Jonas Johansson

Jonas Johansson is a designer, artist and educator from Glommen, Halland. He studied graphic design in Norrköping, Reims, and Stockholm, and has worked at design studios in Tokyo, Montreal, London and Munich. He taught Visual Communication at Beckmans (2017–2025) and Creative Technology at Hyper Island (2014–2022).

Jonas runs the artist residency Visualia and Nordic Audiovisual Artists, plans courses at Svenska Tecknare, creates events with PLX and Lumen Project, collaborates with the lighting collective Svartljus, and co-founded Dome Dreaming, the Nordics' first fulldome film festival.

He shares his studio with SMASH and Rose Hallgren.

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Players gather around BorderLAN's candlelit red table, with their heads replaced by pixel-art Diablo II character portraits.

BorderLAN

A LAN party in an earth cellar. Four seats, a shared table and a return to 2002.

BorderLAN brought people together around Counter-Strike 1.6, Quake II, Unreal Tournament, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Diablo and Diablo II, with Action Quake 2 and OpenArena also on the shelf. Players chose what to play together, with music, food and drinks accompanying each sitting.

A LAN party in an earth cellar. Four seats, a shared table and a return to 2002.

BorderLAN brought people together around Counter-Strike 1.6, Quake II, Unreal Tournament, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Diablo and Diablo II, with Action Quake 2 and OpenArena also on the shelf. Players chose what to play together, with music, food and drinks accompanying each sitting.

Four Raspberry Pi 5 stations ran the games over a local network. A custom launcher and a central controller connected the computers to the room's sound, lights and projections, allowing the players' activity to reach beyond their screens.

The launcher borrowed the atmosphere of the games themselves, moving between their worlds as players browsed the shelf. This reel brings together its gameplay previews for Counter-Strike 1.6, Action Quake 2 and OpenArena.

Music and familiar game sounds filled the room around the players. These mixes bring together tracks from the playlist with voices, spells, weapons, announcements and interface sounds from all nine of the room's game soundbanks, arranged to follow the beat.

I hosted BorderLAN with Rose Hallgren. The website extended the room with a glowing cellar door, a shelf of games and a place to book a seat.

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Balena Voladora at dusk, with cyan light tracing its ribs, fins and tail and a warm yellow light beside its open mouth.

Balena Voladora

A flying whale in the desert. Pulling a lever sets its wooden skeleton in motion, swimming above the sand.

I see a bit of Moby-Dick in it, but also a fossil, or one of the whale skeletons hanging in a natural history museum. The ribs are open and you can see the wooden joints and metal mechanism doing the work. The starting point was a small DIY kinetic model, scaled up into something people could operate themselves.

A flying whale in the desert. Pulling a lever sets its wooden skeleton in motion, swimming above the sand.

I see a bit of Moby-Dick in it, but also a fossil, or one of the whale skeletons hanging in a natural history museum. The ribs are open and you can see the wooden joints and metal mechanism doing the work. The starting point was a small DIY kinetic model, scaled up into something people could operate themselves.

For the lighting, I followed the skeleton. The LEDs trace the ribs, spine, fins and tail, drawing the whale against the sky after dark. I made a 3D lighting study using Erik's model to try the placement and work out the lengths before the LEDs were cut and wired.

I programmed the lighting against the whale's 3D geometry. The twelve ribs, spine, tail and two fins have separate LED runs, driven by two controllers. Colour can travel along an individual bone or move through the whole body.

Erik Schmitz and Selim designed the whale. Erik did the engineering and built the wooden structure and mechanics. I made the 3D study and handled the software and lighting programming. Albert Carrera at Nouled handled the hardware, mounting and cabling.

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Glowing circular light rings surround tree trunks in a forest, lighting the branches yellow.

Svartljus

Svartljus builds modular light installations for forests, festivals, and public spaces.

Svartljus started in 2017 at Stugan, a co-created makerspace in Sickla, Stockholm. I connected with Olle Bjerkås and Markus Persson and we began experimenting with light. Our first piece was a light tunnel for Spotify: two rows of LED columns controlled in real time, serving as both entrance and exit at their Stockholm HQ. In 2018, Per-Olov Jernberg joined, bringing hardware and software skills that let us create more reactive systems. That year we exhibited at Sónar Reykjavík and ran a workshop on our techniques.

Svartljus builds modular light installations for forests, festivals, and public spaces.

Svartljus started in 2017 at Stugan, a co-created makerspace in Sickla, Stockholm. I connected with Olle Bjerkås and Markus Persson and we began experimenting with light. Our first piece was a light tunnel for Spotify: two rows of LED columns controlled in real time, serving as both entrance and exit at their Stockholm HQ. In 2018, Per-Olov Jernberg joined, bringing hardware and software skills that let us create more reactive systems. That year we exhibited at Sónar Reykjavík and ran a workshop on our techniques.

Through hackathons at Reaktorhallen and projects across the Nordics, we developed Dendrolux, a modular light sculpture built for trees, powered by solar and controlled in real time. Inspired by the Wood Wide Web, the underground networks through which trees communicate, Dendrolux wraps trees in bespoke light rings with 300 RGB dual-side pixels and custom silicone diffusion, transforming them into lampposts for the forest. The installation is interactive, responding to people nearby.

Since its debut at Into the Woods in Unnaryd in 2020, Dendrolux has been shown at Copenhagen Light Festival (2021, 2022), PLX Tjärö (2022), Norra Bantorget in Stockholm (2024), and Tjolöholms Slott in Halland (2024), where the light rings wrapped trees in the castle park, turning the grounds into an interactive light walk.

We also built Semiosphere, a geodesic sphere of light panels shown at Urban Burn in 2018, and Autolux, a flexible LED tube sculpture where visitors each became a single LED pixel, racing each other along the strip like a track.

In September 2025 we lit Unreal Fest Stockholm, Epic Games' developer event, produced by Happy Times, at Fållan in Slakthusområdet. We brought three pieces. Minigun stood alone in the yard, three-metre LED tubes splayed out of a single base like a barrel assembly, each tube its own set of channels, running a gradient from white down to fire. Countdown held the clock in a pixel font drawn on a 16x16 grid, lit inside a hard-angled frame on the brick, and it kept counting while the hall filled up behind it. The third was Facing Worlds, a sticker you point a phone at.

The core group is now seven: myself, Olle Bjerkås, Per-Olov Jernberg, Servando Barreiro, Rose Hallgren, Elias Aabjerg, and Lior Nønne Malue Hansen, each bringing skills from metal fabrication and architecture to sound design and creative coding. We have also run an internship programme with students from Beckmans and Hyper Island.

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An oversized pair of red-and-blue 3D glasses rests on a dusty plain in warm evening light.

Retrospectives

A pair of supersized 3D glasses you can sit inside, adorned with patterns inspired by Catalan mosaic tiles.

Retrospectives was built for Nowhere 2022. The glasses were about two metres wide and half a metre tall, CNC-milled, with the classic red-and-blue stereoscopic lenses. The patterns were inspired by Catalan mosaic tiles, the kind being lost to new building projects across Barcelona. I had been obsessed with The Tilehunter, a Catalan man who travels to document and archive these tiles, an obsession I brought with me to a residency at Konvent Zero where I worked with tufting and tiles. At Nowhere the glasses gave people a place to sit and look at the environment "in 3D". Nothing more, nothing less. Massive glasses.

A pair of supersized 3D glasses you can sit inside, adorned with patterns inspired by Catalan mosaic tiles.

Retrospectives was built for Nowhere 2022. The glasses were about two metres wide and half a metre tall, CNC-milled, with the classic red-and-blue stereoscopic lenses. The patterns were inspired by Catalan mosaic tiles, the kind being lost to new building projects across Barcelona. I had been obsessed with The Tilehunter, a Catalan man who travels to document and archive these tiles, an obsession I brought with me to a residency at Konvent Zero where I worked with tufting and tiles. At Nowhere the glasses gave people a place to sit and look at the environment "in 3D". Nothing more, nothing less. Massive glasses.

I made Retrospectives with Erik Schmitz. Erik constructed the glasses in his workshop near Tarrega, and we drove them to the desert together.

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A brass telescope with a circular wooden housing stands on a tripod against a warm desert sunset.

WYSIWYG

An augmented-reality telescope that brings imaginary creatures into the landscape.

WYSIWYG hides a phone inside a familiar viewing instrument. Looking through the eyepiece, visitors encounter animated birds, animals and towering figures within the camera's view of their surroundings. Turning the telescope lets them explore this other layer of the landscape.

An augmented-reality telescope that brings imaginary creatures into the landscape.

WYSIWYG hides a phone inside a familiar viewing instrument. Looking through the eyepiece, visitors encounter animated birds, animals and towering figures within the camera's view of their surroundings. Turning the telescope lets them explore this other layer of the landscape.

By day, the flock appears as black birds. At night, it becomes a swarm of lights. Giant figures made of particles walk through the landscape. The concept image below brings the birds and walking figures into one of my photographs.

These recordings come directly from the software: the flock in daylight and at night, the walking figures and a herd of animals.

The physical construction combines a brass telescope, a wooden tripod and a circular housing for the phone. The enclosure holds the screen in the telescope's line of sight, so looking at a digital image becomes a physical gesture: sit down, lean in and turn towards something.

The instrument travelled between the open desert and a wooded setting during July 2026.

I built the software using WebAR and Three.js. Rose Hallgren designed and built the wooden bench.

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Hands play a small illuminated keyboard on an orange tabletop, the public controller for Harpa’s facade.

Harpa

We turned the 714-panel LED facade of Reykjavík's Harpa Concert Hall into a public game, then an instrument.

