Jonas Johansson

Jonas Johansson is an artist, designer 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.

jonasjohansson.se
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CV · Labs
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 at Borderland. Four seats, a shared table and a return to 2002.

The shelf held Counter-Strike 1.6, Quake II, Unreal Tournament, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Diablo and Diablo II, Action Quake 2 and OpenArena. Players picked what to play together, and every sitting came with music, food and drinks.

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

The shelf held Counter-Strike 1.6, Quake II, Unreal Tournament, Heroes of Might and Magic III, Diablo and Diablo II, Action Quake 2 and OpenArena. Players picked what to play together, and every sitting came with music, food and drinks.

Four Raspberry Pi 5 stations ran the games over a local network, each with a launcher I built. Every keypress also went to a computer that ran the room: the music drove the lamps beat by beat, a key hit flashed the lamp at that station and steady play made it glow, and the projection on the cellar wall reacted too.

The launcher took on the atmosphere of each game as players browsed the shelf. This reel strings together its previews for Counter-Strike 1.6, Action Quake 2 and OpenArena.

Music and familiar game sounds filled the room. These mixes put tracks from the playlist together with voices, spells, weapons, announcements and menu sounds from the room's nine game soundbanks, arranged to 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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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 that runs through split tree trunks and winds across the rooms of an exhibition about the energy changing Skellefteå.

I did the lighting for Society Expo Exhibition at Skellefteå museum, with Try New Things. Part of Society Expo 2026, it tells the story of the city's transformation in four parts, following the energy of nature, people, society and the future.

Light that runs through split tree trunks and winds across the rooms of an exhibition about the energy changing Skellefteå.

I did the lighting for Society Expo Exhibition at Skellefteå museum, with Try New Things. Part of Society Expo 2026, it tells the story of the city's transformation in four parts, following the energy of nature, people, society and the future.

The first room is forest, rock and water, and here the 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 inside: WS2815 at 96 LEDs per metre, on QuinLED controllers with custom software. From there visitors follow the river through a recreation of the Finnfors hydropower tunnel, where water becomes electricity.

Rose Hallgren built the cloud that hangs above the greenhouse. Overhead, lines of light run between the installations, and each part of the exhibition has its own colour: blue, green, pink or amber.

Visitors can record their thoughts, listen to other people's and add colour to a shared mural. Children and young people helped shape the rooms through workshops and a public preview.

I loved working with the Try New Things team. Everyone put their heart into every part of the build, from the 3D-printed joints to the signs, the trees, the endless wiring and the sensors, and they brought the same care to guiding the scenography students on site. I hope we get to do it again. Jonas Westling and Pär Olofsson photographed the exhibition, and Try New Things made the film. More images and videos are on their press page.

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Linda Nurk's Flora bustier lit from inside against black, pressed flowers in pink, purple and yellow set into the grown textile, with sheer sleeves.

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 in 2026 I rebuilt the effect for the browser with encantar.js and three.js, from the original project files. Try it by pointing a phone at the bustier on another screen.

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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. I began the series in 2012, living in Montreal and working at a design studio on large-scale stage experiences, when I started 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. I began the series in 2012, living in Montreal and working at a design studio on large-scale stage experiences, when I started 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.

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.

In 2020 three Vista landscapes, Hide, Skrea and Unna, became Vista AR: maps printed as textiles that opened, through an Instagram filter, into 3D worlds behind the fabric, from the stone walls of Hide kulturbrott to the pier at Skrea and a forest at Unna. Louise Silfversparre and Lina Reidarsdotter built the 3D worlds and Francesco Torelli made the music. They hung in Markuskyrkan in Stockholm that autumn. Spark AR has since closed, so I rebuilt them for the browser: try them by pointing a phone at Hide, Skrea or Unna on another screen.

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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 stood on Camomile Street in the City of London. It grew out of a piece we made at Nowhere, a large wooden crack in the fabric of reality that opened, through a phone, onto a lush walnut garden in the middle of the dry Monegros desert. For this commission we took the idea further, into a sculpture that doubled as an AR piece. I made what you see through it: Camomile Street as the public park proposed for it in the Eastern City's plans, with trees, blossom, cyclists and people on foot.

