Juhani Halkomäki

My journey began with a simple aspiration: to capture the elusive quality of Tove Jansson’s black and white pen drawings, like her beloved Moomin book illustrations. There’s something enchanting in how the strokes make the darkness come alive.

As I experimented with generative pen strokes, my lines suddenly transformed into delicate droplets, each with its own unique size and weight. These droplets, like cosmic rain, transcended the flat surface, bleeding into the third dimension. They coalesced, forming shapes that evoked straws, tubes, and perhaps even heavenly brass instruments. Time and space wove their dance, shaping organic paths for these mysterious forms to follow. And thus, Resting Place For Wild Pigeons emerged — a name whispered by an optical character recognition algorithm when it too tried to find meaning in the work.

Much like the visuals, the process was a winding road. At its core lies a collision detection algorithm — an invisible guardian ensuring that shapes never overlap. And yet, the complexity of the final outputs belie the simplicity: circles, drawn one by one, woven into an intricate tapestry to form a Resting Place For Wild Pigeons.

Terrestrial feelers, a heavenly horn section, wormholes to parallel universes, or a resting place for wild pigeons — Juhani Halkomäki’s debut on ETH, embarks on an adventure across time, space, and dimensions. Its purpose? To discover meaning within the gaze of the viewer.