Tuomas A. Laitinen takes part in “Ecotechnics” on view at the Beall Center for Art + Technology in Irvine, California, USA. The exhibition is curated by Zachary Koroll Gold.
“Ecotechnics” gathers contemporary artists who treat ecology not as a given but as a process of imaging. The works here take divergent paths among the technologies, histories and fictions by which environments and organisms are known. The exhibition asks how we, through technology and as technical beings, sense and represent the living world.
Tuomas A. Laitinen’s work The Earth is the Ear of the Bear (Aural Version) refers to an ancient belief among circumpolar hunting cultures that bears can hear everything. In the work, a tentacular metal base casts three ultrasonic speakers as heads that produce a sound installation throughout the gallery spaces. The speakers use a specialized audio technology that derives from sonar, which encodes audio within ultrasonic signals. These remain beyond the domain of hearing until they hit bodies or objects in space, inducing them to become emitters of sound. Crossing a beam’s path causes a visitor to hear Laitinen’s sound as if it originates within their own body; to others, their body becomes a speaker. Observers’ movements within the gallery thereby influence the perception of the work, entangling the works’ technology and the architecture of the space with the embodied experience of time. It is as if we become the terms of the lifeworld of another, the biotechnical being between octopus and fungus signified by the otherworldly bent metal armature holding the speakers. It is uncertain whether we are listening to Laitinen’s artwork or being appropriated by it as its organs of speech.
Tuomas A. Laitinen is an artist who works with moving images, sound, and glass. He composes situations and installations that inquire into the interconnectedness of language and body within morphing environments. In recent installations, glass sculptures work both as vessels and thresholds near the body, and ultrasonic transmissions move through spaces as a spectral presence. The current works are filtered through an interest in various mythologies, often resulting in a hallucinatory register where perception is altered in a nonlinear manner.
“Ecotechnics” will remain on view at the Beall Center for Art + Technology at the UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts until February 6, 2027.