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

Eastern City Portal stood on Camomile Street in the City of London. It grew out of a piece we made at Nowhere, a large wooden crack in the fabric of reality that opened, through a phone, onto a lush walnut garden in the middle of the dry Monegros desert. For this commission we took the idea further, into a sculpture that doubled as an AR piece. I made what you see through it: Camomile Street as the public park proposed for it in the Eastern City's plans, with trees, blossom, cyclists and people on foot.

The sculpture is built in three layers of sustainably sourced timber, shaped as a gateway whose outline roughly follows the shape of London. The outer layer is CNC-milled and painted with a pattern that doubles as the AR marker.

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

Getting the milled pattern to read reliably as a marker took the most tuning.

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

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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 played a concert from inside a city bus with Teenage Engineering's OP-Z, driving ten storeys of light on the harbour.

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, the artist Rasmus Stride and I formed the collective that would go on to do projects like Tiny/Massive and Skaðablót.

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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 pop-up 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 pop-up cinema. More than 250 artists from over 25 countries have played there.

I joined in 2020, have curated the art since 2021, and 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 website 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 hi-hat 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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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 with Atlí Bollason, Owen Hindley and Rasmus Stride 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 with Atlí Bollason, Owen Hindley and Rasmus Stride 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, and it was part of how I ended up at Moment Factory in Montreal. There I started the VJ collective APM300 with Thien Vu Dang and Charlotte Risch, two fantastic video artists. 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, and in 2026 we made Dome Dreaming together with them and Aavistus. NAVA is also working on ÖTOPIA, a Creative Europe project.

Katrín Hauksdóttir joined the four of us in 2019. NAVA is supported by Nordic Culture Fund, Nordic Culture Point and NAPA.

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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.

It was for the launch of TV4's sci-fi drama "Vi kommer i fred". A single-camera totem filmed the square 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.

It was for the launch of TV4's sci-fi drama "Vi kommer i fred". A single-camera totem filmed the square 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 in real time in Resolume. There were two versions of the scene, one for day and one for night, swapping 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 install: putting the live camera feed inside the scene so anyone who stepped up landed in the shot, mapping it to the totem and calibrating it on location.

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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.

In 2022 I rented Shoof, graphic designer Samira Bouabana's mobile booth gallery in Hornstull metro station, for a month and filled it with light signs. Illustrators sent in work through an open call, and I made each piece into a faux neon sign, LED under coloured silicone on laser-cut acrylic. Passers-by could bid on them through an auction system I built, and every sign was sold, with the money going to Sverige för UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency.

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

In 2022 I rented Shoof, graphic designer Samira Bouabana's mobile booth gallery in Hornstull metro station, for a month and filled it with light signs. Illustrators sent in work through an open call, and I made each piece into a faux neon sign, LED under coloured silicone on laser-cut acrylic. Passers-by could bid on them through an auction system I built, and every sign was sold, with the money 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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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 my father, the painter Bengt Johansson. It is a registered non-profit, supported by Region Halland.

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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.

The stage had three LED walls of 8 x 4.5 m at 3200 x 1800 pixels each, a 7.9 x 9.1 m LED floor at 1664 x 1920 pixels, and a physical Romanesque gate with a staircase, built for projection mapping.

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

The stage had three LED walls of 8 x 4.5 m at 3200 x 1800 pixels each, a 7.9 x 9.1 m LED floor at 1664 x 1920 pixels, and a physical Romanesque gate with a 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 brass telescope with a circular wooden housing stands on a tripod against a warm desert sunset.

WYSIWYG

An augmented-reality telescope. Look through it and the landscape gets company.

The name is the old computer promise, What You See Is What You Get, and here you get a little more. A phone hides inside the telescope, and through the eyepiece the camera's view of the landscape fills with birds, animals and towering figures. Turn the telescope and you can go looking for them.

An augmented-reality telescope. Look through it and the landscape gets company.

The name is the old computer promise, What You See Is What You Get, and here you get a little more. A phone hides inside the telescope, and through the eyepiece the camera's view of the landscape fills with birds, animals and towering figures. Turn the telescope and you can go looking for them.

By day the flock is black birds, and at night it becomes a swarm of lights. Giant figures made of particles walk through the landscape. The concept image below puts 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 telescope is brass, on a wooden tripod, with a round wooden housing that holds the phone's screen in its line of sight. Looking at a digital image becomes a physical gesture: sit down, lean in and turn towards something.

In July 2026 it stood in the desert at Elsewhere, and then at Borderland.

