Tuomas A. Laitinen is an artist who works with video, sound, glass, chemical and microbial processes, as well as algorithms to explore the entanglements of multispecies coexistence. Laitinen composes situations and installations that inquire into the porous interconnectedness of language, body, and matter within morphing ecosystems. In recent years, Laitinen has been working around questions of ecology, mythology, and processes of knowledge production.
Since 2016, one strand of Tuomas A. Laitinen’s artistic practice has touched upon the research into cognition and consciousness in other-than-human minds, focussing on octopuses in particular. This endeavour is emerging through different forms: glass objects made for octopuses, multiple video and audio works, and a series of glyphs—made both with glass and as a font—derived from research on octopus arm movements.
Laitinen released his debut album Sapiduz (Öm sound / Svart Records) as TAL in 2022. Sapiduz is a shapeshifting body of sounds containing traces of early music, mutated vocals, and granular electronic composition techniques. Analogous to Laitinen’s other works as an artist, the album is an entanglement of symbiotic processes and worldbuilding where the (mythical) past is attuned to submit questions about emerging futures.
2022 marked the premiere of TAL & Sapiduz Ensemble’s audiovisual performance at Flow Festival Helsinki.
Laitinen´s works have been featured at the 21st Biennale of Sydney, the 7th Bucharest Biennale, Screen City Biennale 2019 (Stavanger), Radius CCS (Delft), Vdrome (online screening), SADE LA (Los Angeles), Amado Art Space (Seoul), Moving Image New York, A Tale of a Tub (Rotterdam), Art Sonje Center (Seoul), Helsinki Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, and MOCA Shanghai.
Photo by Diana Luganski
Laitinen received The Fine Arts Academy of Finland award in 2013, the AVEK prize for media arts in 2021, and is nominated for the 2023 Ars Fennica prize.