Henna-Riikka Halonen explores our relationship to materials, objects, language as well as to living and non-living beings. In her latest video work, technology leaks into everything, creating a porous, flooded world. Buoyant force (2025, 6:50 min) is a ruin of the future, a museum, or a laboratory. It asks how to create a fictional sense of a world that is not yet here, but that may approach us from the future.

The work is grounded in a long and layered process in which Halonen has trained generative AI using her own paintings and digital collages in order to detach the resulting imagery from the generic stream of images. Rather than pursuing efficiency, the point of departure has been to bend the AI toward a more alien and surprising mode of expression — toward a crooked world and ecosystem of its own. In the translucent, pastel-toned hybrid world that emerges from this process, the boundaries between the digital and material realities blur, and bodies merge with technological devices. The work brings to the surface half-dissolved bodies, flesh, stone, strange beings, remnants, and warnings. The experience is ethereal and futuristic in an unexpected way.

Yet where does this futurity belong? Not in the gleam of utopia, but in the dirty, refracted places where shadows persist. This future is multiple: watery, technological, post-planetary. It is a clearing, breaking, an unmaking. It invites us to dive in, to blend with it— and to perhaps fail in imagining what is not yet ours to imagine.

(The production of the film is supported by the Arts Promotion Centre Finland, and the music is composed by Kyösti Salokorpi)