It started in 2014 when Atlí Bollason and Owen Hindley turned Harpa's 43-metre tall, almost 100-metre wide facade into a publicly playable game of Pong. Launched on Menningarnótt (Culture Night) on 23 August 2014, it was the first time Ólafur Elíasson granted another artist access to the 714 LED panels embedded in the south facade's steel-and-glass quasibrick structure. Anyone with a smartphone could join a Wi-Fi network and take control of a paddle on the building.

We turned the 714-panel LED facade of Reykjavík's Harpa Concert Hall into a public game, then an instrument.

It started in 2014 when Atlí Bollason and Owen Hindley turned Harpa's 43-metre tall, almost 100-metre wide facade into a publicly playable game of Pong. Launched on Menningarnótt (Culture Night) on 23 August 2014, it was the first time Ólafur Elíasson granted another artist access to the 714 LED panels embedded in the south facade's steel-and-glass quasibrick structure. Anyone with a smartphone could join a Wi-Fi network and take control of a paddle on the building.

After the success of Pong, Harpa and the Sónar organisers invited Atlí and Owen back for the festival in 2015. I was working at FIELD.io at the time, where Owen would freelance, and that's how I got involved. Rather than simply re-run Pong, we turned the entire building into an audio-reactive light show, taking the music being played inside and using it to drive the visuals outside. We reached out to creative developers across Europe, and ended up with over 12 visual responses from 8 artists.

As artistic lead, I coded visualisations and animations for the facade, and took on much of the project management, from writing funding applications to running meetings and coordinating the group. The scale was hard to grasp. Harpa is an enormous building set against the harbour in a small city, and when your animation fills that facade it's visible across half of Reykjavík.

In 2016 we took it further and built a light organ on the 4th floor balcony, overlooking the geometric glass front and the downtown area. Visitors could play the building like an instrument. Harmony was colour, pitch was position, strength was brilliance. In 2017 we did a series of interactive installations using hardware from Teenage Engineering and Flic, giving the festival audience direct control of the facade. We called it Sónarspil.

Rose Hallgren built the physical wood and concrete models used as tactile interfaces, and Johanna Tano did the hardware coding. We had funding from the Nordic Culture Fund through their Opstart grant.

In 2019, as Tiny/Massive, we opened the facade to artists worldwide during the Reykjavík Winter Lights Festival. Loney Dear and Teenage Engineering performed a live concert controlling the visuals with the OP-Z, ten storeys of light on the harbour, driven from inside a city bus.

It was a great few years. We would gather in Reykjavík for Sónar, hack the facade, have morning meetings in the pool, and enjoy playing with lights in the evenings. The work with Harpa became the spark for NAVA (Nordic Audiovisual Artists), a community where Atlí, Owen, myself and artist Rasmus Stride formed the collective that would go on to do projects like Tiny/Massive and Skaðablót.

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An ice bed sits within a tall carved alcove, flanked by ice sculptures and lit in pale blue.

Icehotel

Two suites designed and sculpted for Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden.

The seed was planted twice. First at 19, when I joined my father at KKV in Bohuslän and met a travelling sculptor duo who spoke of their Icehotel experience. Later, over an evening in London, my friend, artist and designer Joshua Space, mentioned he had worked there himself. It stayed in the back of my mind until 2018, when I finally applied together with sculptor and artist Jordi Claramunt, whom I had met at Nowhere in Spain, and architect Lukas Petko, a former student of mine at Hyper Island. The three of us made for an odd trio: Jordi the hands-on figurative sculptor, Lukas with his appreciation for symmetry and structure, and myself somewhere in between.

Two suites designed and sculpted for Icehotel in Jukkasjärvi, Sweden.

The seed was planted twice. First at 19, when I joined my father at KKV in Bohuslän and met a travelling sculptor duo who spoke of their Icehotel experience. Later, over an evening in London, my friend, artist and designer Joshua Space, mentioned he had worked there himself. It stayed in the back of my mind until 2018, when I finally applied together with sculptor and artist Jordi Claramunt, whom I had met at Nowhere in Spain, and architect Lukas Petko, a former student of mine at Hyper Island. The three of us made for an odd trio: Jordi the hands-on figurative sculptor, Lukas with his appreciation for symmetry and structure, and myself somewhere in between.

Haven (2018) was an animal sanctuary guarded by a phoenix and a fox, an igloo with an escape room narrative where visitors had to solve a riddle to gain entrance. We arrived in Jukkasjärvi and over two weeks worked day and night, our room facing the Torne river with an open end. I learned to sculpt and saw in ice, snow, and snice, with some very questionable working methods. Jordi took a dip in the icy river, as did I, followed by a proper sauna. We got to sleep in our own suite, but it was so cold I left in the middle of the night and scurried back to our warm cabin lodge.

After that experience I was hooked and kept applying almost every year. In 2023, Icehotel reached out and asked me to build a luxury suite for Icehotel 365, the permanent ice hotel. They wanted an earlier concept I had designed called Mystery on the Icehotel Express, inspired by Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, a 1930s Orient Express train where something has gone wrong, with clues scattered throughout for visitors to piece together. The room featured a bedroom and a dining area with Art Deco details: drapes, ornaments, packed luggage, and a ticking clock. I wanted to try CNC milling on ice, and designed the clock and other details. The build required a large amount of ice. This time I invited Jordi Claramunt and his friend Abel Pruñonosa, who did most of the work as I could only be there for a few days. I still send in proposals every year, longing to return with my partner Rose Hallgren and collaborator Erik Schmitz.

I made Haven with Jordi Claramunt and Lukas Petko. For Mystery on the Icehotel Express, Jordi and Abel Pruñonosa did most of the build, with help from Creative Director Luca Roncoroni and the Icehotel team. Francesco Torelli and Nikita Dudnik made the music for that suite.

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Seen from above, a figure in a white mask and suit reaches up into a tangle of pale, dry branches.

2.18

A small room split in two by a door covered in mirror film. As the light changed sides, the mirror turned into a window, and the person looking back was not you.

2.18 was one of the rooms in Satans död, the third and final part of Satans trilogi, which began with Satans demokrati in 2015. It ran from 4 November to 31 December 2017 in a decommissioned Atlas Copco office building on Sickla industriväg. Visitors wore masks and found their own way through around 150 rooms, many of them dark enough to need a flashlight. Jimmy Meurling, Andreas Blom and Py Huss-Wallin led the project for Woland presenterar, with music by Magnus Larsson and sound design by Niklas Nordström. More than 1,300 artists, architects, performers and craftspeople took part.

A small room split in two by a door covered in mirror film. As the light changed sides, the mirror turned into a window, and the person looking back was not you.

2.18 was one of the rooms in Satans död, the third and final part of Satans trilogi, which began with Satans demokrati in 2015. It ran from 4 November to 31 December 2017 in a decommissioned Atlas Copco office building on Sickla industriväg. Visitors wore masks and found their own way through around 150 rooms, many of them dark enough to need a flashlight. Jimmy Meurling, Andreas Blom and Py Huss-Wallin led the project for Woland presenterar, with music by Magnus Larsson and sound design by Niklas Nordström. More than 1,300 artists, architects, performers and craftspeople took part.

Room 2.18 was my room. Two lamps, one on each side of the door, sensed the visitor and took turns switching on. With your side lit, the film was a mirror; when the light moved to the other side, it went transparent. The lamps alternated faster and faster, flickering between reflection and window. The far side was a mirrored copy of the room, and I was hiding in it, moving with the visitor like a reflection.

In June 2018, after the run, I made a short film in the building with Rose Hallgren, the two of us in front of the camera. A man in a white suit walks the corridors into 2.18, where the light flickers and the mirror becomes a window with a masked double on the other side.

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Two of the musicians in profile at Barnens Scen, with bold white strokes of a live-drawn score projected large behind them.

Signs of Presence

Live graphic scores for People in Orbit's reinterpretation of Signs of Presence, a 1978 work by Leo Nilsson and Al Eklund.

In February 2026, People in Orbit performed Signs of Presence at Barnens Scen in Malmö, a reinterpretation of the graphic score created by electronic pioneer Leo Nilsson and artist Al Eklund in 1978. The original sheets were photographed, cleaned up and redrawn in white on black for projection, with their expression markings set in type.

Live graphic scores for People in Orbit's reinterpretation of Signs of Presence, a 1978 work by Leo Nilsson and Al Eklund.

In February 2026, People in Orbit performed Signs of Presence at Barnens Scen in Malmö, a reinterpretation of the graphic score created by electronic pioneer Leo Nilsson and artist Al Eklund in 1978. The original sheets were photographed, cleaned up and redrawn in white on black for projection, with their expression markings set in type.

Then I turned the idea around. While the band interpreted the notations, I drew a new score out of what I heard, live on a tablet in a custom web app I built for it, and composed the projection in Resolume with custom FFGL shaders.

The performance became the pre-study for the Signs of Presence Tour, a Nordic tour of existing graphic scores that Adam Sass and I are planning for Stockholm, Helsinki, Reykjavík and Copenhagen in autumn 2027, playing scores from the 1960s to 1980s with a local musician in each city. We applied for project funding in September 2026. I also make the band's album artwork.

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A giant patterned lighter burns in an open field at night as a lightning bolt illuminates the sky behind it.

Firestarter

A supersized Zippo lighter that visitors ignite with their own flame.

Firestarter is an interactive installation presented at Nowhere in Monegros, a regional burn I have attended since 2015. The piece is an enlarged replica of the classic Zippo lighter. I wanted to work with fire as a material, so we learned propane systems, sensors, and ignition triggers from the ground up. You walk up, you light a fire. A small, rebellious act of speaking up. It lit the official closing ceremony.

A supersized Zippo lighter that visitors ignite with their own flame.

Firestarter is an interactive installation presented at Nowhere in Monegros, a regional burn I have attended since 2015. The piece is an enlarged replica of the classic Zippo lighter. I wanted to work with fire as a material, so we learned propane systems, sensors, and ignition triggers from the ground up. You walk up, you light a fire. A small, rebellious act of speaking up. It lit the official closing ceremony.

