams up to 20 people, but the ideal size for me is 5 - 10 designers/engineers etc.

Right now, the most exciting stuff is under NDA, so alas, I cannot talk about it. :)

drop me an email. jussi.angesleva@iki.fi or swing by for a cup of Coffee ;)

As it is with creative process, many threads tend to get bundled to (ideally) elegant solutions. In this case, I had been working with computational caustics before, as well as ran some research grants in looking at snow and ice in the context of new media. When I was invited to create new work at the Sapporo International Art Festival, these threads convereged, and given the festival's theme "Last Snow", the different strands convereged, and a sense of purpose came together.

Well, quite simply, this is what I do. I might say that I am Claude Levi-Strauss's "bricoleur", a kind of hacker that combines technological and cultural means to convey meaning. My whole professional life, I have explored the liminal space between virtual and real. transferring the qualities of the digital to the physical and vice versa. From interaction design point of view, I like to explore theoretical questions in practical context, creating museum experiences, art in public space, or other forms where the story and the medium blend together.

In this interview, I am writing the answers in first person, but it should be implicitly clear, that these kinds of works are ALWAYS collaborations. So, in this case, my long time collaborators Mark Pauly from EPFL, and Rayform were instrumental in calculating the geometry needed for the image to emerge from refracted light. They have developed the techology over many years, and I've always marveled its beauty and elegance. At the same time, the project brought me together with AATB, an artist duo from Zürich, who create art with robots for living. So, all these technical challenges had very human solutions.

That's a tough one. Since there's so many strands that need to come together for a one-off experience, you cannot reshoot and changing things indefinitely. Therefore, it was really preparing the building blocks, (some custom code running on a raspberry pi as well as few off the shelf time-lapse cameras) individually, and then hoping they will capture the one off event, that can then be preserved in documentation. I must say, if I had a chance to do this again, I'd be better prepared for even better documentation.

It is infinitely satisfying to work with great team: there is this kind of empathy of each others' responsibilities, but also caring for what everyone can do to help across space and time(zones). I am used to think through complex installations, where through conversation and discussion you can hopefully avoid major pitfalls, but also make the time when everything come together as enjoyable as possible. In my experience, the kind of unforgiving perfectionism at the installation site is detrimental to the quality of the work, as the professional understanding of the different qualities across the different aspects of the work exists in different brains. You have to trust that.

Simply by bringing those two together and seeing what happens :) In other words, the aesthetics of the work is exactly in this interplay of theoretical model manifesting in "living" material, where the latter brings dynamic and changing nuance. It makes the work alive. I got a chance to work with AATB, EPFL and Rayform through a grant from ECAL called "Third hand – Creative Applications for Robotics" to prototype what we wanted to build. During this time, we could experience the aesthetic qualities of this combination, and then extrapolate the final installation with this knowledge in mind.

It was hugely influential, but in retrospect, also accidental. When I started working on this, I was imagining the work in more kind of white cube setting. But since the gallery, Isamu Noguchi's iconic glass pyramid was dealing with the same environmental questions, the festival director's genius connected the function of the snow storage as an unconventional exhibition space that turned out perfect for the work in its ambience and functionality.

I have done lot of experiments with different visual motifs with caustics over the years, and with this project, also did a broad series of indexical, symbolic and abstract visuals. But in the end, the natural caustics need very stark contrast in the encoded message, so typography works the best, as we as humans are wired to read meaning from these abstract symbols. The ominous IPCC 2 degrees temperature rise warning is a global cultural artifact, I felt that this would be the clearest way to let the audience then decipher the physical manifestation of the installation. By looking at the work, we know what will happen, and can see it in our mind's eye. Then extrapolating it to the global scale, there's no need for further words.

To be honest, I have no idea. Since the artwork is quite difficult to exhibit, and requires substantial cultural support framework, I am afraid it will not have that much impact in the grander scheme of things. I am afraid that it is destined to be "preaching to the converted". Of course, that is the power of art: you can give form to something abstract and omipresent in a way that it can be meaningful in many ways to many different people. Simply being present, and existing is already a lot. ... until all melts away ;)

I am undecided about this, but my experience is that you need to have strong internal conviction about the purpose of your work. Without this internal mindset, you only end up "wrangling" with the system. With environmental awareness, it is difficult to be optimistic these days, but that is something that I wish would be the fundamental tone that artists thrive for. We live in a complex world where I believe we should embrace the complexity, and not try to polarise everything to be right or wrong or good or bad. I hope with my work I got to create something ambivalent that makes the audience think in different levels. This is what art in this context should strive for.