Brothers is a short film about the different perception of the world around us by children compared to adults. Children’s mind is still a blank canvas with lots of space for imagination, whilst adults have already spoiled it with symbols and meanings.
Deadweight is my latest film. It’s a co-production with musician Finkseye. The longer “short movie release” has not premiered yet, but the music video cut is available at Finkseye’s Youtube channel.
We live in a hectic worked, where everyone just cares about themselves. People are not really in hurry, but the society has planted in their mindsets. They need to run and hurry. they need to use their elbows to be before others. They need to fit in the train that is already a full. Platform is a short story from CPH airport train station. It is a bystander view about the stress that the society is putting over people. Soundtrack includes distorted totalitaristic announcements and bible sentences.
“There is a train for everyone, but some of us must stay at the platform”
Hidden / Exposed is a project that is experimenting how Internet can on other hand bring a single image or text into the spotlight and gain huge publicity as on the other hand you can publish hundreds of hours of material that is available, but still not really exposed to public.
In this ongoing project Juha is placing himself as test-subject, exposing parts of his private life in to public, yet still remaining hidden. There is no turning back. When public wants to find the private information, they will – and then the public can not become private again.
This book is a continuation for the earlier project. Instead of studying the transition from analog to digital, this one studies the relevance of rules. Haiku is a traditional form of poetry with strict rules about the form and content.
The book experiments how the illustrations change the content of modern haiku, where the abstraction traditionally is a key element.
This is another study about transformation. The key piece, a “splicer mask” is taken from a video game. The composition started with the mask itself and evolved involved into a photograph and resulted in two oil paintings, where the second one is an analog composite between the photograph and the first painting.
Masquerade poster
Bunny mask
Bunny mask photo
Bunny mask oil 1
Bunny mask oil 2
Oil on canvas, papier mache, digital photography
2014
Sleep is an experiment I made that ended up launching my film career and still gets unexpected attention. It’s a piece where I wanted to explore the differences between 1963 and 2013 by creating an 8-hour long film of me sleeping.
My film, unlike Andy Warhol’s original Sleep, uses modern tech like drones and multiple camera angles to capture me sleeping naked, with dream sequences added in. Despite the advances in technology, working with 8 hours of material on consumer-grade equipment is still tough.
The film’s context is more important than its content. I released it as a single-layer DVD on Amazon, which was even ordered by the Rotterdam International Film Festival for its screening in 2015. This unusual distribution method was part of what got it noticed.
Christopher Costabile wrote a master’s thesis on Sleep, calling it an example of “aesthetics of cohabitation.” He analyzed how my use of digital tech challenges norms about space and time, linking it to the aura concept by Walter Benjamin.
In 2023, Sleep found new life through the sleepstreaming phenomenon, quickly racking up over 100,000 views on YouTube. Unfortunately, YouTube took it down for violating their nudity policy, which was a blow since it meant they didn’t see it as art.
The way I shared Sleep—first on Amazon, then on YouTube—helped it reach a wider audience and even got it screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and discussed in an academic thesis. This mix of old and new ways to distribute films has been key to its ongoing influence.
In January 2024, I announced a sequel, also called Sleep, showing me using a mobile phone for over 5 hours. When I was in Rotterdam again in 2023, a Sri Lankan director told me he’d heard about my film in film school, showing how far-reaching its impact has been.