Built from aluminium sheets on a steel frame with hand-cut patterns, LED lighting, Arduino, DMX, and an IR sensor.

Made with Erik Schmitz and Rose Hallgren, with help from Josep Giribet. We built it in David Giribet’s workshop at Calidos in Tarrega.

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Branching blue-white projections illuminate a large boulder beneath the dusk sky.

Visualia

An audiovisual artist residency in a former school on the west coast of Sweden.

Visualia grew out of my work with NAVA (Nordic Audiovisual Artists) and the open call collaborations around Harpa and Sónar Reykjavík, where visual artists were paired with musicians to create new audiovisual performances. The idea of pairing artists to make something new kept pulling at me. I found a place for it in Långaveka småskola, a former school from the early 1900s in Glommen, Halland, where I grew up. Two artists stay for three weeks, working both individually and together.

An audiovisual artist residency in a former school on the west coast of Sweden.

Visualia grew out of my work with NAVA (Nordic Audiovisual Artists) and the open call collaborations around Harpa and Sónar Reykjavík, where visual artists were paired with musicians to create new audiovisual performances. The idea of pairing artists to make something new kept pulling at me. I found a place for it in Långaveka småskola, a former school from the early 1900s in Glommen, Halland, where I grew up. Two artists stay for three weeks, working both individually and together.

The first edition in 2022 brought Gabriela Prochazka and Annie Tådne. Gabriela made "Here May Be Dragons," a projection onto coastal boulders at dusk. In 2023, Sui and Niklas Alriksson were in residence. In 2024, Tomas Larsson, Merle Karp, and Leo Pahta worked at the school and exhibited at Into the Woods in Unnaryd, joined by micro-residents Erik Natanael, Murilo Polese, and Hara Alonso.

I run Visualia with Rose Hallgren and Bengt Johansson. It is a registered non-profit, supported by Region Halland.

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A sharply faceted dark mountain catches golden light against a violet sky and orange sun.

Vista

A decade of web-based generative landscapes: mountains, cloth, and caves, each with its own light and sound.

Vista means a distant view through an opening, an extensive mental view over a stretch of time. Each piece is a web-based landscape built in Three.js, with generative sound, light, and terrain. The series began in 2012 while living in Montreal, working at a design studio on large-scale stage experiences, and starting to treat code as sculpture rather than function.

A decade of web-based generative landscapes: mountains, cloth, and caves, each with its own light and sound.

Vista means a distant view through an opening, an extensive mental view over a stretch of time. Each piece is a web-based landscape built in Three.js, with generative sound, light, and terrain. The series began in 2012 while living in Montreal, working at a design studio on large-scale stage experiences, and starting to treat code as sculpture rather than function.

Berg is a procedural mountain terrain, born from living next to the mountain on Rue des Pins in Montreal. Grotta came from building polygonal foam structures for projection mapping and getting drawn into designing origami-like spaces.

Pilgrim is a billowing cloth with generative wind and synth, a desire to keep something floating still, in movement.

Glommen is my first personal work, made after moving to Canada from Japan. Inspired by my father, a painter of light, I began experimenting. Glommen reflects the connection to my seaside hometown and the anticipation of life without my father. The sun's position in the artwork mirrors his birthday, near the summer solstice.

I made these pieces in Three.js. Glommen was shown at Stockholm Showww in 2014 and at Myriad in R1 Reactor Hall in 2024, a re|thread project on origin and authorship.

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Two visitors look up through a grid of glowing vertical strings in a dark room.

Lyra

A playable light instrument. Strings hung from floor to ceiling in a darkened room, each one triggering light and sound when plucked.

Lyra was my first foray into interactive light art. A set of fishing wire strings was strung tightly from floor to ceiling, each fitted with an accelerometer. When a visitor plucked a string, the sensor fed its peak value into an algorithm simulating a vibrating chord. Light and sound grew from the tip of the string and travelled along the walls and ceiling, turning the room into a kind of circuitry. The more people played, the richer it got. Built on Arduino.

A playable light instrument. Strings hung from floor to ceiling in a darkened room, each one triggering light and sound when plucked.

Lyra was my first foray into interactive light art. A set of fishing wire strings was strung tightly from floor to ceiling, each fitted with an accelerometer. When a visitor plucked a string, the sensor fed its peak value into an algorithm simulating a vibrating chord. Light and sound grew from the tip of the string and travelled along the walls and ceiling, turning the room into a kind of circuitry. The more people played, the richer it got. Built on Arduino.

I made Lyra with Melanie Le Guen while working at Moment Factory in Montreal. We showed it at C2 Montreal.

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A bedside tablet controls blue and violet projections that wrap around the walls of a hotel room.

Embed

A Hobo Hotel room where guests fill all four walls with films from a tablet by the bed.

In 2021, three short-throw projectors were installed in a small hotel room at Hobo Hotel in Stockholm, with an elaborate speaker system and a custom control interface on a tablet. Guests could book the room and browse curated films and generative graphics, surrounded by visuals on every wall.

A Hobo Hotel room where guests fill all four walls with films from a tablet by the bed.

In 2021, three short-throw projectors were installed in a small hotel room at Hobo Hotel in Stockholm, with an elaborate speaker system and a custom control interface on a tablet. Guests could book the room and browse curated films and generative graphics, surrounded by visuals on every wall.

I initiated and built Embed with Barkas and Vitali Poluzhnikov.

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A child reaches towards a large patchwork of colourful tufted textiles, including flowers, figures and a smiling face.

Tufting Ex Machina

A collaborative tufting workshop using the exquisite corpse technique, turning cultural patterns into tufted textiles.

Tufting Ex Machina was a two-day workshop at Aavistus, an audiovisual festival in Helsinki that I have been part of since its start in 2022, as both an artist and collaborator through Nordic Audiovisual Artists. The workshop brought together 10 participants to tuft their own cultural canon. I'd learned tufting during a residency at Konvent Zero in Spain.

A collaborative tufting workshop using the exquisite corpse technique, turning cultural patterns into tufted textiles.

Tufting Ex Machina was a two-day workshop at Aavistus, an audiovisual festival in Helsinki that I have been part of since its start in 2022, as both an artist and collaborator through Nordic Audiovisual Artists. The workshop brought together 10 participants to tuft their own cultural canon. I'd learned tufting during a residency at Konvent Zero in Spain.

The method drew on the exquisite corpse technique, a collaborative approach originating from the Surrealists where each participant contributes to a composition without seeing the full picture, responding only to what came before.

Two groups of four each designed and tufted a square, then passed it on for the next group to respond to, reacting to each other's cultural shapes, colours, and patterns, resulting in 24 tufted squares covering 140 x 210 cm.

For the project, Rose Hallgren designed a custom modular tufting frame that could expand to 2 x 4 metres yet fold down to fit in a sports bag.

The finished piece was exhibited at the festival, with conductive thread added to make it interactive using Circuit Playground.

Made with Rose Hallgren and the ten workshop participants at Aavistus. I also produced a music track to accompany the work.

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The pink outline of Klättermusen's sewing mouse is drawn in tufted wool over the botanical pattern.

Klättermusen

A two-metre hand-tufted wall piece for Klättermusens Verkstad, the outdoor brand's mark drawn over a botanical landscape of mine.

Klättermusens Verkstad is the workshop and store of Swedish outdoor brand Klättermusen, a short walk from my studio. They wanted their mark tufted at two by two metres for the wall of the space.

The ground it sits on is an illustration I had already made: a circular botanical scene, seed heads and reeds standing against a low sun. It went into the previewer as an example of how a pattern might sit behind the mark, and it was the one they kept. Their lettering and the mouse at its sewing machine ended up drawn over it in Light Pink, with the sun carried through in Ochre Yellow.

Rather than send a flat mockup, I built them that previewer. It recolours artwork into real yarn, simulates how cut pile will render it, tallies the cones to order, and drops the result into a photograph of the wall it was headed for. The rest of the palette was settled by playing with it: Salmon, Aubergine Purple and Maple Brown.

A two-metre hand-tufted wall piece for Klättermusens Verkstad, the outdoor brand's mark drawn over a botanical landscape of mine.

Klättermusens Verkstad is the workshop and store of Swedish outdoor brand Klättermusen, a short walk from my studio. They wanted their mark tufted at two by two metres for the wall of the space.

The ground it sits on is an illustration I had already made: a circular botanical scene, seed heads and reeds standing against a low sun. It went into the previewer as an example of how a pattern might sit behind the mark, and it was the one they kept. Their lettering and the mouse at its sewing machine ended up drawn over it in Light Pink, with the sun carried through in Ochre Yellow.

Rather than send a flat mockup, I built them that previewer. It recolours artwork into real yarn, simulates how cut pile will render it, tallies the cones to order, and drops the result into a photograph of the wall it was headed for. The rest of the palette was settled by playing with it: Salmon, Aubergine Purple and Maple Brown.

We made it on their shop floor over the first week of August with Rose Hallgren, on the modular tufting frame she designed for Tufting Ex Machina, which opens to two by four metres and folds down into a sports bag. The tool exports a projection version of the design, contours only and no pile texture, which we threw onto the stretched cloth and traced by hand: in mirror, since a tufting gun punches from the back and every letter has to be drawn in reverse. Then 14 mm of cut pile, glued and trimmed.

Rose hand-stitched the backing, and a pocket along it to take a flat aluminium bar, giving a piece this size some rigidity and something to hang from. At around twenty kilos, the hanging became a design problem of its own. A curtain rod would have held it too far off the wall, so I drew a printed saddle for the bar to drop into instead: two screws, no rake, and the rug sitting 5.8 mm off the concrete. They went on the printer twice. The first mount left it very slightly askew, so a second set carries an offset to correct it.

