[Aug 30 - Oct 12 ] No One is There by Henrik Soederstroem - Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center

📢 No One is There by Henrik Soederstroem

🗓 DATE & TIME: August 30 to October 12, 2025. Open to the public: 11 am to 5 pm on Sat and Sun.

Opening: Saturday August 30, 2025 from 3 – 5 pm.

Artist Talk @ 1 pm on August 30, 2025, with Emilia Nicholson-Fajardo (Curatorial Assistant, MOCA Los Angeles)

📍 LOCATION: Harvestworks Art and Technology Program. Building 10a, Nolan Park, Governors Island. New York City, USA.

No One Is There is a mixed media installation incorporating found objects, generative AI, and a live-running no-input 3D game with a stochastically generated soundtrack. The project explores liminal states, uncanny agencies, and the entanglement of unique and multiple, virtual and material, data and trash. No One is There leverages a custom AI 3D model generator, trained on discarded furniture from the streets of NYC, to probe the subconscious of the city and the ghosts of household items through machinic eyes and minds.

No One Is There was created by Henrik Soederstroem for the Harvestworks New Works 2025 program. Using found objects, a custom trained AI text-to-3D model, and a live-running no-input 3D game with a stochastically generated soundtrack, the installation explores tensions between virtuality and materiality, the hidden agency of objects, and uncanny aspects of digital computation.

The project departs from Henrik Soederstroem’s earlier work Troubles of Presence I-IV which ponders processes of meaning and agency, through a speculative framing of quotidian, mass-produced consumer items, discarded trash and virtual objects.

In Troubles of Presence I-IV, Soederstroem created virtual copies of furniture and household items from memory, of now-lost childhood items and family heirlooms, as well as discarded objects found on the streets of Los Angeles. Inspired by Mark Fisher’s notion of the “eerie” as the presence of an unknown agency, and using a vernacular aesthetic of haunting and the supernatural, Troubles of Presence I-IV explored the unseen personal histories inscribed in these throwaway objects – their “aura” or agency. The project speculated into how this aura lingers in objects that have been demoted to urban waste or digital representation, in the entanglement of unique and multiple, virtual and material, data and trash.

No One is There investigates these themes of unseen agency and virtuality further through speculative use of generative AI. The project incorporates a custom AI trained on 3D models of used and discarded furniture from New York City, programmed to independently generate new objects. This application of AI explores non-human cognition of human objects, and machine learning as a tool to decode the immanent aura / agency / vibe that Troubles of Presence I-IV proposed.

No One is There traces several other topics of interest in Soederstroem’s work, including the materiality of electronic media technologies, aesthetics of horror and the supernatural, and how these intersect in weird or haunted media. The installation weaves an autonomous, virtual ghost-plane through computer game engines and generative code, presented across deconstructed and outmoded media devices, proposing a weird and eerie outside to dominant narratives of technology. This no-input game draws on artificial life studies as well as the history of generative art and composition, randomizing generation and placement of virtual objects in 3D space, as well as the selection and sequencing of camera gestures and sounds.

BIO:

Henrik Soederstroem is a multidisciplinary artist from Stockholm, Sweden. He works with computer graphics, interactive and generative video, sound, spatial installation and sculptural objects. His work explores the limits and critical points of aesthetic, technological, social and linguistic systems. In recent years his focus has been on virtual worlds, their methods of meaning-making and their paradoxical relation to physical reality, often viewed through metaphors drawn from horror, the supernatural and folkloric.

ADDITIONAL MATERIAL:

Troubles of Presence II & III on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/m7ZFIfnoTag

Troubles of Presence installed in the New Wight Gallery in Los Angeles:
https://youtu.be/GSOtzUFml6M