Questions/Contact
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This is site is dedicated to bring accurate and thorough information about my artwork. I work with electronic art, such as computer animation, digital photography, webart and artvideo. I have shown in many galleries and artshows, such as Casey Caplan Gallery 1997, Kunstnernes Hus Oslo 1997, The Tate Gallery of Modern art 1998, National Museum of Art, Norway 2008 and I was the Norwegian artist selected for the 1997 Venice Biennale. In 2001, the complete videoinstallation of “Crash Course” was bought by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo.
For questions, please use the form here! Otherwise, check out the interview below
Interview with Sven Påhlsson by Berta Sichel, Museo del Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid Spain Oct 2002 as published in the artmagazine Tentaciones.
As an artist working with electronic art, such as computer graphics, 3D animation, digital photography, web projects and installation, Sven Påhlsson was born in 1965, in Lund, southern Sweden, but while growing up he moved more then 10 times to different cities. So, he was almost global even before he become an international artist. Norway and New York are now the places where he works and exhibits. With a diploma in Fine Art by the Academy of Fine Arts in Oslo and different video and computer technologies courses, Påhlsson uses 3D animation to constructed a world, replicating many aspects of the real world. At Feira de las Tentaciones he is showing his latest project Sprawlwille or Life at the Highway Exit Ramp (in a former work, Crash Course the theme of highway culture is also explored). Last Summer, when it was exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, critic Holland Cotter wrote in the New York Times: ” It’s a hallucinatory, digitally generated trip through nocturnal suburbs, past fortress-like malls and housing developments that resemble colossal power plants, all viewed if by a alien surveillance…” Are you prepared for the trip? And, if you can’t catch up with Påhlsson at Feira de las Tentaciones, Cine y Casi Cine at the MNCARS is also showing Sprawlville. Following is a “chat” I had with Sven last summer, when he was in Oslo.
B.S. The subject matter of “American Suburbia” has already captured the imagination of many American artists and writers. Some of them lived in those “New Towns” and we understand their dream. Why did the subject attract you? Do you have suburbia in Sweden?
S.P. Many of the cities that I lived in where small towns with different types of suburbia. The suburban phenomenon is to me an important contemporary issue. The growth and size of suburbia has totally exploded, especially in the last 5-10 years. And most suburban developments seem to be sprawling in a more or less uncontrolled manor. There are no traditional or common spaces in suburbia for people to meet and interact in. On the contrary, suburbia is made up of communities that appear to want to avoid any kind of interaction with the outside world. You have gated communities, closed windows with the blinds shut …The highway system is another component. Initially it was efficient and people were able to work in the city, and still live outside in the lush and safe countryside. Today it is congested and even dangerous. How people can find a high quality of living in this repetitive environment is puzzling to me. Sprawlville is in many ways a daring art project in the choice of the subject matter. It seems that the familiarity of the situation makes the subject transparent in today’s society. Most people both in and outside of suburbia seem either unaware, or have already resigned to the situation. It is exactly for these reasons that Sprawlville is such an important and exciting art project.
B.S. What came first: the interest on the subject of suburbia or the interest for architecture and spaces?
S.P. Architecture surrounds us almost everywhere, where we work, live and play. Therefore I believe that architecture, buildings and constructed spaces affect us greatly. In every city, urban and suburban spaces exist with different levels of architectural spaces. It becomes important to examine these spaces to get an understanding how these spaces affect us and influence our experience…
B.S. Do you expect the viewer experimenting how architecture and space influence us through artificiality, through a constructed world, through a virtual reality world?
S:P: The 3D world is a constructed world, replicating many aspects of the real world, but not all. For example, depending on the design of the 3D animation, there might not be air, dust or dirt in the virtual world, thus rendering a more restrained and artificial visual appearance. And in doing that, the subject matter of the synthetic and thoughtless sprawl in many suburban developments is emphasized… In Sprawlville I explored the visual electronic medium using a more subdued and restrained visual appearance… Another important aspect of Sprawlville is the reference to computer games and specifically 3 D-simulation games. One of the most popular games right now is The Sims, a suburban game where you can play out different suburban life styles. In terms of 3D animation, Sprawlvile goes against the remaining few traditions of computer graphics, in the way it explores a different kind of imagery. With the use of a more low key output, it ( it refers to the Sprawlville animation) creates an even higher excitement and nerve in the images.