Made with Rose Hallgren for Klättermusens Verkstad. Rose designed the tufting frame and hand-stitched the backing. I made the artwork, yarn previewer and wall mounts.

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An immense alien craft emerges from clouds above Stockholm in the installation’s invasion scene.

Vi kommer i fred

In Kungsträdgården, facing the Royal Castle, a screen pulled everyone who walked past into an alien invasion of Stockholm.

For the launch of TV4's sci-fi drama "Vi kommer i fred", a single-camera totem stood in Kungsträdgården, facing the Royal Castle across the water, and dropped whoever walked by straight into the show's opening scene, a huge alien craft breaking through the clouds over the city.

In Kungsträdgården, facing the Royal Castle, a screen pulled everyone who walked past into an alien invasion of Stockholm.

For the launch of TV4's sci-fi drama "Vi kommer i fred", a single-camera totem stood in Kungsträdgården, facing the Royal Castle across the water, and dropped whoever walked by straight into the show's opening scene, a huge alien craft breaking through the clouds over the city.

Behind it, the whole invasion ran live in Resolume, mapped onto the live camera feed so anyone who stepped up landed inside the shot. Two versions of the scene, one for day and one for night, swapped on a timer to match the light, and it ran around the clock for two weeks.

Made with Smash Studio. I did the real-time integration and the on-site install, getting the live camera feed placed into the scene and mapped onto the totem, then calibrated on location.

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Light trails wind through Society Expo's empty exhibition rooms, with a close view of the suspended cloud and green and amber lighting.

Society Expo

Light winds through an exhibition about the energy that connects nature, people and a city's future.

Society Expo Exhibition takes place at Skellefteå museum on Nordanå. Part of Society Expo 2026, the exhibition tells the story of Skellefteå's transformation through sound, light, projections and environments that respond to visitors. Four parts follow the energy of nature, people, society and the future.

Light winds through an exhibition about the energy that connects nature, people and a city's future.

Society Expo Exhibition takes place at Skellefteå museum on Nordanå. Part of Society Expo 2026, the exhibition tells the story of Skellefteå's transformation through sound, light, projections and environments that respond to visitors. Four parts follow the energy of nature, people, society and the future.

The journey begins with forest, rock and water. Visitors follow the river through a recreation of the Finnfors hydropower tunnel, where water becomes electricity. In this first room, light runs through real tree trunks. We cut the trees in half and left them to dry for a few months, then drilled a channel and fitted the LED cable inside. We used WS2815 LEDs at 96 LEDs per metre, QuinLED controllers and custom software to control the light.

Rose Hallgren built the cloud suspended above the greenhouse. Light catches its rounded surface, while glowing lines run between the installations overhead. Across the room, blue, green, pink and amber give each part of the exhibition its own atmosphere.

Visitors can leave recorded reflections, listen to one another and add colour to a shared mural. Children and young people helped shape the exhibition through workshops and a public preview, bringing their own ideas into the rooms. The story of the city keeps growing with the people who enter it.

I did the lighting with Try New Things and loved working with their team. Everyone put their heart into every part of the build, from the 3D printed joints to the signs, trees, endless wiring, wireless connections and sensors. They brought the same care to guiding the scenography students and making it all come together on site. I hope we get to do it again, and I look forward to many more visits to their beautiful office in Skellefteå. Jonas Westling and Pär Olofsson photographed the exhibition, and Try New Things made the film. Find more images and videos on their press page.

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Waves of white particles fill a gauze and the screen behind it, with a vibraphonist, guitarist and drummer playing between the two layers.

Fenomen

Projection and light for an audiovisual jazz concert, where phenomena from nature move across two layers of image around the band.

Fenomen is a concert by four musicians from Halland: Tomas Larsson on guitar, Mattias Grönroos on piano and bass, Fia Forslund on vibraphone and Michael Edlund on drums. Each piece starts from a phenomenon, from northern lights and snowflakes to lightning and bioluminescence, and the music moves between composed parts and improvisation in step with the images.

Projection and light for an audiovisual jazz concert, where phenomena from nature move across two layers of image around the band.

Fenomen is a concert by four musicians from Halland: Tomas Larsson on guitar, Mattias Grönroos on piano and bass, Fia Forslund on vibraphone and Michael Edlund on drums. Each piece starts from a phenomenon, from northern lights and snowflakes to lightning and bioluminescence, and the music moves between composed parts and improvisation in step with the images.

Tomas and I designed the stage: a black gauze in front of the band and screens behind it, so the projection lands on both, with the musicians standing in between. I made the visuals and the lighting. Much of the imagery was made live from a desk in the stalls: colour and liquids on a light table and under a microscope, filmed and fed straight into the projection as the band played.

I also designed the posters and the campaign, including a portrait of each of us in the band.

Fenomen premiered at Kulturhuset Forum in Hylte on 15 March 2024, produced by Musik Hallandia, and toured Kungsbacka Teater, Festsalen in Halmstad and Varbergs Teater in November 2024. I also designed the posters and campaign material. Photos and film by Rose Hallgren.

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The Close/Away album cover: a dense botanical world in purple, pink and green, with figures seated before a glowing stage and the band name above.

People in Orbit

Album artwork for electroacoustic jazz quintet People in Orbit.

I met trumpet player Adam Sass while working on another production, and he reached out about designing the artwork for their debut album Close/Away, released on Prophone Records in 2023. I was inspired by The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch and Hilma af Klint's colour work. The artwork is a repeating pattern that stitches onto itself, as if it were a physical world with several entries from the different sides of the print.

Album artwork for electroacoustic jazz quintet People in Orbit.

I met trumpet player Adam Sass while working on another production, and he reached out about designing the artwork for their debut album Close/Away, released on Prophone Records in 2023. I was inspired by The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch and Hilma af Klint's colour work. The artwork is a repeating pattern that stitches onto itself, as if it were a physical world with several entries from the different sides of the print.

For their second album Viewpoint, released on April Records in 2026, I made the artwork across the album and three singles: Synchronized Whalestuff, Spinning Downwards, and Cycle 3, Everlasting Confusion. The album artwork takes a macro perspective, inspired by the artwork for Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson and the cyclical, almost diabolical world of Uzumaki by Junji Ito. The contrast of those two realms, with a lighthouse shining its light in the centre, became the foundation. The singles zoom in: a whale's eye, a whirling vortex in the sea, a fresnel lens from the lighthouse.

I also made their website, peopleinorbit.se: a photographed shelf where the records, the TV and the phone lead to the music, videos and shows.

In 2026 I made the live visuals for their performance Signs of Presence.

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An installation view of Det Mörka Ljuset, with visitors surrounded by Lars Lerin's watercolours of birds, mountains and a house by the sea.

Det Mörka Ljuset

Lars Lerin's paintings, voice and archives surround the audience in Det Mörka Ljuset, a film by Sara Broos made for the walls and floor of Elverket in Stockholm.

The film follows Lars through his paintings, home movies, photographs and his own telling of his life. Sara Broos developed the concept, directed and edited it. The main hall at Elverket is roughly 34 metres long, eleven metres wide and eight metres high, with images on all four walls and on the floor. A composition can surround you, but you can only look at part of it at once.

Lars Lerin's paintings, voice and archives surround the audience in Det Mörka Ljuset, a film by Sara Broos made for the walls and floor of Elverket in Stockholm.

The film follows Lars through his paintings, home movies, photographs and his own telling of his life. Sara Broos developed the concept, directed and edited it. The main hall at Elverket is roughly 34 metres long, eleven metres wide and eight metres high, with images on all four walls and on the floor. A composition can surround you, but you can only look at part of it at once.

I made animation for the film. Much of the work was about how one painting moves into another: spreading pigment, wet edges, blooms, ripples, light and mist, always starting from the paintings themselves. I also worked on flocks of birds moving through the hall and built a browser model of the room so we could see how a house, a face or a stretch of water would land on the walls and floor while the images were still being made.

I worked with Jesper Kurlandsky and a team of talented animators, including Annie Tådne, David Giese, Johannes Ferm Winkler, David Nord and Boris Nawratil, among others. Full credits and visitor information.

Photographs by Martynas Justinevicius (Glidephotos).

Det Mörka Ljuset opens on 26 September 2026. Tickets are available on elverket.com.

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A close view of Kagora's crossing ribs reveals rows of blue and cyan LEDs running along the curved structure.

Kagora

A woven pavilion of moving light, built as a place to gather in the woods.

Kagora brings Japanese basket weaving to an architectural scale. Its name combines kago, Japanese for basket, with aura.

A woven pavilion of moving light, built as a place to gather in the woods.

Kagora brings Japanese basket weaving to an architectural scale. Its name combines kago, Japanese for basket, with aura.

Inspired by Hanakago flower baskets and Kagome weaving, the ribs cross overhead to define a room without closing it off. Across 120 woven tubes, more than a kilometre of LED strip carries around 32,000 individually controllable points of light. As colour moves through the weave, different curves emerge and recede, changing the space around the people sitting and lying beneath it.

The build began with models, joints and tests of individual arches. A crew of collaborators prepared the diffusion for the LEDs and assembled the woven ribs among the trees. In daylight, the white structure frames the woodland; after dark, the light gives it a different presence.

Annie Locke Scherer led the design and build. I designed the lighting, with sound by Teodor Sundström and engineering by Christian Pisano. Built with David Tollman, Rich Miller, Björn Bergenheim, Matias Peljo, Markku Leppala, Emilia Ferguson, David Correa, Max Hassler, Eero Laaksonen, Cecilia Johansson, Mar Benavides and Tomas Kronvall.

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Festival visitors walk through an arch built from stacked wooden chairs, lit magenta against the night forest.

PLX

An art and music collective that builds festivals where there are none: an island in the Blekinge archipelago, an empty warehouse, a museum's old casino.

