Erkki Kurenniemi: The Future is Not What It Used to Be

Is the merging of man and machine really possible? Or has it already happened? This is a film about 1960s avant-garde music and film, the early history of microcomputers and the open questions of 21^st century science. It is also a portrait of the nuclear physicist/artist Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941), one of the unsung pioneers of early electronic art. Kurenniemi has been exploring the potential of virtual reality and interactive computer art in diverse projects since the early 1960s. The film is structured around Kurenniemi’s “manic collection project”, in which he constantly and feverishly recorded his thoughts, everyday observations, objects and images, with the ultimate aim of merging man and machine – thereby reconstructing the human soul.

Spindrift was a project initiated by Swedish composer/musician Jan Bark. In 1965 he proposed SVT to produce an experiment for a new kind of “music for black and white TV”, exploring audiovisual synesthesia. Bark’s friend Erkki Kurenniemi programmed the animations with Pace TR-48 analogue computer at Helsinki University’s Department of Nuclear Physics where he was hired as an assistant while being a student at the same time. These animated sequences were then shot directly off the computer screen, some of them treated with optical printer later on. The screening print and the negative of Spindrift were lost, most likely destroyed accidentally in the early 1970s.
The reconstructed film is a not the definite form of what Bark and Kurenniemi achieved. The editing is based on the surviving 16mm positive ”work copy” film reel, which has been cleaned and re-scanned. The soundtrack is compiled from the two 1/4” unedited tapes containing music composed for the film, edited now on the basis of Bark’s hand-written “mixing process chart”. This reconstruction of sound and image was done with the help of Bark’s work diaries, laboratory notes and reminiscences of people who were involved in the making or saw the film screened in 1967.