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

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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 at Borderland.

Kagora is Japanese basket weaving at the scale of a building, and its name joins kago, Japanese for basket, with aura. Annie Locke Scherer led the design and build, and I designed the light.

A woven pavilion of moving light, built as a place to gather at Borderland.

Kagora is Japanese basket weaving at the scale of a building, and its name joins kago, Japanese for basket, with aura. Annie Locke Scherer led the design and build, and I designed the light.

The ribs follow hanakago flower baskets and kagome weaving, crossing overhead to make a room without closing it off. More than a kilometre of LED strip runs inside the 120 woven tubes, around 32,000 points of light that can each be controlled on its own. As colour travels through the weave, different curves come forward and fall back above the people sitting and lying beneath it. To plan the strips, controllers and power, I built a browser tool for drawing LED installations that works out the voltage drop and the parts list as you draw.

The build began with models, joints and test arches. A crew prepared the diffusion for the LEDs and assembled the woven ribs among the trees.

Teodor Sundström made the sound and Christian Pisano did the engineering. 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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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 put a hand into one of two boxes, each with a Leap Motion sensor that turned it into a virtual hand, covered in Aztec and Mayan-inspired patterns. A hidden monitor, reflected in the acrylic, made the hand appear to hover inside the pyramid. When two visitors' index fingers touched, as in the Creation of Adam, light streaks and particles burst out with a sound. 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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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 the 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.

Rather than send a flat mockup, I built them a 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.

For the ground I tried an illustration I had already made, a circular botanical scene of seed heads and reeds against a low sun, to show how a pattern might sit behind the mark. It was the one they kept. Their lettering and the mouse at its sewing machine are drawn over it in Light Pink, with the sun carried through in Ochre Yellow, and the rest of the palette was settled by playing with the previewer: 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 the 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.

Rather than send a flat mockup, I built them a 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.

For the ground I tried an illustration I had already made, a circular botanical scene of seed heads and reeds against a low sun, to show how a pattern might sit behind the mark. It was the one they kept. Their lettering and the mouse at its sewing machine are drawn over it in Light Pink, with the sun carried through in Ochre Yellow, and the rest of the palette was settled by playing with the previewer: Salmon, Aubergine Purple and Maple Brown.

Rose Hallgren and I made it on their shop floor over the first week of August, 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 previewer also 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.

The saddles went on the printer twice. The first mount left the rug very slightly askew, so the second set carries an offset to correct it.

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

Heroes

A projection on Stockholm's Great Synagogue in honour of Raoul Wallenberg and Dag Hammarskjöld.

Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews in Budapest during the Holocaust, and Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the UN, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961. Statues of both men were 3D-scanned and the synagogue captured by drone, which gave us exact geometry to work with. We kept it black and white and high in contrast, with the animation fitted tight to the building's ornate architecture.

A projection on Stockholm's Great Synagogue in honour of Raoul Wallenberg and Dag Hammarskjöld.

Raoul Wallenberg saved thousands of Jews in Budapest during the Holocaust, and Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the UN, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961. Statues of both men were 3D-scanned and the synagogue captured by drone, which gave us exact geometry to work with. We kept it black and white and high in contrast, with the animation fitted tight 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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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.

We built it for Nowhere, the regional burn in Monegros I have been going to since 2015. 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 and you light a fire: a small, rebellious act of speaking up. It also lit the official closing ceremony.

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

We built it for Nowhere, the regional burn in Monegros I have been going to since 2015. 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 and you light a fire: a small, rebellious act of speaking up. It also 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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The blue and red towers of Facing Worlds rise from opposite ends of an asteroid bridge in space.

Facing Worlds

Unreal Tournament’s most famous map, rebuilt in the browser as a five-a-side capture-the-flag game anyone can join.

It 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.

Unreal Tournament’s most famous map, rebuilt in the browser as a five-a-side capture-the-flag game anyone can join.

It 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.

Since then it has grown into a game. Open facingworlds.org on a computer and you drop straight into the match. A server fills two five-player teams with bots, makes room as people join, and keeps the shots, damage, deaths, flags and score in sync, with six weapons, pickups, the UT99 HUD, the original sounds and announcer, and a live scoreboard.

The firing cadence, weapon poses, projectiles, muzzle flashes and impact effects follow the original UnrealScript wherever the browser can. 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.

