Heidi Tikka

Media artist and researcher Heidi Tikka’s works often explore the interfaces between affect and technology, the private and the public. Her context-specific and site-specific installations often involve participatory processes, placing the spectator in a performative, embodied relation with the work. In her art and her research she has argued for the social and cultural situatedness of an affective experience and its technological mediations.

One of Heidi Tikka’s recent art works is a long-term project At Hand, an interactive video installation designed for touch screens in public space. The piece, consisting of intimate video portraits of anonymous hands performing, has its starting point in the European flow of migration, specifically the recent appearance of beggars in the Helsinki cityscape. The project explores micro spaces of the street and encounters with otherness, asking how we should respond to the urban gestures of plea directed towards us.

In 2014, At Hand was projected on seven gallery windows in Tikka’s exhibition Within Reach in Helsinki. Turning the gallery windows into the main venue of the exhibition inititated a series of transformations of turning spaces inside out. Inside the gallery each video projection responded subtly to the presence of the audience.In the exhibition Tikka also presented prototypes of interactive knitted dresses, which respond to touch with quiet sounds, movement or other small changes.

In her artistic research Tikka investigates what kinds of ontological questions emerge when interactive media art installations are made accountable as technical systems and heterogenous networks of production. She is a doctorate candidate at the Department of Media, Aalto University. She was the recipient of the AVEK Media Art award (2004) and the Prix Möbius Nordica Innovation award (2005).

Heidi Tikka will be participating the Triangle Arts Association’s Residency located in Dumbo, Brooklyn, spending her 3-month residency period in New York in January-March 2015. Recently launched partnership between The Finnish Cultural Institute and Triangle Arts Association aims to benefit Finnish artists as well as the artist community at Triangle by creating an international network of professional artists. Furthermore, the collaboration funded by Finnish Cultural Foundation (SKR, Suomen Kulttuurirahasto), will provide the artists with an apartment and workspace for a set period of time.

http://heiditikka.com/

http://triangleworkshop.org/