Jonas Johansson is an anywhere-based artist, educator, and designer from Glommen, Halland. His work explores light and technology through play, community, and (un)human intervention.
Since 2024 Jonas plans courses for Svenska Tecknare, taught Visual Communication at Beckmans (2017–2025), served as Industry Leader at Hyper Island (2014–2022), and have lectured at Aalto University, Konstfack, School of Machines, Berghs, Nyckelviken, Futuregames, to name a few.
Jonas's professional experience includes KRAM/WEISSHAAR (SE/DE), FIELD (UK) and Moment Factory (CA). He interned at W+K Tokyo (JP) and UltraSuperNew (JP).
Under the moniker Scenic Route, he has performed for artists such as La Fleur, Kornel Kovacs, Gesafellstein, Yuksek and all time idol, The Field.
Today, Jonas runs the artist residency Visualia, produces the fulldome film festival Dome Dreaming, co-creates events with PLX, collaborates with the lighting collective Svartljus, and co-founded Nordic Audiovisual Artists. He shares a studio in Stockholm with SMASH and Rose Hallgren.
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.
For the Reykjavík Winter Lights Festival in February 2019, we parked a Strætó, a Reykjavík city bus, outside Harpa in the middle of winter and invited people to come in and experience the work. Inside the bus we had a custom arcade tabletop with joysticks and buttons, so visitors could play interactive games and control visualisations directly on the building. We provided creators kits with templates for Processing, Unity, TouchDesigner and After Effects, and ran workshops to help artists get started.
We ran a course at the Iceland University of the Arts where students developed their own content for the building. During the festival, Loney Dear performed a live concert inside the bus, controlling the visuals on the facade in real time with Teenage Engineering's OP-Z.
I designed the open call, the website, and the visual identity, project managed the whole thing through NAVA, and coded visualisations for the building. We had funding from the Nordic Culture Fund through their Opstart grant. The collective behind Tiny/Massive was myself, Atlí Bollason and Owen Hindley.