Electronics in the World of Tomorrow

Erkki Kurenniemi was arguably one of the first artists to propose or fantasise about a complete cultural surrender to cyber existence and his entire career covering such diverse fields as artificial intelligence music engineering film dance or rhetorics testifies to this desire to escape the limits of the human body and transgress into a different dimension bordering on technofetishism In his 1964 short Electronics in the World of Tomorrow Kurenniemi presents a slideshow of the most aseptic signs of technological imagination diagrams chips machines cold surfaces But footage of human warmth also comes up mostly in black and white as if to give humans the status of a memory Originally silent the film was in this version endowed with a electronic music piece by Kurenneimi himself a cold aggressive soundtrack that could be said to present technology as a potentially menacing affair although this is a reading that the director would certainly refute