We talked to the Swedish artist and musician based in LA about his recent exhibition Spirit Interface at Killscreen.
Q: How does the interplay between physical and digital media factor into your work?
A: I’ve always been interested in the configuration of space as part of a work – how viewers physically move through a room and position themselves in relation to the works. I like working with physical and architectural immersion. I frequently extend the physical space into the virtual by visual juxtaposition and repetition, trying to blur the lines between the two worlds.
I also highlight the materiality of media technologies in my work, placing computers and cables on view in the installation. I try to be critical of the ecological and political impact of digital media hardware and a first (small) step to that is acknowledging this hardware as part of the base structure of my work.
Q: What role do video games play in the process of folklore or myth making?
A: Video gaming is a huge part of modern western culture, so it’s inevitable that games would influence the myths and legends we make for ourselves. The memetic folklore of “The Backrooms,” for example, is directly influenced by a vocabulary of games (you enter the Backrooms by “noclipping out of reality,” which is a reference to a hidden setting in games that lets players walk through walls). We create myths about what would happen if our (ostensibly) real lives started behaving like a video games, and what would happen if video games stopped behaving as expected (see the many “creepypasta” stories about haunted media: Petscop, Ben Drowned, etc.). Legends and myths negotiate the limits of possibility of our world, and gamers are experts at figuring out the rules and limits of games, so it makes sense that they think about these things.
Q: What are the most common spirits we encounter in our daily lives?
A: Some people would probably say ancestral spirits or spirits of our natural surroundings are always present in our lives. If you have a particularly difficult life you might suspect you’re encountering demons or malevolent spirits frequently. Personally, I think I mostly encounter ghosts from the past — either my past or others’.
Q: How does sound affect myths?
A: Good question. Myth is often communicated orally, i.e. sonically, but not always. The artist and theorist Salome Voegelin writes about hearing as a subjective, doubtful form of physical knowledge; as opposed to seeing, which is more distanced and indexical, seeking fixed meanings and definitions. In Swedish folklore we have Näcken, a water spirit that plays so beautifully on the violin that listeners are lured into the river to drown. Here sound becomes really subjective: the music of Näcken is only known by the effect it has, i.e. we can’t quantify how beautiful it is or why, but if you heard it, you would know (but you would also be dead). I think myth and sound share traits of (inter-)subjectivity, and a vague or loose kind of meaning-making.
Q: What can the horror genre teach us about being human?
A: Horror is a rich genre with a lot of different subcategories that all have different, wonderful things to teach us. Most of all, I think experiencing horror fiction teaches us that it’s ok to be scared. I also like to think of horror as showing us that there is an outside of what we take for granted, what we have been told to accept as reality. This outside can be scary, but also enticing and even radical — a shadow world, full of danger and possibility. We see examples of this in certain queer and feminist readings of horror, where the killer or monster is identified as the threat against hetero- and CIS-patriarchal “normality,” and in Mark Fisher’s book The Weird and the Eerie, where “weird” horror (H.P. Lovecraft’s unknowable cosmic beings, etc.) also allows us to think of an order beyond hegemonic capitalism — something that we can’t fully understand from where we stand, but which is out there, waiting for us…
Q: What is the relationship between the history of the occult and contemporary video games?
A: Another hard question. I don’t know if there is an explicit relationship, but electronic media have, since their inception, been associated with the supernatural and occult. Media technologies allow us to communicate over great distance (through the tele-graph, tele-phone, tele-vision, etc.) and even change the flow of time (through film and video). It’s not unreasonable that a person who saw these revolutions of perception would imagine that we could also us them to communicate with the Other Side, the spirit realm, the land of the dead. Different media have been ascribed different types of spiritual power, so video games would obviously function differently than, say, the telegraph. I think an occult approach to video games would center virtual game worlds and especially interactions between player and non-player characters as a place where we might encounter spirits, like in the creepypasta stories I mentioned earlier.
Henrik Söderström: Spirit Interface
Killscreen, Los Angeles, CA
March 7 to March 23, 2024