Erkki Kurenniemi films at IFFR 2014

The legendary Finnish musician, filmmaker, scientist and technologist Erkki Kurenniemi will be celebrated with a screening of short films on January 26th and 27th at this year's International Film Festival Rotterdam. The program, titled Kurenniemi's Cinematic Collaborations, is comprised of a number of films directed by Kurenniemi or films of his collaborators (like Eino Ruutsalo, Ralph Lundsten and Risto Jarva) for which he provided sound. Kurenniemi built his own synthesizers and these electronic soundtracks (reissued on LP) are hailed by some as precursors to minimal techno. 

Computers Serve, dir. Risto Jarva, 1968, Finland, 35mm, music by Erkki Kurenniemi

This program was curated by film artist Mika Taanila who also made a 2002 documentary on Erkki Kurenniemi called The Future is Not What it Used to Be (IFFR 2013). The documentary is an overview of the artist's career with a special focus on his latest project: "Today Kurenniemi is devoted to the obsessive, even manic, effort to record his own life, preserving all his thoughts and observations, trivial objects, and a constant stream of images, continually recording an audio diary, making videotapes, and shooting 20,000 photographs a year. This accumulating mass of documentation is then regularly fed into a computer, storing the record of his existence, his mind and consciousness in digital bytes, thus creating a reconstruction of his life, a "virtual persona," to be premiered in July, 2048." 

Erkki Kurenniemi's 1964 short film Electronics in the World of Tomorrow is available to view via YouTube and UbuWeb. I Hate This Film also has links to a few shorts by Eino Ruutsalo, some with Kurenniemi soundtracks.