Jenna Sutela,
Writer, Curator, etc.

ADD METAPHYSICS is a publishing project at the Aalto University Digital Design Laboratory. Borrowing from a schoolbook format, it presents an experimental curriculum for designers and artists in the midst of a changing electro-cultural field of material.

In discussion with mechanical engineers and material scientists, the project builds a case for critical, inquisitive practice that converges around not only the material and the digital but also the metaphysical: molding the perception of the material world as much as materials themselves.

Out in spring 2013, the first publication in the series focuses on devising literacies for a digital materiality. It includes essays and assignments by select practitioners and researchers, such as Jane Bennett, Vera Bühlmann, and Graham Harman.

Design: Johanna Lundberg

Organised by Äänen Lumo and curated by Kimmo Modig and me, Sounds Like Work explored the relationship of art to work through language, sound, and video. The project took place at Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki in two parts in October and November 2012.

Proposing that bureaucracy has exhausted risks and criticality in the Finnish arts, Sounds Like Work was an attempt at turning the rustling of paperwork and the beat of ticking schedules into a subversive melody. In the manner of musicians, or dilettantes, we played work instead of working on it: if you asked for a CV a protest song was what you would get. Our undertakings from administration to management to curating were made accessible and transparent in an open office. What resulted was an event presenting new degrees of freedom in various performative arrangements from Ingo Niermann's Madgermany to Bill Drummond's The17.

Office table: Pro Toto. Photo: Hertta Kiiski.

A three-year project by Anni Puolakka and I, from 2009 to 2012, the abstruse art/design practice OK Do explored life and work in between disciplines, cities and hierarchies—with corresponding ideas and enquiries manifesting in publications, installations and events. These have dealt with, for example, the societal parameters of contemporary design, the aesthetics of science, and literary placemaking.

Based in Helsinki and Paris, and operating in collaboration with different organisations and individuals, our activities have often resembled those of a peripatetic cultural institute. In 2012, we were granted the Finnish Young Designer of the Year award for critical design publishing, with self-published titles including Science Poems (2010), OK Talk Helsinki/London (2011), and Museum of the Near Future (2012).

Illustration: Rami Niemi for a design disease mapping by OK Do.

Following a science fiction mindset, OK Do's Science Poems project explored the poetry and multi-sensorial aesthetics of natural science. Having resulted in a publication, it built around a group exhibition at 0fr galerie, Paris in June 2010. Ranging from fashion exploring electromagnetic space to a musical composition derived from DNA base pairs, each commissioned artwork attempted to see and understand, or imagine and question everyday scientific phenomena.

More than a catalogue, the self-published title includes discussions with influential science poets as well as unique writings and images, such as my physics-inspired event scores. It has been presented in performances at do you read me?!, Berlin and X Marks the Bökship, London, among others, with contributors including Megatron Braineater, Claire L. Evans, K.I. Kinnunen, Miska Knapek and Nene Tsuboi.

Design: Åh. Photo: Paavo Lehtonen.

Solution 239-246, Finland: The Welfare Game (Sternberg Press 2011) by architect Martti Kalliala, co-written with architect Tuomas Toivonen and me, addresses the Nordic country’s numerous predicaments. We propose eight and a half solutions to our native country’s quandaries, ranging from the practical (rescuing ailing public space through climatization and the introduction of the Winter Garden City), to the absurd (dividing the country into two interlocking sub-nations: City and Wilderness) and the earnest, if far-reaching (the repurposing of the country to host the world’s nuclear waste).

The book elucidates the northern country’s modern history as a nation under construction, proposing that its identity remain a malleable myth, in which designing a more tenable future is the conduit for crucial adaptation.

Design: Z.A.K. Related: 'Solution 246: Mythcraft' exhibition at the 032c Workshop in Berlin, 2012.

My article Non-linear reading for frieze magazine's May 2012 issue discusses Internet modes of reading through the review of two publications: Mieke Gerritzen and Geert Lovink's 'I Read Where I Am: Exploring New Information Cultures' (Valiz, 2011) and Boris Groys' essay 'Google: Words Beyond Grammar' (Hatje Cantz, 2012), as written for dOCUMENTA (13)'s '100 Notes – 100 Thoughts' series.

The piece considers new forms of "image-text" at a time when technology develops form and content simultaneously and considers them to be a whole; or reading as seeing and writing as thinking online, where we analyse and organise information by taking notes, then publishing them in a prologue state. Going through indexes and search engines, it looks at the contemporary ways in which we address questions to the world, or address the questions that the world asks us.

See also: Tõnis Vint in frieze issue 151, 2012.

"Finnish musicians like to repeat things. It goes on and on... Sometimes for too long."

For the April 2011 issue of The Wire magazine, I got out of control about music with Shinji Kanki, a Japanese-Finnish composer and my former sound art teacher, as well as other local practitioners, with a mission to unravel Finland's orderly art music scene. The 'Global Ear Helsinki' piece discusses methods such as unorthodox musical education; encouraging students not to listen too much while they're playing, interpreting roof tiles as a score, and trying to only produce sound when no one else is. However, it also endorses the beauty of tedium:

"The best thing about the new music scene is that you can't always be sure when the concert started, or if it already started or not."

Image: The Art of War by Shinji Kanki.

I wrote about Vuokko Eskolin-Nurmesniemi, my favourite Finnish designer and Issey Miyake's fashion mom, for Apartamento magazine #7, 2011.

"If you don't ask yourself, you'll never get the answer." Vuokko's always had her own questions. She has, for example, used batteries in clothes to keep them warm, as long as 50 years ago, and blocked holes in printing machines with chewing gum in order to enable larger patterns in her fabrics. 'Design Mom' piece discusses the establishment of this "Vuokko way of thinking", and how nothing has ever stopped her since.

My other contributions to Apartamento include 'Home for Abstract Content' (#5, 2010), an article about architect Jean Renaudie's 1970s social housing in Ivry sur Seine, Paris. Disturbing and unpractical, the apartments inspire their inhabitants to break free of mechanical, automatic living.

Portrait: Kaarle Hurtig