Point the camera at the printed marker and the arena holds still on it, with the live match playing out inside: players running, carrying flags, firing and falling where they are in the game. You can move around the table, crouch beside a tower and follow the score and both teams.

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 model of the map by Harry Clarke, which had shrunk the arena to 43% of its real size. Restoring the 71-metre towers brought back the long, exposed crossings that give Facing Worlds its rhythm.

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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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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, and I was its technical producer. Much of the animation was about how one painting moves into another: spreading pigment, wet edges, blooms, ripples, light and mist, always starting from the paintings themselves.

As technical producer I 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 also set up the templates the animators rendered their chapters with, one file for each wall and one for the floor, and the route the finished files took to the hall.

I worked with Jesper Kurlandsky and a team of talented animators, including Annie Tådne, David Giese, Johannes Ferm Winkler, David Nord and Boris Nawratil. Det Mörka Ljuset opened on 26 September 2026. Full credits and visitor information.

Photographs by Martynas Justinevicius (Glidephotos).

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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. Its 714 LED panels make a screen of just 77 by 13 pixels across an almost 100-metre wide facade, each pixel over a metre wide, hence the name. We put out an open call for video, generative and interactive work, with creator kits for Processing, Unity, TouchDesigner and After Effects and workshops to help artists get started, and well-known generative artists took part.

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. Its 714 LED panels make a screen of just 77 by 13 pixels across an almost 100-metre wide facade, each pixel over a metre wide, hence the name. We put out an open call for video, generative and interactive work, with creator kits for Processing, Unity, TouchDesigner and After Effects and workshops to help artists get started, and well-known generative artists took part.

For the Reykjavík Winter Lights Festival in February 2019, we parked a Strætó, a Reykjavík city bus, outside Harpa and invited people in. Inside was a custom arcade tabletop with joysticks and buttons, so visitors could play games and control visuals directly on the building.

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. Tiny/Massive was Atlí Bollason, Owen Hindley and me.

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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, the audiovisual festival in Helsinki I have been part of since it started in 2022, as an artist and through Nordic Audiovisual Artists. Each of the ten participants went looking for their cultural, national or personal identity in patterns, then used sketching and generative AI to combine and remix them into something new. 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, the audiovisual festival in Helsinki I have been part of since it started in 2022, as an artist and through Nordic Audiovisual Artists. Each of the ten participants went looking for their cultural, national or personal identity in patterns, then used sketching and generative AI to combine and remix them into something new. I'd learned tufting during a residency at Konvent Zero in Spain.

The method was the Surrealists' exquisite corpse, where each person adds to a picture without seeing the whole of it, responding only to what came before.

The participants worked in groups, each designing and tufting a square and then passing it on for the next group to respond to, picking up each other's shapes, colours and patterns. It ended as 24 tufted squares covering 140 x 210 cm.

Rose Hallgren designed a modular tufting frame for it that opens to 2 x 4 metres and folds down into a sports bag.

The finished piece was shown at the festival, with conductive thread added to make it interactive with a Circuit Playground. I also made a music track to go with it.

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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.

Sala got its city charter from Gustav II Adolf in 1624, and for the anniversary in 2024 the town's history played out across a curved building facade, in pictures and sound. Much of the work was done on site, fitting the projection to the architecture.

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

Sala got its city charter from Gustav II Adolf in 1624, and for the anniversary in 2024 the town's history played out across a curved building facade, in pictures and sound. Much of the work was done on site, fitting the projection to the architecture.

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

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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. I also make the band's album artwork.

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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. It premiered at Tekniska museet during the 2025 Baltic Sea Festival and brought 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. It premiered at Tekniska museet during the 2025 Baltic Sea Festival and brought 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.

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

Svartljus

The lighting collective I co-founded in 2017, building modular light installations for forests, festivals and public spaces.

Svartljus started at Stugan, a co-created makerspace in Sickla, Stockholm, where Olle Bjerkås, Markus Persson and I 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 build more reactive systems, and that year we exhibited at Sónar Reykjavík and ran a workshop on our techniques.

The lighting collective I co-founded in 2017, building modular light installations for forests, festivals and public spaces.

Svartljus started at Stugan, a co-created makerspace in Sickla, Stockholm, where Olle Bjerkås, Markus Persson and I 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 build more reactive systems, and 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.

