Some years ago, curator Jens-Maier Rothe invited me to take part in The One Minutes Foundation’s group video exhibition with the theme of spamming.

As I researched the subject, I noticed that the spam emails use a wide variety of letters that superficially look like the common Latin alphabet, but are actually separate letters from many different languages. I decided to document as many of these letters as possible in the video. I found 97 different ones, though the video only has 93. Some are only used in very obscure languages, so the research was quite interesting.

The natural format for this seemed to be a news broadcast, since many spam emails of the time used a similar dramatic language. All of the scrolling texts (and the channel name) in the video are taken directly from spam emails. The letters are shown one by one with the actual information about them at their side. The background is a stock film showing the making of the meat product that gave spam its name.

My current spam folder contents didn't seem to use the same technique to subvert the reader anymore, the algorithms probably have made it obsolete. So, the video also works as a snapshot to a moment in the history of spam.

I was asked to join the Espoo New Year festival for the New Year's Eve 2024, so I made this pixel animation game trailer for a non-existing game. The game is inspired by 80s compilation sport games such as Summer Games & California Games I used to play on Commodore 64. The trailer shows three games: a racing game in Tapiola's main roundabout, tetris in the local landmark building and swimming game in the now-demolished swimming hall. The locations are also shown on a map in the trailer.

The animation was done in Photoshop (for the individual elements) and After Effects (actual animating) and projected on the wall of Tapiola Church for about a week starting on New Year's Eve.

My first private exhibition was on April 2019 in Galleria Kuvitus (The Finnish Illustration Association‘s members’ gallery) in Helsinki. I wanted to experiment with varying pixel sizes (and therefore the viewing distance), so the main works were three 1 x 1 meter prints of Kallio (a neighborhood in Helsinki), Taroko National Park in Taiwan and Tokyo, Japan. The prints were started as 12 x 12 pixel images, and then continued with smaller and smaller pixel size in parts of the image, until the smallest details were just barely visible as pixels in the final prints.

Since the idea of the works was to play with the viewing distances, it’s a challenge to present them in other forms than the original prints. Video works decently, so here’s an animated version showing each work with a zoom to/from a selected detail.

The works looked like this on the gallery itself.

The fourth work is a collection of 16 pixelated images from different places, some having to do with the large prints and some unrelated. They were also arranged to a square form. The smaller works were made in a single pixel size each. Animation about the smaller works is below.

The works were a lot of fun to make and show, and the idea worked quite well, in some places even better than I had hoped. Quite many people showed up too, which is always nice. Thanks again to all the visitors!

-…………0+ is a self-published collection of writings by Maija. I edited and designed the zine from a larger collection of writings originally published in Maija’s Facebook page. The text is very abstract, so while designing the layout I was mostly working to make the text appear visually interesting instead of a conventional layout process.

A pixel animation video, presented as a trailer for an upcoming art game. No audio, but instead there’s a fancy ‘mute’ symbol in the corner. Some retiming and minor graphical changes compared to v.0.1.