Vi kommer i fred

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

A freestanding screen stands in front of the Royal Castle, showing an altered view of the square.

Made with Smash Studio to launch 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.

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.

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.

A laptop running the alien invasion scene in Resolume overlooks the softly lit Stockholm waterfront at night.

Jonas Johansson

Jonas Johansson (b. 1987) 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 at Beckmans (2017–2025) and 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
j@jonasjohansson.se

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.

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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 with Fredrik Edström of IVAR Studios and Sebastian Häger, 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.

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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.

Made with Smash Studio 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.

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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.

Made with Smash Studio to launch 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.

View full project ↗

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.

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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, realised together with Smash Studio as co-designers. Smash led the design work from 3D modelling to animation, while I was technical director and creative support. 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.

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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, commissioned by Scarlett Entertainment. Created together with Erik Schmitz, 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.

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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. Created together with Catalan artist Erik Schmitz and architect Rose Hallgren, 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.

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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 over months of conversation, he found actor and director Jakob Bladh. 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, created with Smash Studio for Allt Ljus på Uppsala. 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. Built together with Rose Hallgren.

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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, I worked as technical lead and projection mapper in collaboration with Smash Studio, who created the 3D modelling and animation. The piece was 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.

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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. Created together with Rose Hallgren, the workshop brought together 10 participants to tuft their own cultural canon. I'd learned tufting during a residency at Konvent Zero in Spain.

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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.

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Four views of colourful album artwork combine dense botanical patterns, hand-drawn lettering and circular motifs.

People in Orbit

Album artwork and live visuals 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. 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.

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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 by Tove Alderin, projected onto Uppsala Cathedral for Allt ljus på Uppsala in 2021 and onto Storkyrkan for Nobel Week Lights the year after.

Tove 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 by Mattias Heldner at the Stockholm University Phonetics Laboratory drove particles that formed a pattern across the facade.

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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, commissioned by the World Jewish Congress, Raoul Wallenberg Academy and Nobel Week Lights 2022. Created with Smash Studio, with music by Joseph Wilkinson. 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.

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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. The exhibition was mounted together with Rose Hallgren. 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. Logo by Eugenia Kukharchuk.

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

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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.

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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.

Embed was a collaboration with Barkas and Vitali Poluzhnikov, built 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.

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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. Malin Bobeck Tadaa initiated the project and brought me in alongside Really Interactive game studio. Malin had perfected a technique using optic fibre and custom 3D-printed parts to weave LED strips directly into her textile sculptures. 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. Björn Albihn and Jonatan Crafoord at Really Interactive built the mixed reality side. I spent days and nights in that reactor hall, listening to System of a Down and going slightly insane.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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, in collaboration with Hybrid Forest (later Smash Studio) and Rose Hallgren. 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.

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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.

It started during a project at Harpa in Reykjavík with Atlí Bollason, Owen Hindley and Rasmus Stride. 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.

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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, made while I was working at Moment Factory in Montreal and shown at C2 Montreal. 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.

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