Today the core group is seven: Olle Bjerkås, Per-Olov Jernberg, Servando Barreiro, Rose Hallgren, Elias Aabjerg, Lior Nønne Malue Hansen and me, with 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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The Close/Away album artwork without its type: a dense botanical world in purple, pink and green, with figures seated before a glowing stage under a violet sky.

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. I also made the band's name sign and logo.

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. I also made the band's name sign and logo.

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 cover takes the wide view, after the artwork for Moominpappa at Sea by Tove Jansson and the cyclical, almost diabolical world of Uzumaki by Junji Ito, with a lighthouse shining at the centre where the two meet. 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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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 and conductive thread woven into the fabric. Touch a sculpture and its light shifted, and a signal went to the AR layer in the HoloLens.

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 and conductive thread woven into the fabric. Touch a sculpture and its light shifted, and a signal went to the AR layer in the HoloLens.

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, and Björn Albihn and Jonatan Crafoord at Really Interactive built the mixed reality side.

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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 we put three short-throw projectors, an elaborate speaker system and a tablet with our own interface into a small room at Hobo Hotel in Stockholm. Guests could book the room and browse curated films and generative graphics that wrapped around every wall.

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

In 2021 we put three short-throw projectors, an elaborate speaker system and a tablet with our own interface into a small room at Hobo Hotel in Stockholm. Guests could book the room and browse curated films and generative graphics that wrapped around every wall.

I initiated and built Embed with Barkas and Vitali Poluzhnikov.

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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.

Four weatherproof pads with built-in lights stood in the main square, made to take snow, rain and a lot of jumping. I built them with Arduino, wired over USB into the Unreal Engine project. Each pad sent a ripple of colour across an ocean scene animated on the facade, and when all four were pressed at once, a final sequence of light and music played out. The facade was drone-scanned for a digital replica, and I laser-cut a scale model of the building to test the projection on.

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

Four weatherproof pads with built-in lights stood in the main square, made to take snow, rain and a lot of jumping. I built them with Arduino, wired over USB into the Unreal Engine project. Each pad sent a ripple of colour across an ocean scene animated on the facade, and when all four were pressed at once, a final sequence of light and music played out. The facade was drone-scanned for a digital replica, and I laser-cut a scale model of the building to test the projection on.

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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, and 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, and 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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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. I made the game and its real-time visuals, and a web version so anyone could play from a phone. Platon Marko built the arcade controllers. Over three nights hundreds queued up, some to chase down their own avatar.

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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, so you can see the wooden joints and the metal mechanism doing the work. Erik Schmitz and Selim designed it, scaling a small DIY kinetic model up into something people could work themselves, and it swam at Elsewhere in July 2026.

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, so you can see the wooden joints and the metal mechanism doing the work. Erik Schmitz and Selim designed it, scaling a small DIY kinetic model up into something people could work themselves, and it swam at Elsewhere in July 2026.

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

The twelve ribs, spine, tail and two fins each have their own LED run on two controllers, and I programmed them against the whale's 3D geometry, so colour can travel along a single bone or move through the whole body.

Erik did the engineering and built the wooden structure and the mechanics. Albert Carrera at Nouled handled the hardware, mounting and cabling, and took the film photographs.

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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 Tomas Larsson on guitar, Mattias Grönroos on piano and bass, Fia Forslund on vibraphone and Michael Edlund on drums, four musicians from Halland, where I grew up. 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 Tomas Larsson on guitar, Mattias Grönroos on piano and bass, Fia Forslund on vibraphone and Michael Edlund on drums, four musicians from Halland, where I grew up. 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 the five of us.

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.

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A black and white AR marker several metres across covers a concrete pillar under Skanstullsbron at night, above a dark stairway and the lit market stalls and stage of Trädgården.

Reality Unit

Verklig-enheten, the Reality Unit: a crew contracted to turn Stockholm into an augmented-first city, starting with one pillar of Skanstullsbron.

For the Gather festival in September 2019, Maria Kling, Onur Yuksel, Rose Hallgren and I arrived at Trädgården, the club garden under the bridge, as the unit: matching boiler suits and everything a work crew needs, wheat paste, brushes, ladders, fika and a thermos. Over two days we pasted a black and white AR marker, a few metres across and printed on dozens of sheets, onto the pillar above the stairs, finishing on the festival's first day while explaining to visitors what it was for.