PLX has been going since 2006, an association since 2014, working out of Blekinge, Malmö and Stockholm on festivals, exhibitions and performances made for the place they happen in. Since 2017 its centre has been PLX Tjärö, four days each August on a protected island in the archipelago: no cars, only boats, barefoot paths and cows. In 2025 that meant six stages, over sixty music acts and thirty exhibiting artists, a floating sauna and a popup cinema. More than 250 artists from over 25 countries have played there.

An art and music collective that builds festivals where there are none: an island in the Blekinge archipelago, an empty warehouse, a museum's old casino.

PLX has been going since 2006, an association since 2014, working out of Blekinge, Malmö and Stockholm on festivals, exhibitions and performances made for the place they happen in. Since 2017 its centre has been PLX Tjärö, four days each August on a protected island in the archipelago: no cars, only boats, barefoot paths and cows. In 2025 that meant six stages, over sixty music acts and thirty exhibiting artists, a floating sauna and a popup cinema. More than 250 artists from over 25 countries have played there.

I have curated the art since 2021, and I lead Konst & Teknik, the team that plans the light and lays the power the island runs on: the cabling every artist plugs into, and the help they need once they are out on the rocks with a piece half-built. Choosing the work and making the work possible are the same job here.

I host the cinema: putting it up each year and helping curate what plays. Previews and works in progress from independent filmmakers, often in conversation with Folkets Bio, shown outdoors to whoever sits down.

On Klippan, the granite stage on a high outcrop over the sea, the cliff face itself is the screen. I lead the visuals there: booking the artists who play that rock after dark, and performing on it myself.

PLX turned twenty in 2026 and marked it with ODE JOY, two nights in the old casino at Malmö Konstmuseum in Kungsparken. A large scaffolding installation stood in the main room. I built the site as its double: a vine climbing a scaffold while you read the page.

The tower has four floors because the casino has four main areas, and the score climbs with you: strings on the ground, a hihat on the second, a beat and a whistle on the third, shakuhachi and steel pan at the summit. Six stems by Anton Ingvarsson, crossfading by camera height, and the tower loops, so the climb has no top.

Photographs from Tjärö and ODE JOY by Olle Enqvist, Djoana Gueorguieva, David Neman and Petter Nilsson.

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An audience reclines beneath a dome filled with swirling gold and white imagery during a live performance.

Dome Dreaming

A fulldome film festival at two newly built domes in Stockholm and Malmö.

In May 2026, I co-organised Dome Dreaming, a non-profit festival across three evenings at Wisdome Stockholm and one at Wisdome Malmö. Both venues were newly built, and as far as we know it was the first fulldome film festival in the Nordics.

A fulldome film festival at two newly built domes in Stockholm and Malmö.

In May 2026, I co-organised Dome Dreaming, a non-profit festival across three evenings at Wisdome Stockholm and one at Wisdome Malmö. Both venues were newly built, and as far as we know it was the first fulldome film festival in the Nordics.

The idea took shape at a hackathon I co-organised with Tekniska museet. Through NAVA, we had been collaborating with Aavistus in Helsinki for years and seen how strong their fulldome programme was, and with two new Wisdome venues open in Sweden, we decided to make one of our own.

The festival owes a lot to Stan VanderBeek. In the 1960s he built the Movie-Drome at Stony Point, NY, a geodesic dome where audiences lay on the floor while films, slides and sound played across the surface above them. He pictured a global network of such domes sharing image libraries across borders, a kind of pre-internet visual commons, and called the wider project Expanded Cinema. The technology of his time couldn't quite catch up. Fulldome projection and ambisonic sound finally let that proposition feel like a medium.

Fulldome cinema fills the entire field of view, with ambisonic sound coming from every direction. There are no edges to compose against, and audiences sit or lie back and look up. We wanted to treat that as an artistic medium, not a planetarium attachment.

Each Stockholm evening moved between pre-recorded fulldome works and live audiovisual performances composed directly for the dome. The Malmö evening played a tighter selection. An open call brought in shorts from artists across Europe, and an installation programme ran at Trähallen, the wooden hall next to Wisdome Stockholm.

Trähallen stayed open between sets so audiences could drift through it, a tactile moss landscape, electromagnetic sculptures of branches and orange extension cables, a VR embodiment piece, and the new mobile dome from SKH.

We coordinated a student day with KKH, SKH, Konstfack and Östra Grevie Folkhögskola so the next generation of fulldome artists could meet the visiting ones, with screenings, talks and an open studio at Trähallen.

I designed and built the festival website at domedreaming.com and the surrounding visual identity, with Linn Willebrand on graphics, animation and communication. To help artists prepare for the dome geometry, I also built a browser-based preview tool that maps any image or video onto a 3D model of Wisdome Stockholm, so they could see how their work would land on the surface before arriving for the production residency. The 3D model was made by Ashley Reed at Smash Studio.

I organised the festival with Fredrik Edström of IVAR Studios and Sebastian Häger. Festival photography by Rose Hallgren and Glidephotos, with Rose also handling documentation and communication. Produced in collaboration with Aavistus, Kokong, Baltic Analog Lab and Nordic Audiovisual Artists. Supported by Tekniska museet, Malmö Stad, Region Stockholm and Kulturfonden Sverige-Finland. Full programme and credits at domedreaming.com.

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A hand grips a glowing arcade joystick under blue and purple light, reflected in the controller’s glossy surface.

Jagad

For three nights, a building in central Stockholm became a five-storey, playable arcade game.

To mark the launch of Kanal 5's show "Jagad", we rebuilt a classic top-down chase game onto the building itself: the windows became the blocks, the gaps between them became the streets. Players worked custom arcade controllers down on the pavement, hunting roaming celebrity avatars across the facade. Catch one and the whole road network flooded with your colour. High scores and player names were projected straight back onto the wall.

For three nights, a building in central Stockholm became a five-storey, playable arcade game.

To mark the launch of Kanal 5's show "Jagad", we rebuilt a classic top-down chase game onto the building itself: the windows became the blocks, the gaps between them became the streets. Players worked custom arcade controllers down on the pavement, hunting roaming celebrity avatars across the facade. Catch one and the whole road network flooded with your colour. High scores and player names were projected straight back onto the wall.

Made with Smash Studio and Platon Marko. I handled the game and real-time visuals, designed and built the physical arcade controllers and their instruction panels, and built the web version so anyone could play from a phone. Over three nights hundreds queued up, some to chase down their own avatar.

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The Dome Conductor title and an orchestra fill the curved projection above a seated audience at Wisdome Stockholm.

Dome Conductor

An orchestra follows your hands. Raise them, find a rhythm and conduct the music around you.

I worked on development and parts of the design for Dome Conductor, made with IVAR Studios and SMASH for KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The interactive installation premiered at Tekniska museet during the 2025 Baltic Sea Festival, bringing the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra into Wisdome Stockholm.

An orchestra follows your hands. Raise them, find a rhythm and conduct the music around you.

I worked on development and parts of the design for Dome Conductor, made with IVAR Studios and SMASH for KTH Royal Institute of Technology. The interactive installation premiered at Tekniska museet during the 2025 Baltic Sea Festival, bringing the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra into Wisdome Stockholm.

A camera tracks visitors' movements. KTH's machine learning model, trained on recordings of conductors, translates those gestures into tempo: move faster and the orchestra accelerates; pause and it waits. No suit or calibration is needed. KTH researchers Hedvig Kjellström and Mert Mermerci worked on the project, supported by WASP and SeRC.

The experience uses the opening ninety seconds of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, recorded with conductor Daniel Harding. A wide-angle camera captured the orchestra for the dome's 180° projection, while playback lets the visitor set the pace. The musicians also recorded reactions: conduct them successfully and they applaud.

Fredrik Edström produced the project, Oliver Akermo was the cinematographer, and Emile Pascoe and SMASH also worked on development. Images from IVAR Studios.

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The blue and red towers of Facing Worlds rise from opposite ends of an asteroid bridge in space.

Facing Worlds

Facing Worlds has grown into a browser-native desktop 5v5 capture-the-flag game, rebuilt from the data, rules and assets of Unreal Tournament’s most famous map.

Open facingworlds.org on a computer and you drop straight into the match. A WebSocket server fills two five-player teams with bots, makes room as people join, and keeps the shots, damage, deaths, flags and score in sync. Six weapons, pickups, character animation, the UT99 HUD, original sounds and announcer, and a live scoreboard now make it a game rather than a map viewer.

Facing Worlds has grown into a browser-native desktop 5v5 capture-the-flag game, rebuilt from the data, rules and assets of Unreal Tournament’s most famous map.

Open facingworlds.org on a computer and you drop straight into the match. A WebSocket server fills two five-player teams with bots, makes room as people join, and keeps the shots, damage, deaths, flags and score in sync. Six weapons, pickups, character animation, the UT99 HUD, original sounds and announcer, and a live scoreboard now make it a game rather than a map viewer.

The firing cadence, weapon poses, projectiles, muzzle flashes and impact effects follow the original UnrealScript wherever the browser can. The characters carry the right weapons, move through the original animation sets and stay in the match through hits, deaths and respawns. It is still deliberately rough and immediate: click the page, grab a flag and run.

On a phone, the same live match becomes a miniature arena you can walk around on the table.

The mobile AR view is a spectator companion to the desktop game. The phone camera uses six-degree image tracking to hold the arena still on the print, while a read-only connection brings in the match: players run, carry the correct weapons and flags, fire and fall in the same positions seen by everyone playing first-person. You can move the phone around the table, crouch beside a tower and watch the score and both team rosters update on screen.

The project began as a sheet of AR stickers I brought to Unreal Fest in Stockholm in September 2025. I was working on light and installation for the Epic Games event, produced by Happy Times, and made this outside the brief. Pointing a phone at a sticker placed the whole arena on the table: a small portal back to a game I had loved since I was a teenager.

