Tuomas A. Laitinen is an artist who works with moving image, sound, light, glass, chemical and microbial processes, as well as algorithms to explore the entanglements of multispecies coexistence. Laitinen composes situations and installations that inquire into the porous interconnectedness of language, body, and matter within morphing ecosystems. In recent years, Laitinen has been working with questions of ecology, the notion of the extended mind, and processes of knowledge production. The works are often made with translucent and transparent materials in order to find ways to layer and diffract material relations and different epistemological systems.
Since 2016 one strand of Tuomas A. Laitinen’s artistic research and 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 material agencies: glass objects made for octopuses, multiple video and audio works, and a series of glyphs—made both as a font and as glass objects—derived from research on octopus arm movements.
Out from this research trajectory, a new video Hemocianin will be presented, which is juxtaposing the scenes of the hot liquid glass to the body movements of the octopus. In it, the artist explores the cognition and consciousness of the octopus and its interaction with glass sculptures as a peculiar architectural intervention in its habitat and its (im)possibilities of integration into it.
Laitinen´s works have been recently shown in the 21st Biennale of Sydney, 7th Bucharest Biennale, Screen City Biennale 2019 (Stavanger), SADE LA (Los Angeles), Amado Art Space (Seoul), Moving Image New York, A Tale of a Tub (Rotterdam), Art Sonje Center (Seoul), Helsinki Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, MOCA Shanghai & Cinemateca do MAM Rio de Janeiro.
Haemocyanin, 2019
Still image of a video
8 min, UHD, Stereo sound
Courtesy of the artist and Helsinki Contemporary
