The insect is moving over book pages, eating its way through the book, page by page in a slow animation. When the whole book has been eaten the insect moves on to the next. Thus a selection of books, important to our culture and civilisation, is disintegrated as the insects erase the lines through their movements. In the end, all that is left are small fragments of text and the traces of the insect’s movements.

The images are beautiful in their own right, like abstract art created from ink stains, but their purpose is not esthetical. They belong to the so-called Rorschach test, a cognitive personality test in which the patient's interpretations of the images are used as a basis for a diagnosis. The test has been in use since the beginning of the 20th century, but in recent years its scientific credibility has been challenged.

A couple of years after the find, Essvik is working with AI and starts playing around with the Rorschach images, analysing them through an AI trained on image recognition. During the exhibition period the AI’s interpretations of the images will change, and get increasingly advanced, as more images are fed into the system.

"Act 1. Staging (rule) A long time ago there was no digital. It was something else. Many people from that time are dead. In a near future there will be no one left. The room is darkened and the sun is missing. Empty blue screens lighting up the room. Screens without content. A corridor filled with darkness. A fire camp with ice. A forgotten Internet cafe. Periscope mirroring the sky.The digital beginning. The time we hardly remember. A room without content. The emptiness.

Act 2. The process and the final (obstruction) To be continued...

I download the book from the Internet, https://books.google.com, Enemies of books, written by William Blades, published in 1881. A book on the decay of books. The enemies of the physical book – fire, water, gas, the bookworm, dirt, bigotry etc. A digitized book with no identity. Black letters on a white background. I buy a copy of the book from 1881. A yellowed, and stained copy. The book bears traces of a former owner, one Dr. Sarolea. Newspaper cuttings on his death and his extensive book collection. I compare the two texts, the original and the digitized copy. Using my computer I create a tool for binding books. I combine and modify traditional tools that have been used for hundreds of years and print out the components on a 3D-printer. The next day I print out another copy of the digitized book, and using the 3D-printed tool I make an exact replica of the book from 1881, in its original design. I construct a manual describing the process and upload the files to the Internet.

This is a description of a project which I begun in 2014 as an artistic development project financed by the University of Gothenburg. A project exploring digitization, human traces and the unique copy, and at the same time an act of resistance against digitization and technology. The outcome of the project was a book, presented together with the tool used to produce it.

Read more about this project and download files,books for free.

A graveyard. A cooking program. A desert. Oil fields. Mourning march. A starry sky without an end. A lion tamer. Food that is transported in outer space. New recipes are written and new cooking instructions are recorded over and over again.

I was invited to take part in an exhibition in Mustarinda in the midpoint of Finland.
Famous for its old forest.

In the exhibition I created a museum of dead woods. I built the museum at a clear-cut forest from material found in the local dumpster. I announced in the area if someone had a picture of the forest before it was cut down.  I found a photo of the forest from a person who used to work in the area. The photo was place in the museum.

One summer’s journey through Finnish landscapes documented through a home built pinhole camera and found objects.

”This exhibition features propositions towards infinite art. Rather than completed works, the artists asked to create plans for and descriptions of works that would be, in some sense, infinite. The creation of limitless or endless work is a preoccupation for many artists working with computer technology. The intent of this exhibition is to examine how the idea of an infinite artwork might be interpreted by artists working across a variety of media, both digital and analogue.”

The basic plot of the online computer game ”Endgame” is violent and dark, but the soundtrack in the form of 1910s marching music, and the Atmosphere render it so absurd and exaggerated that only comedy remains.

Made in collaboration with Mateusz Pozar

Instead of writing an email or sending a text that will arrive instantaneously, send a postcard that won’t arrive until you want it to. Perhaps you want to remind yourself of something in five years time or make a prediction for the world to read in ten years time? Write a postcard, upload an image and select the keywords you want search engines to index. Somewhere on the vast Internet there’s a message waiting for you.

An image making machine built from scrap materials, inspired by Öyvind Fahlströms essay ”Invisible Painting”.

Painting is lagging behind the other art forms because of its limited opportunities to reach its audience. By "reach" I mean to "own" a work of art, to possess it, to take it out when you want to, have it on display or not — like a book or a record — so that as many people as possible can experience an original, as they can with film and theater. By this I mean that the fetishism connected to handmade and signed originals would never exist; instead there would be a multitude of equally valuable copies. When art is bought today, it happens, as we know, only partly for the same reasons that books or records are purchased — and it is bought by an extremely limited group of people. Those to whom works of art mean the most have the least means to acquire them. This is an incredibly warped situation, to which many artists are oddly resigned. Nowadays it is possible to make and reproduce exact copies of paintings, in which even the tactile values, to some extent, are retained.

The web program downloads words that people have been using when searching the Internet for topics related to war, and stores them in a database. It then randomly picks three words and searches for pictures that become a pattern for a box to print and fold – the type of box that you may find in i.e. supermarkets. The box pattern updates every 30 seconds with new pictures, making every box unique.

