Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich: Mika Taanila, Human Engineering
Hardcover, 160 x 230 mm, 176 pages, e/d
With essays by Ken Hollings & Heike Munder
Edited by Heike Munder
Published by Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst & JRP|Ringier, 2005
ISBN: 3-905701-32-4
Since the mid-1990s, the Finnish artist and filmmaker Mika Taanila has been portraying researchers whose work lies between utopianism and science. He works with found-footage material, to which he adds experimental electronic music. The artist recalls a time in the 1960s and 1970s when utopian ideas were closely bound up with science and lifestyle. For example, Taanila portrays the Finnish visionary Erkki Kurenniemi, whose machine ‘DIMI-0’ transformed human touch into sounds and images, or he retraces the development of a transportable house made out of plastic, which was invented by Matti Suuronen, from the first drawings to the project’s eventual failure.