The level is placed from the original map data rather than eyeballed from screenshots: two flag bases, twenty player starts, 56 pickups, 166 navigation points and 592 path connections. I started from a 3D map model by Harry Clarke, which had compressed the arena to 43% of its real scale. Restoring the 71-metre towers and grounding the old path network against a new navigation surface brought back the long, exposed crossings that give Facing Worlds its rhythm.

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A silhouetted performer stands inside nested orange arches that extend into the dark stage.

Danny Saucedo

Projection mapping and stage design for Danny Saucedo's "Happy That You Found Me" in Melodifestivalen 2024.

A long-held dream to bring something new to the Melodifestivalen stage. The stage featured three 8 x 4.5m LED walls at 3200 x 1800 pixels each, a 7.9 x 9.1m LED floor at 1664 x 1920 pixels, and a physical Romanesque gate with staircase built for projection mapping.

Projection mapping and stage design for Danny Saucedo's "Happy That You Found Me" in Melodifestivalen 2024.

A long-held dream to bring something new to the Melodifestivalen stage. The stage featured three 8 x 4.5m LED walls at 3200 x 1800 pixels each, a 7.9 x 9.1m LED floor at 1664 x 1920 pixels, and a physical Romanesque gate with staircase built for projection mapping.

The visuals move through a moonlit Romanesque evening, a garden like Elysium, building to a climax where the gate falls back into open sky.

We tested the visuals on a physical maquette, and I developed a custom Unity camera tool to lock a precise direction of photography across the scenes.

I was technical director and creative support, working with Smash Studio, who led the stage design, 3D modelling and animation. Rose Hallgren built the physical maquette we used for testing.

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A carved wooden arch frames the surrounding London buildings, bringing an ornamental doorway into the street.

Eastern City Portal

A hybrid sculpture and augmented reality portal for the streets of London.

Eastern City Portal was a public artwork on Camomile Street in the City of London. The piece was a continuation of an installation at Nowhere, where we built a large wooden crack in the fabric of reality. Looking through it, visitors would see into a lush walnut garden, in contrast to the dry sandy landscape of Monegros. For this commission we developed the concept further into a sculpture that doubled as an AR experience. Passersby could point their phone at it and see the street transformed.

A hybrid sculpture and augmented reality portal for the streets of London.

Eastern City Portal was a public artwork on Camomile Street in the City of London. The piece was a continuation of an installation at Nowhere, where we built a large wooden crack in the fabric of reality. Looking through it, visitors would see into a lush walnut garden, in contrast to the dry sandy landscape of Monegros. For this commission we developed the concept further into a sculpture that doubled as an AR experience. Passersby could point their phone at it and see the street transformed.

Carved from sustainably sourced timber, the sculpture was shaped as a gateway, its outline roughly following the shape of London. The wood was CNC carved and painted with patterns designed to guide the augmented reality experience, acting as markers for the three-layered design.

I like these kinds of pieces, where digital techniques meet sculpted wood and people can interact with both.

Getting the carved patterns to read as AR markers took the most tuning, so the three layers landed when you raised your phone.

I made this with Erik Schmitz, for a commission from Scarlett Entertainment.

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A performer faces a towering black-and-white portrait projected onto the dark stage.

Jag är Gud

Scenography, video, and lighting design for a sold-out autobiographical stage piece about bipolar disorder.

Jag är Gud is an autobiographical one-man show by dancer and performer Danne Dahlin about living with bipolar disorder. I got involved through a mutual friend who introduced me to Danne, and we spent months talking about the piece.

Scenography, video, and lighting design for a sold-out autobiographical stage piece about bipolar disorder.

Jag är Gud is an autobiographical one-man show by dancer and performer Danne Dahlin about living with bipolar disorder. I got involved through a mutual friend who introduced me to Danne, and we spent months talking about the piece.

When Danne graduated, he had already caught the attention of leading choreographers and was headed for a career in dance. 19 years later, he was so affected by electroshock treatments and heavy medication that he could barely move. In 2018, Danne disappeared in Los Angeles. He was found surrounded by American police with drawn weapons. His bipolar disorder had taken hold again. In Jag är Gud, Danne looks back on his life: a youth as a promising dancer, his constant chase for love, parties with Russian oil billionaires and Spanish hitmen, his first manic episode in New York, and the stable years that could no longer keep the illness at bay.

The challenge was making Danne's stories visible on stage while keeping the lighting simple. The show premiered at Kilen, Kulturhuset Stockholm in November 2024. It sold out and ran a second time.

"Danne Dahlin lets us see his experience through the eye of the storm, a calm place in chaos. [...] When Danne Dahlin takes command of his self-exposing story, it is brave, human, and beautiful." (Anna Angstrom, Svenska Dagbladet)

Danne Dahlin performed the piece, with Jakob Bladh directing and Teresia Björk as Danne’s mentor. Rose Hallgren and I shared video and scenography; I also designed the lighting.

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Purple, blue and green projections cover Uppsala Town Hall while people gather around a controller in the square.

Resonance

Interactive projection mapping on Uppsala Town Hall, where the public could paint the facade in colour.

Resonance was an interactive projection mapping piece on the facade of Uppsala Town Hall. Four weatherproofed touch pads with embedded lighting were placed in the main square, built to handle snow, rain, and countless jumps. I built them with Arduino, feeding into the Unreal Engine project over USB. Each pad triggered a colour ripple across the facade, animating an ocean scene on the building's surface. When all four pads were activated at once, a final sequence of light and music played out. I laser cut a scale model of the building for testing the projection, and the facade was drone-scanned to build a digital replica.

Interactive projection mapping on Uppsala Town Hall, where the public could paint the facade in colour.

Resonance was an interactive projection mapping piece on the facade of Uppsala Town Hall. Four weatherproofed touch pads with embedded lighting were placed in the main square, built to handle snow, rain, and countless jumps. I built them with Arduino, feeding into the Unreal Engine project over USB. Each pad triggered a colour ripple across the facade, animating an ocean scene on the building's surface. When all four pads were activated at once, a final sequence of light and music played out. I laser cut a scale model of the building for testing the projection, and the facade was drone-scanned to build a digital replica.

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An illuminated face and warm architectural forms are projected across a curved building facade at night.

Sala Hjärtslag

Projection mapping 400 years of Sala's history onto a curved facade.

In 2024, the city of Sala celebrated 400 years since receiving its city charter from Gustav II Adolf. For the anniversary, the piece took visitors on an audiovisual journey through 400 years of Sala's history, mapped onto a curved building facade. Much of the work was done on-site, aligning the projection to fit the architecture.

Projection mapping 400 years of Sala's history onto a curved facade.

In 2024, the city of Sala celebrated 400 years since receiving its city charter from Gustav II Adolf. For the anniversary, the piece took visitors on an audiovisual journey through 400 years of Sala's history, mapped onto a curved building facade. Much of the work was done on-site, aligning the projection to fit the architecture.

I was technical lead and projection mapper, working with Smash Studio, who did the 3D modelling and animation.

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White branching lines radiate from a dark circular centre across the illuminated facade of Storkyrkan at night.

Chorus

A sound-reactive work projected onto Uppsala Cathedral for Allt ljus på Uppsala in 2021 and onto Storkyrkan for Nobel Week Lights the year after.

Tove Alderin reached out through our mutual friend Sophia Wood. The piece played Dona nobis pacem alongside NASA's "Chorus", a VLF recording of electromagnetic waves in the Earth's magnetosphere. Anyone standing outside could sing into their phone and become a voice in the work. Pitch analysis at the Stockholm University Phonetics Laboratory drove particles that formed a pattern across the facade.

A sound-reactive work projected onto Uppsala Cathedral for Allt ljus på Uppsala in 2021 and onto Storkyrkan for Nobel Week Lights the year after.

Tove Alderin reached out through our mutual friend Sophia Wood. The piece played Dona nobis pacem alongside NASA's "Chorus", a VLF recording of electromagnetic waves in the Earth's magnetosphere. Anyone standing outside could sing into their phone and become a voice in the work. Pitch analysis at the Stockholm University Phonetics Laboratory drove particles that formed a pattern across the facade.

Both years we worked out of a freezing cargo container on the square, aligning the mapping as our breath fogged the laptops.

The tricky part was making hundreds of simultaneous voices still feel personal. With anyone in the city able to join from a phone, each singer needed to recognise their own particle, a few pixels moving the way their voice moved.

The work was created by Tove Alderin. I handled the projection mapping, composition and socket data. Mattias Heldner at the Stockholm University Phonetics Laboratory did the pitch analysis, Sol Sarratea wrote the shaders, David Giese did the video, and Scenteknik ran the rig in Stockholm.

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A seven-piece jazz band plays in front of three hanging screens washed in blurred purple, orange and turquoise projections, the audience in silhouette.

Lumia

Live visuals for Lumia, an audiovisual jazz concert by guitarist Tomas Larsson, where seven musicians played in front of projections that answered their instruments.

Lumia premiered at Dramalogen in Halmstad on 23 September 2022, then played Forum in Hyltebruk on 30 September and Teaterklubben at Halmstad Teater during Kulturnatten on 1 October. Each of the seven pieces had its own visual idea. I built generators the band could play: rain that the vibraphone and drums set falling in the intro, patterns that followed the trumpet's volume, and lines and waves that traced Per Thornberg's saxophone, each note shifting the colour. Gamla stan ran 1950s and 60s footage from 8 mm Halmstad by Stefan Petzén and Johan Rosenlind under sound-reactive filters.

Live visuals for Lumia, an audiovisual jazz concert by guitarist Tomas Larsson, where seven musicians played in front of projections that answered their instruments.

