Haraldur Karlsson
Time Aside

The artist Haraldur Karlsson has cooperated with Vasulka Kitchen Brno in the past having developed an online workshop on the use of Medical Imagery for Creative Purposes in 2020 and by having taken part in our residency program in 2021 where he proposed to work on the development of the Imag/ine software instrument for real-time video manipulation originally developed at STEIM by Steina Vasulka and Tom Demeyer for contemporary operating systems. 

Haraldur Karlsson studied Mixed Media at the Iceland school of art / The Iceland Academy of Art and then studied Video-art at AKI, Enschede the Netherlands, where the Vasulkas were frequent guest lecturers. Hereafter he studied multidisciplinary Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. From 1999- 2009 Haraldur was instrumental in initiating and active as a pedagogue, running the Audio/Video lab at the Icelandic Academy of Art.

The last 20 years Haraldur has been an active advisor, cultural organizer and curator in Iceland and Norway working for example with Atopia, Atelier Nord, the Icelandic Society for Electronic Arts and the Raflost festival of electronic and media arts in Reykjavik, Iceland.

Haraldur Karlsson has been working with video for several decades as his relationship to the medium and his experimental approach reveals in his attempt to expand the given parameters and explore the contemporary possibilities that current technologies enable rather than those of a video art as such. He often employs an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach and, besides installations and presentations in exhibitions, has shown his work in public spaces and venues which he perceives as a moment of critical reflection on contemporary society. In 2018 he created the light installation and video piece Brain at Keflavík International Airport which makes use of the Magnetic Resonance Imaging that he has been actively working with since 2014. Recently he has been exploring live video streaming in his project Snæfellsness Broadcast Station (2020) in which he often appears as a protagonist, his image warping and melting into the lush Snæfellsnes landscape rich in lore and mythology. 

The work MONT ESJA 16 DAYS is an observation and meditation on the mountain Esja and is based on a month-long recording filmed through a window at the Icelandic Art Academy in Reykjavik. Translating hours to minutes, 24 hours to 24 minutes, the 16 days presented in the work is a selection, arranged and displayed simultaneously for comparison on variations of movement, light and color over time. Looking out of a window from time to time has the limitation of presenting a view almost as a still — of just one moment; placing days side by side reveals the uniqueness of every day, how no moment is ever the same.

INNARDS is a new video sculpture installation rooted in his previous works, embedded with the essence of MRI scans of the human body revealing a world beneath the skin like under an ocean's surface. Investigating spaces and non-spaces governed by the choice of thickness visibility from the MRIs. Choreographed movements of light and reflections in added and altered dimensions are associated with the viewer's existing awareness of inner dimensions.