BS: Nerve in the images? What do you want to say with this? And what does it mean “low key output?”
SP: I was referring to nerve as in thrill or visual tension. And low key is the opposite of the general perception of 3D animation as colorful, flashy, fast paced and spectacular.
BS: When I asked you about your training, you said that started as painter and “was lucky enough to be part of the first computer revolution that happened in school and at home.” Why?
S.P. “With lucky enough”, I was referring to what I believe is a new generation difference, namely that some people belong to the pre-computer era and some are part of the computer era, which happened around the mid eighties. And being part of the computer era means I have had the opportunity to closely follow, understand and take part in the ongoing evolution and development of Computer Graphics. 3D animation is a very complicated visual technology and it takes enormous resources to be able to work with. You need to constantly invest and upgrade the equipment; it’s tremendously time consuming and there is a constant need to do technological research into this never-developed electronic media field. Contemporary 3D animation, drawing, and design work takes many months of hard work. Using more than 18 computers, the final rendering takes an additional several months of full days and many nights work. All these aspects make a work such as Sprawlville a tremendous challenge. In addition, most tools were not even intended to be used by artists, giving you an even greater challenge to work creatively and freely with the electronic media… Nevertheless being able to overcome these challenges and realize your visions of art with electronic media can be rewarding. Also it is interesting to strive to be in the forefront and part of the actual development of the electronic media… So each art project I do is quite complex, and I need to carefully plan the whole project in advance to succeed. Usually there is also a lot of research and traveling to gather background material.
B.S. I heard that you are very concerned about the music in your work and that you collaborate with a musician… Tell me more about this?
S.P. Music is usually seen as a separate creative media genre. But one of the many interesting aspects of the medium 3D animation is the obvious possibility for having a soundtrack and music. But I wanted to take this a step further in the development of Sprawlville and try to integrate the two disciplines as much as possible, making the result into a new “whole” or entity. I began the work and collaboration with composer Erik Wøllo already from the very beginning of the project, even before there was any animation produced at all. We did research together into suburbia and the shopping malls, with Erik making actual recordings of sounds for further manipulation to be used in the music. There are also aspects in the work that might not have worked well if visualized, but that could be added in the music and soundtrack. The drawing of the animation and the composing by Erik then proceeded closely for a year to produce the complete 3D animation of “Sprawlville”, thereby integrating and synchronizing sounds and vision to a new level of multidisciplinary experience. Music and sounds are an important and integral part of the animation, and close collaboration with a composer is essential.
B:S: Goddard said once: ” There are no more simple images.” The whole world is too much for an image.” What do have to say about that?
S:P: The visual world has definitively become more complex. Part of the reason might be the many new possibilities from the developing visual technologies, and part of the reason might be that our visual experience of the world is becoming more and more fragmented. People talk a lot today about computer animation, simulation technologies, computer-generated sets, and so on…
B.S. I read elsewhere that electronic keying creates disjointed spaces that reminds artworks from the 20ies, people like Moholy-Nagy. On the same time, they say that Digital compositing is closer to the nineteenth-century techniques of creating smooth combinations prints. What is your opinion about that?
S.P. I think that we naturally begin to judge any new visual media from the perspective of the traditional media that we already know. In your work how many techniques do you use? I will use just about any visual technology available, as long as it is beneficial to my artistic intentions and vision. It might be 3D animation, 2D and 3D composing, Virtual lighting, Visual effects, time remapping and digital editing.
B.S. As new technology comes along, it becomes important to explore them to see if there are visual possibilities that can be added to the work progress. For instance, in Sprawlvile and Crash Course, but I think mostly in Sprawville, the virtual shapes situated around the virtual city reminds me a film set. A kind of a cinematic realism. Is this right?
S.P. I would say you are right, but the connection between film sets and the 3D animation setup is perhaps mostly inspired from the actual reality of the American Southwestern suburban developments. Do you think that the ability to generated virtual and three-D still represents a radical break in the history of visual representations.? Definitively yes. 3D animation and 3D drawing is an immensely powerful visual tool. I believe we are only seeing the beginning of all the possibilities of 3D visual technology development. It will influence every part of our society and everywhere where we will encounter graphics and media, such as TV, movies, advertising, banking, news, art and so on.