Lumia premiered at Dramalogen in Halmstad on 23 September 2022, then played Forum in Hyltebruk on 30 September and Teaterklubben at Halmstad Teater during Kulturnatten on 1 October. Each of the seven pieces had its own visual idea. I built generators the band could play: rain that the vibraphone and drums set falling in the intro, patterns that followed the trumpet's volume, and lines and waves that traced Per Thornberg's saxophone, each note shifting the colour. Gamla stan ran 1950s and 60s footage from 8 mm Halmstad by Stefan Petzén and Johan Rosenlind under sound-reactive filters.

For Oket, a story about a farmer whose ox dies, and The Bolmen Express, about the old steam railway from Halmstad to Bolmen, I generated AI animations styled after Josef Frank and John Bauer. In Oket the guitar set how fast the animation played.

The band was Tomas Larsson on guitar, Malte Zeberg on double bass, Per Thornberg on saxophone, Adam Sass on trumpet, Fia Forslund on vibraphone, Jonathan Kabell on drums and Axel Croné on clarinet. Anton Wernebäck ran sound, Charlotte Ek Wirack produced, Klara Viridén made the graphics and Servando Barreiro did programming. Lumia was a project by Tomas Larsson with support from Region Halland, Kulturrådet and Hylte Kommun, in collaboration with Dramalogen. In 2023 I made the visuals for Lumia II as well, at Festaurang in Halmstad. Concert photos by Rose Hallgren.

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A monochrome projection of sculpted figures covers the Great Synagogue as visitors watch from the street.

Heroes

Real-life statues, drone-scanned architecture, projected onto Stockholm's Great Synagogue.

Heroes was a projection mapped piece on the facade of Stockholms Stora Synagoga in 2022. The work honoured Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews in Budapest during the Holocaust, and Dag Hammarskjöld, 1961 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and UN Secretary-General. Real-life statues of both men were 3D scanned and the synagogue was captured by drone, giving us precise geometry to work with. Black and white, high contrast, with tight animation set to the building's ornate architecture.

Real-life statues, drone-scanned architecture, projected onto Stockholm's Great Synagogue.

Heroes was a projection mapped piece on the facade of Stockholms Stora Synagoga in 2022. The work honoured Raoul Wallenberg, who saved thousands of Jews in Budapest during the Holocaust, and Dag Hammarskjöld, 1961 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and UN Secretary-General. Real-life statues of both men were 3D scanned and the synagogue was captured by drone, giving us precise geometry to work with. Black and white, high contrast, with tight animation set to the building's ornate architecture.

I worked with Smash Studio, with music by Joseph Wilkinson. The commission came from the World Jewish Congress, Raoul Wallenberg Academy and Nobel Week Lights.

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Colourful illuminated drawings of hands, flowers and faces fill a window as LED signs.

Lights for Ukraine

An open call for illustrations, turned into LED signs and auctioned for Sverige för UNHCR.

Lights for Ukraine was an exhibition of custom light signs at Shoof, a mobile booth gallery in Hornstull metro station by graphic designer Samira Bouabana, which I rented for a month. Through an open call, illustrators submitted work that I prepared for production as LED signs with coloured silicone covers on laser-cut acrylic. I built a custom auction system so passersby could bid on the pieces directly. All signs were auctioned off with proceeds going to Sverige för UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

An open call for illustrations, turned into LED signs and auctioned for Sverige för UNHCR.

Lights for Ukraine was an exhibition of custom light signs at Shoof, a mobile booth gallery in Hornstull metro station by graphic designer Samira Bouabana, which I rented for a month. Through an open call, illustrators submitted work that I prepared for production as LED signs with coloured silicone covers on laser-cut acrylic. I built a custom auction system so passersby could bid on the pieces directly. All signs were auctioned off with proceeds going to Sverige för UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

I mounted the exhibition with Rose Hallgren. Eugenia Kukharchuk designed the logo.

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The words Tillit är en palindrom hang in bright handwritten light above open ground under a violet dusk sky.

Text Type Light

Words sent in through an open call, written into Stockholm at night with a stick of light.

Text Type Light was a Svartljus project that began in spring 2020 as the COVID-19 Open Call for Text and Type in Light, while the pandemic kept people apart. People sent in lines of text, typefaces and music. Each line was set in type as an image 144 pixels high, one pixel for each LED on a handheld stick, which plays the image back one column at a time. We walked the stick through streets, squares and station entrances on camera, then built up its trail in TouchDesigner, so the words were left standing in the place. The finished pieces went out as short films on Instagram.

Words sent in through an open call, written into Stockholm at night with a stick of light.

Text Type Light was a Svartljus project that began in spring 2020 as the COVID-19 Open Call for Text and Type in Light, while the pandemic kept people apart. People sent in lines of text, typefaces and music. Each line was set in type as an image 144 pixels high, one pixel for each LED on a handheld stick, which plays the image back one column at a time. We walked the stick through streets, squares and station entrances on camera, then built up its trail in TouchDesigner, so the words were left standing in the place. The finished pieces went out as short films on Instagram.

The writing happened out in public space, at night, while gatherings were restricted. On one walkway a sign read Håll avstånd till varandra, keep your distance from each other, and the words went up right beside it.

I built the stick around a Teensy 3.6 and a strip of 144 addressable RGB LEDs. A small Python script, adapted from one by Lucas Berbesson of La Fabrique DIY, turns each image into a text file of colour values, rotated so that every column of the image becomes one frame for the strip. The files go on the Teensy's SD card. Four buttons pick a file, light every LED as a test, and start or stop playback. After start, the first LED glows red for three seconds and goes dark for two, time to get into position, then the stick shows a new column every 80 milliseconds while it is carried along. The firmware is on GitHub.

That autumn Nobel Week Lights asked us for something similar for their social media, since the Nobel festivities that year were digital. We made three new pieces with the words Ljus i mörkret, light in the darkness, at Stadshuset, Stadsmuseet and Sergels torg, in handwritten lettering by Fredrika Frykstrand, whose Synvilla had come in through the open call. We filmed them on 31 October 2020, and Francesco Torelli wrote the music.

The project grew out of Victoria Albrecht's internship with Svartljus in spring 2020. I managed the project, built the LED stick and documented the shoots, and Victoria handled the technical production.

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Linda Nurk shows visitors her grown textiles with pressed flowers, hanging above clear vitrines against a rust-red container wall at Open Cell.

Osmos Kosmos

Augmented reality for Linda Nurk's grown textiles. Point a phone at a piece and a digital garden grows out of its pressed flowers.

Osmos Kosmos was a collaboration with couture artist Linda Nurk, shown at Biodesign Here Now at Open Cell in London during the London Design Festival, 19 to 22 September 2019. Linda grows her own textiles with what she calls the Couture Vivante method, joining raw elements of nature with couture: home-grown bio-textiles, and silkworms raised on a torso mould that weave petals and leaves into the fabric itself. Through pattern recognition we treated each piece as a digital garden, so the life that made the fabric could carry on virtually. I built the AR as an iPhone app in Unity and Vuforia, with the textiles themselves as tracking targets. Erik Norrhede modelled the 3D flowers and Alexander Wallin made the music.

Augmented reality for Linda Nurk's grown textiles. Point a phone at a piece and a digital garden grows out of its pressed flowers.

Osmos Kosmos was a collaboration with couture artist Linda Nurk, shown at Biodesign Here Now at Open Cell in London during the London Design Festival, 19 to 22 September 2019. Linda grows her own textiles with what she calls the Couture Vivante method, joining raw elements of nature with couture: home-grown bio-textiles, and silkworms raised on a torso mould that weave petals and leaves into the fabric itself. Through pattern recognition we treated each piece as a digital garden, so the life that made the fabric could carry on virtually. I built the AR as an iPhone app in Unity and Vuforia, with the textiles themselves as tracking targets. Erik Norrhede modelled the 3D flowers and Alexander Wallin made the music.

In 2020 Linda showed the series as Embodiment in Art in Fashion at Sven-Harrys konstmuseum in Stockholm. For it I made a new version of the AR in Spark AR, Meta's platform for camera effects. Seen through the phone, her Flora bustier, grown from a culture of bacteria and yeast on a cast of her body, grows an algorithmically generated bloom. The effect also worked on the bustier's photo in the exhibition catalogue. Meta closed Spark AR in January 2025, so the AR now lives only in screen captures like these. Linda and I took the photographs and recordings.

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Translucent textile forms glow blue and pink, with a bright red line tracing their folds.

Emerging Sensation

An interactive installation combining smart textiles and augmented reality, 25 metres below ground in a retired nuclear reactor hall.

Emerging Sensation took over Reaktorhallen R1, the old reactor hall underneath KTH in Stockholm, for several weeks in January 2019. The textile sculptures combined optic fibre and custom 3D-printed parts, with LED strips woven directly into the fabric. Conductive thread woven into the fabric gave the sculptures capacitive touch, so when visitors touched them, the light animations shifted and a signal was sent to the HoloLens AR layer.

I built the light animations on Arduino and a node-based OSC system that bridged the physical sculptures and the HoloLens. I spent days and nights in that reactor hall, listening to System of a Down and going slightly insane.

An interactive installation combining smart textiles and augmented reality, 25 metres below ground in a retired nuclear reactor hall.

Emerging Sensation took over Reaktorhallen R1, the old reactor hall underneath KTH in Stockholm, for several weeks in January 2019. The textile sculptures combined optic fibre and custom 3D-printed parts, with LED strips woven directly into the fabric. Conductive thread woven into the fabric gave the sculptures capacitive touch, so when visitors touched them, the light animations shifted and a signal was sent to the HoloLens AR layer.

I built the light animations on Arduino and a node-based OSC system that bridged the physical sculptures and the HoloLens. I spent days and nights in that reactor hall, listening to System of a Down and going slightly insane.

