The
Future Is Not What It Used To Be
by Mika Taanila
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, New
York, 2002
DVD, 52 mins., col.
Sales, $390; rental, $100
Distributor’s
website: http://www.frif.com/
Reviewed by Stefaan Van Ryssen
Hogeschool Gent
Jan Delvinlaan 115, 9000 Gent, Belgium
stefaan.vanryssen@pandora.be
Erkki Kurenniemi is a Finnish computer
scientist, artist, and visionary of the
Information Age who has been widely neglected
in the official histories of the computer
age. The son of an artist mother and a
scientist father, he became interested
in the intersections of art and science
at a very early age. During his physics
studies at university, he was requested
to build the apparatus for a newly founded
electronic music studio. Designing the
machines from scratch, he practically
single-handedly invented the famous DIMI
synthesizers in the late 1960s——probably
the first digital synthesizers in the
world. Because of his unorthodox views
on the state of contemporary physics,
he fell out with the academic world and
started his own business, building the
first commercially manufactured and marketed
microcomputers in 1973. As the company
went bust, he was employed by several
Finnish companies——Nokia, among
others——as an automation systems
designer and developer. All the while,
Kurenniemi worked as a computer artist,
making digital films and creating electronic
music on his self-designed synthesizers.
In the 70s and 80s he collaborated with
a group of young Finnish experimental
composers and performance artists, exploring
the possibilities of interactive installations
and the digital integration of image and
sound.
In an interview with Lina-Maria Larsson
(at http://www.arton.nu, in Swedish) Kurenniemi
confirms his mistrust of natural language
as a means to understand the chaotic world
around us and his belief in logic and
mathematics to create order in our mind
and to construct some kind of truth, albeit
a relative truth that is entirely the
product of our mind. Recognizing that
we are only at the start of the digital
revolution and aware of the limitations
of the biological substrate of the human
mind (the brain) he has a vision of re-creating
personalities from the recordings of daily
experiences, thoughts, sensations and
activities. The ever-increasing capacity
to digitally record practically everything
allows us to store what we see, hear,
say and, through our stories, and think.
And since those are the building blocks
of our conscious existence, it should
be possible for future historians or historiographers
to reconstruct from such a record, even
if it is incomplete, the existence of
a long dead person and the times she lived
in. Living up to his beliefs, Kurenniemi
is currently recording everything he sees,
hears, lives through, and thinks with
the perspective of letting his reconstructed
persona be 'premiered' in July 2048, the
year of his centennial.
Kurenniemi's project of self-reconstruction
may be regarded as yet another quest for
immortality and the expression of a mad
man's hubris, but it is clear from the
movie that this is not what he is interested
in. Basically, what he wants is not to
artificially prolong 'I, Erkki Kurenniemi'
but to prove a point about the future
of mankind. Biology and technology are
gradually merging. Men and machines are
already completely interdependent, and
it is only a matter of time before technology
will take over as the substrate for our
personality. According to Kurenniemi,
the time has come to take this thought
to its full consequence, and it is only
a matter of convenience that it will be
through the reconstruction of the life
of a Finnish whiz-kid avant la lettre.