The box is a modern digital version of the ancient Greek Dipylon vase, that was traditiona
lly covered with patterns from narratives and important events – typically warriors, chariots, burial scenes and land or sea battles.

The program stopped working in 2007 and remains black. See pdf with boxes.

A remake of a found book on drying flowers using a microwave.

Recommended Drying and Standing Times for Flowers Dried in Microwave Use a full-power cooking setting. The times given in the chart are only guidelines. The actual time may vary due to the type of oven and the amount of moisture in the flowers. If your oven does not have a turntable, you may want to rotate the container every 1/2 to 1 minute.  Anemone (Anemone sp.) 2 1/2 to 3 ( Drying Time (in minutes)) , 12 ( Standin time (inhours).

Aster (Aster sp.) 2 1/2 , 10 , Calendula (Calendula officinalis) 2 1/2 , 10,  Carnation (Dianthus caryophyllus) 1 , 10, Chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum sp.) 3, 10 Daffodil (Narcissus sp.) 2 1/2 , 10, Dahlia (Dahlia hybrids) 5 to 7 , 36, Delphinium (Delphinium elatum) 4 to 5, 10, Marigold (Tagetes sp.) 2 1/2 to 3 , 10  Pansy (Viola x wittrockiana) 2 1/2 to 3, 36, Peony (Paeonia hybrids) 3 to 4, 36, Poppy (Papaver orientale) 2 1/2 to 3, 24, Rose (Rosa sp.) 1 1/2 to 2, 10  Salvia (Salvia sp.) 3, 24, Tulip (Tulipa sp.) 3, 24

A calender for 100 years, for my years to come.

"It’s my birthday today. I woke up this morning with no one there to sing for me. So I made a program that will play the birthday song every birthday at 08:30, every year. This way I never have to wake up without anyone singing on my birthday.
The web site is just a countdown to my next birthday, at 08:30 on the 21 of December next year it will start singing."

(this was posted at the section drawings/news 2004-12-29 at jimpalt.org).

How to make your own program.
1. Write your name and date of birth below. Enter what time you want the program to start singing.
2. Press submit.

3. Look for your name in the database.

The program stopped working in 2012 and remains black.

Welcome to experience an artwork that takes place inside your dreams… Here is a web-site broadcasting sounds with the intention of influencing the contents of your dreams. The project is based on sleep- and dream research, indicating that external stimuli like sound, smell and touch can be experienced also during sleep. Our dreams are shaped by an inner world, as well as by experiences that we have had during the day and the external stimuli we are exposed to during sleep. While dreaming we get in contact with sub- and pre-conscious layers of our soul. Using sound you can influence your dreams.

Welcome to take part in this artwork that takes place in your bedroom and where the stage is your dream…

The program stopped working in 2010.

See pdf with texts from database

A yellow field moving over a computer screen. The movement, so slow that it is barely perceptible, corresponds to the movement of the sun. The screen, shifting from completely black the moment before sunrise, to completely yellow in the middle of day, and back to black at night, could be perceived as a slowly moving painting, or as a functional device allowing you to follow the sun in real time – a digital Sun.

The program stopped working in 2009 and remains black.

Download code  

Vasagatan 33, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 07, 2005 23:10:48 - May 22, 2005 20:10:48

In this net based bird opera a rare bird might sing every day for a long period of time, but the chance is small. To hear a blackbird or a chaffinch sing during the night is another rare experience. Some days the jackdaw will sing together with the nightingale, other days with the magpie or on its own in solitude. Some birds sing at night, others are more likely to be heard in day time, and so on. If a bird of prey appears all the other birds could go quiet for hours, days or weeks. The scope for variation is unlimited, resulting in an ever-changing and completely unpredictable opera.

All the sounds are registered and stored in a database, acting as a digital ornithologist.

The program stopped working in 2008 . Download recordings

Ancient immigrants

For thousands of years birds have taken advantage of Turkey's and Istanbul's strategic position as a bridge connecting Europe to Asia and Africa. In spring migratory birds fly northwards from Africa to Asia and Europe, and in autumn they leave their breading grounds to fly south to Africa again using Istanbul as a passageway.
  In the most spectacular manifestation of this migration over a quarter million Storks fly in clouds over the city in the course of a few weeks. In autumn the peak passage time coincided with the beginning of the 9th Istanbul Biennale.

The bird’s eye view became the basis for a typeface where the letters were exchanged for the symbolic shapes of famous places, buildings, islands and parks, taken from the city map of Istanbul. The artist book contained patterns and images created with the typeface, which was also availble for online download.

download typeface + posters

A ghost collecting bags of points. A computer game based on the contradictory principle that the challanges get easier the longer you play.

A web site containing five short abstract animations.