Verklig-enheten, the Reality Unit: a crew contracted to turn Stockholm into an augmented-first city, starting with one pillar of Skanstullsbron.

For the Gather festival in September 2019, Maria Kling, Onur Yuksel, Rose Hallgren and I arrived at Trädgården, the club garden under the bridge, as the unit: matching boiler suits and everything a work crew needs, wheat paste, brushes, ladders, fika and a thermos. Over two days we pasted a black and white AR marker, a few metres across and printed on dozens of sheets, onto the pillar above the stairs, finishing on the festival's first day while explaining to visitors what it was for.

No app was needed. The QR code in the marker opened a web page, and with the camera pointed at the pillar a door opened in the concrete onto another place: a sunset, a rainforest, fire, drifting clouds, chosen at random from eleven films.

The piece runs again, restored from my Glitch archive: open reality-unit.jonasjohansson.se on a phone and point it at the marker.

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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 interactive light work. Fishing line was strung tight from floor to ceiling, each string fitted with an accelerometer. When a visitor plucked one, the sensor fed its peak into an algorithm simulating a vibrating string, and 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 interactive light work. Fishing line was strung tight from floor to ceiling, each string fitted with an accelerometer. When a visitor plucked one, the sensor fed its peak into an algorithm simulating a vibrating string, and 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 performer faces a towering black-and-white portrait projected onto the dark stage.

Jag är Gud

Video and lighting for an 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.

Video and lighting for an 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. Nineteen years later, electroshock treatment and heavy medication had left him barely able to move. In 2018 he disappeared in Los Angeles and was found surrounded by American police with drawn weapons; his bipolar disorder had taken hold again. In Jag är Gud he 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 in the end could not 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 Ångström, Svenska Dagbladet)

Danne Dahlin performed the piece, with Jakob Bladh directing and Teresia Björk as Danne’s mentor. I did the video and lighting, Rose Hallgren the scenography and Amadeus Rudolfsson the sound.

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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 had a bedroom and a dining area with a heavy dose of London Art Moderne: drapes, ornaments, packed luggage and a ticking clock. I wanted to try CNC milling on ice, and designed the clock and other details. 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.

On Mystery on the Icehotel Express, Jordi and Abel had help from Icehotel's creative director Luca Roncoroni and the Icehotel team, and Francesco Torelli and Nikita Dudnik made the music for the suite.

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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, Fredrik Edström of IVAR Studios, Sebastian Häger and I organised Dome Dreaming, a non-profit festival over three evenings at Wisdome Stockholm and one at Wisdome Malmö. 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, Fredrik Edström of IVAR Studios, Sebastian Häger and I organised Dome Dreaming, a non-profit festival over three evenings at Wisdome Stockholm and one at Wisdome Malmö. 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, New York, a geodesic dome where audiences lay on the floor while films, slides and sound played across the surface above them. He imagined a worldwide network of such domes exchanging images, and called it Culture: Intercom. The technology of his time couldn't quite catch up.

Fulldome projection and ambisonic sound finally can. The image fills the whole field of view and the sound comes from every direction, so there are no edges to compose against, and the audience sits or lies back and looks 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 moss landscape to touch, electromagnetic sculptures of branches and orange extension cables, a VR embodiment piece and SKH's new mobile dome.

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's website and visual identity, with Linn Willebrand on graphics, animation and communication. To help artists prepare for the dome, 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. Ashley Reed at Smash Studio made the 3D model.

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.

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Tufting Ex Machina

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

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, the audiovisual festival in Helsinki I have been part of since it started in 2022, as an artist and through Nordic Audiovisual Artists. Each of the ten participants went looking for their cultural, national or personal identity in patterns, then used sketching and generative AI to combine and remix them into something new. I'd learned tufting during a residency at Konvent Zero in Spain.

The method was the Surrealists' exquisite corpse, where each person adds to a picture without seeing the whole of it, responding only to what came before.

The participants worked in groups, each designing and tufting a square and then passing it on for the next group to respond to, picking up each other's shapes, colours and patterns. It ended as 24 tufted squares covering 140 x 210 cm.

Rose Hallgren designed a modular tufting frame for it that opens to 2 x 4 metres and folds down into a sports bag.

The finished piece was shown at the festival, with conductive thread added to make it interactive with a Circuit Playground. I also made a music track to go with it.