Fusco, Fält & Väisänen (FI): Shared Futures

Shared Futures is a long term, multiform collaboration that invites people to imagine futures. At the ANTI Festival the artists Emma Fält, Roberto Fusco, Anna-Maria Väisänen and a group of 60+ people are presenting the following parts of the project.

Imagining Future Bodies

Fält and Väisänen have held weekly workshops in Kuopio for 60+ people. The group explores the urban space and the living environments of the participants, as well as the related needs and dreams for the future. Deep and radical listening, wild co-imagination and a multisensory approach have been central to the work. In the live- situation at the Art Museum of Kuopio the group works with materials they have chosen to be an important part of imagining the future, its possible bodies and environments.

Performers invite the audience to explore the space of imagining the future 100 years from now.

Tuning into the future

Tuning into the future is a sound walk where the audience can discover hidden pirate radios scattered in the city of Kuopio. We have been interviewing the participants of the workshops to address questions about the future of economy, ecology, automation as well as personal desires and speculations attached to specific places in the city. Fusco has used the entire text-based dataset to train a neural network (GPT-Neo) to generate alternative answers. The machine-made text has been edited together with the original answers to create site-specific “scripts”, a possible conversation between human and machine that did not happen yet.

Located on key-places of the city and marked on a provided map, those radios will broadcast a human and artificial soundscape. People will be able to listen to the workshop participants in dialogue with a voice interpreting the AI-generated text. The trained network will help us tune in to both what is already in the given answers but not yet formulated, but also to imaginative unspoken horizons.

Emma Vilina Fält is a multidisciplinary artist working with drawing, installation, performing arts and participatory practices. Her main interests are in live acts, contact and togetherness of drawing. Fält is inspired by the body, its boundaries and possibilities to connect with the world. In her work, unfinished and raw meet detailed and well-planned. Fält seeks to expand and stretch the understanding of drawing and the ways to present it.

Previously her work has been presented at Mänttä Art Festival, Lonely in the Rain-festival, ANTI-Contemporary art festival, ITAK – Stage, M_ITÄ Biennale, MUU Gallery and Third space – gallery. She has done workshops at Thinking through drawing and Draw to Perform – symposiums (UK) and in Äänen Lumo events. Emma teaches at Art School MAA, Helsinki. She works as a coordinator of Thinking through Drawing, an international group of drawing research.

Anna-Maria Väisänen is a freelance dance artist based in Kuopio. She works with different people and questions to whom the art belongs to. Väisänen works in different communities as a teacher, facilitator, dancer and choreographer. For the past years her practice has focused on examining the performer’s technique, the themes of exposure and cover-up and dialogue. In her work Väisänen strives to make power structures visible and to question traditional dancer norms. Väisänen has chosen to work in the Northern Savonia region  and wants to challenge the capital-centric nature of the art field with her work. She is an active freelance dance artist who works in many different art contexts and examines different phenomena of society in her work.

Roberto Fusco, (M.Phil. Music and Media Technology, D. Sc. (Technology), ITA/FI, b. 1980, is an Italian media artist based in Helsinki. At the intersection of physical and computational processes, Roberto focuses his artistic research on the use of digital techniques capable of recording, reconstructing, and simulating reality, exposing the role of technology itself in mediating our perception and experience.

His work, in the form of installations or audiovisual performances with real-time and interactive elements, combines material and digital elements towards the creation of hybrid forms in which the processes of negotiation with technology become manifest and the materiality of the world, with its complexity and unpredictability, transcends what is computable.