Malin Bobeck Tadaa initiated the project and developed the textile sculptures. I made the light animations and the system connecting them to the HoloLens. Björn Albihn and Jonatan Crafoord at Really Interactive built the mixed reality side.

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A visitor watches colourful patterns illuminate the glass panels of Harpa Concert Hall.

Tiny/Massive

An open call for artists to illuminate the facade of Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavík: 77 pixels wide, 13 pixels tall, one enormous building.

Tiny/Massive grew out of NAVA (Nordic Audiovisual Artists) and our years of working with the Harpa facade. The name says it all: the building's 714 LED panels map to a resolution of just 77 by 13 pixels across an almost 100-metre wide facade, each pixel over a metre wide. We released an open call inviting artists to create video, generative, and interactive content for this tiny-but-massive canvas, and the response was strong, with well-known generative artists contributing.

An open call for artists to illuminate the facade of Harpa Concert Hall in Reykjavík: 77 pixels wide, 13 pixels tall, one enormous building.

Tiny/Massive grew out of NAVA (Nordic Audiovisual Artists) and our years of working with the Harpa facade. The name says it all: the building's 714 LED panels map to a resolution of just 77 by 13 pixels across an almost 100-metre wide facade, each pixel over a metre wide. We released an open call inviting artists to create video, generative, and interactive content for this tiny-but-massive canvas, and the response was strong, with well-known generative artists contributing.

For the Reykjavík Winter Lights Festival in February 2019, we parked a Strætó, a Reykjavík city bus, outside Harpa in the middle of winter and invited people to come in and experience the work. Inside the bus we had a custom arcade tabletop with joysticks and buttons, so visitors could play interactive games and control visualisations directly on the building. We provided creators kits with templates for Processing, Unity, TouchDesigner and After Effects, and ran workshops to help artists get started.

We ran a course at the Iceland University of the Arts where students developed their own content for the building. During the festival, Loney Dear performed a live concert inside the bus, controlling the visuals on the facade in real time with Teenage Engineering's OP-Z.

I designed the open call, the website, and the visual identity, project managed the whole thing through NAVA, and coded visualisations for the building. We had funding from the Nordic Culture Fund through their Opstart grant. The collective behind Tiny/Massive was myself, Atlí Bollason and Owen Hindley.

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Two projected hands reach towards one another across a dark reflective surface.

Transcend

An interactive Pepper's Ghost installation inspired by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, where two strangers' fingertips touch in mid-air.

Transcend was built for Urban Burn Stockholm in 2017. Two acrylic glass pyramids, one inverted on top of the other, sat inside a wooden cage adorned with colours, patterns, and vines. We wanted an Indiana Jones feeling, like discovering a hidden ancient machine.

An interactive Pepper's Ghost installation inspired by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, where two strangers' fingertips touch in mid-air.

Transcend was built for Urban Burn Stockholm in 2017. Two acrylic glass pyramids, one inverted on top of the other, sat inside a wooden cage adorned with colours, patterns, and vines. We wanted an Indiana Jones feeling, like discovering a hidden ancient machine.

Visitors placed their hands into one of two boxes, each housing a Leap Motion sensor that turned their hand into a virtual one. The hand was displayed on a hidden monitor and reflected through the acrylic using the Pepper's Ghost technique, making it appear to hover inside the pyramid. The virtual hands were covered in Aztec and Mayan-inspired patterns. Inspired by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam, when two visitors' index fingers touched, light streaks and particle effects appeared alongside an audio cue. People loved just moving their hand around, watching it float in thin air, and then pulling friends over to complete the gesture together. It was my first time working with Pepper's Ghost and hand sensing.

I made Transcend with Hybrid Forest, later Smash Studio, and Rose Hallgren.

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Projected blue and white patterns cover a performer’s face and clothing in a dark audiovisual performance.

NAVA

NAVA, a network for audiovisual artists across the Nordic, Baltic and Arctic regions, founded at Harpa in 2016.

I co-founded NAVA during a project at Harpa in Reykjavík. We were already hacking the Harpa facade together for Sónar, and NAVA came out of wanting to keep that collaboration going beyond a single festival.

NAVA, a network for audiovisual artists across the Nordic, Baltic and Arctic regions, founded at Harpa in 2016.

I co-founded NAVA during a project at Harpa in Reykjavík. We were already hacking the Harpa facade together for Sónar, and NAVA came out of wanting to keep that collaboration going beyond a single festival.

I got into VJing at 21, through a Modul8 workshop run by Pixelvärk in Stockholm. From there I ran a VJ collective in Montreal called APM300 with Thien Vu Dang and Charlotte Risch, two fantastic video artists, and that projection work was part of how I ended up at Moment Factory. NAVA continued the same thread. When we started in 2016, Aavistus in Helsinki and Nonagon in Sweden did not exist, and neither did most of the audiovisual festivals that came after. We were one of several small initiatives across the Nordics pushing for the art form, and while we had no direct hand in what grew up alongside us, it felt good to be part of an early wave.

Through open calls NAVA paired musicians with visual artists, starting at Sónar Reykjavík and the Countdown Stage at Roskilde Festival from 2016 to 2019. In April 2019, after Sónar Reykjavík was cancelled, we and Plútó put on Skaðablót at Bíó Paradís in a few weeks, a one-day festival with DJ sets from Phil Hartnoll of Orbital and Kero Kero Bonito, proceeds going to an emergency fund for Icelandic electronic musicians. We also ran Tiny/Massive at the Reykjavík Winter Lights Festival.

In 2020, Tour de Lux turned bicycles into projection platforms in Stockholm, Oslo and Helsinki, rolling through parks and courtyards for pop-up audiovisual nights.

In 2022, Nordic Lights paired twelve artists into six new audiovisual acts across three festivals: Monument in Norway, Nonagon in Sweden and Aavistus in Helsinki. Residencies ran first: a mountain cabin above a Norwegian valley, a disused steel silo in the Swedish forest, and a wooden farmhouse in the Finnish countryside. Each duo spent a week together writing the piece, then we brought the six new acts to each festival over the summer and autumn.

A week together in a cabin or a silo, then the piece on stage: that rhythm is what NAVA is really about.

In 2023, Annie Tådne, Merle Karp and I spent three weeks in Sisimiut, Greenland for Arctic Lights, running workshops and performing at Arctic Sounds. In 2024 we connected with Kokong on Åland and Baltic Analog Lab in Riga. NAVA is currently working on DOME DREAMING and ÖTOPIA, a Creative Europe project.

I co-founded NAVA with Atlí Bollason, Owen Hindley and Rasmus Stride. Katrín Hauksdóttir joined us in 2019. NAVA is supported by Nordic Culture Fund, Nordic Culture Point and NAPA.

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Text Type Light

The words Tillit är en palindrom hang in bright handwritten light above open ground under a violet dusk sky.

Words sent in through an open call, written into Stockholm at night with a stick of light.

Your smile is contagious, written in white script light beneath a dark steel structure against a blue night sky.

Text Type Light was a Svartljus project that began in spring 2020 as the COVID-19 Open Call for Text and Type in Light, while the pandemic kept people apart. People sent in lines of text, typefaces and music. Each line was set in type as an image 144 pixels high, one pixel for each LED on a handheld stick, which plays the image back one column at a time. We walked the stick through streets, squares and station entrances on camera, then built up its trail in TouchDesigner, so the words were left standing in the place. The finished pieces went out as short films on Instagram.

Inte för min egen del, written in light across the forecourt of a red building with garage doors at night.
Utan för alla andras, written in light along a pavement beside the same red building.
We're all in this alone, together, written in light at Sergels torg beside the lit glass obelisk.

The writing happened out in public space, at night, while gatherings were restricted. On one walkway a sign read Håll avstånd till varandra, keep your distance from each other, and the words went up right beside it.

Här börjar jag, written in rough white light letters on a quay at night, the lit waterfront behind.
Här slutar du, written in light on a walkway at night beside an orange sign asking people to keep their distance.
Plats för nya tankar, written in white script light across a dark courtyard below a lit arched gateway.

I built the stick around a Teensy 3.6 and a strip of 144 addressable RGB LEDs. A small Python script, adapted from one by Lucas Berbesson of La Fabrique DIY, turns each image into a text file of colour values, rotated so that every column of the image becomes one frame for the strip. The files go on the Teensy's SD card. Four buttons pick a file, light every LED as a test, and start or stop playback. After start, the first LED glows red for three seconds and goes dark for two, time to get into position, then the stick shows a new column every 80 milliseconds while it is carried along. The firmware is on GitHub.

Comment te dire adieu, auf Wiedersehen, written in light along the entrance of Stockholm Centralstation as travellers pass.
Words in broad light letters, starting with Exist, run along a waiting metro train on a striped platform.
Synvilla in jagged light letters beneath a tall metal frame at dusk.

That autumn Nobel Week Lights asked us for something similar for their social media, since the Nobel festivities that year were digital. We made three new pieces with the words Ljus i mörkret, light in the darkness, at Stadshuset, Stadsmuseet and Sergels torg, in handwritten lettering by Fredrika Frykstrand, whose Synvilla had come in through the open call. We filmed them on 31 October 2020, and Francesco Torelli wrote the music.

Ljus i mörkret in rounded light letters on the quay in front of Stockholm City Hall at dusk.
Ljus i mörkret in light letters across the rain-wet courtyard of Stadsmuseet, its windows lit.
A person holds the glowing LED stick on the quay in front of Stockholm City Hall at dusk.
Two people check the lit LED stick on a balcony above the courtyard of Stadsmuseet.
Outside Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, one person holds the LED stick while another checks a laptop.

The project grew out of Victoria Albrecht's internship with Svartljus in spring 2020. I managed the project, built the LED stick and documented the shoots, and Victoria handled the technical production.

More projects

Jonas Johansson