Experts: Kurenniemi did not film child pornography

Artist Erkki Kurenniemen the illegal material found in the remains was not shot by him, say the experts who studied the artist and his relatives.

The police said this weekthat material depicting children sexually has been found in Kurenniemi’s artistic remains. The National Gallery had delivered material for the police to examine in October.

Director General of the National Gallery Kimmo Läva did not take a position on what kind of material it is. The police also did not take a position on the content of the material, its form or purpose of use.

Kurenniemi, who died in 2017, was considered a significant pioneer of electronic art and information technology. HS contacted several researchers and experts familiar with the art of Kurenniemi. Four of them agreed to comment on the matter under their own names.

Vain few researchers have had access to Kurenniemi’s 50 meter long archive in the National Gallery.

One of them has known the artist personally Perttu Rastas. Rastas is a retired curator, producer and expert who has worked with video and media art. He was working at the National Gallery when the Kurenniemi art archiving work was started.

In 2006, Kurenniemi had suffered a severe cerebral infarction, became paralyzed and partially lost his ability to speak. His wife was about to move into a new apartment with her husband, who is in a wheelchair, and asked Rastaa what should be done with the unfinished projects and archive.

“Kurenniemi’s entire home was an archive. It’s unbelievable how much stuff there was,” Rastas recalls.

According to Rastaa, the National Gallery and Kurenniemi’s relatives held negotiations on the matter before the gigantic archiving work could begin.

Found says that he is surprised by the investigation that came out this fall. Based on what he saw, he does not believe that the material depicting the child sexually was filmed by Kurenniemi himself.

Rastas suspects that it would be a study started by Kurenniemi in the early 1990s. At the time, Kurenniemi had said that he saved “all the porn images he finds on the internet” on his computer’s hard drive for a period of one year. At that time, child porn could have been stored on the hard drive, for example.

“If it’s child porn that appeared on the internet, I wonder why it couldn’t just be removed in the National Gallery,” says Rastas.

Kurenniemi’s wife also remembers the study in question Kati Heickell. He says he is shocked by the police investigation.

“He had a theory that about 70 percent of the image stream on the internet at that time was porn. That’s what Erkki studied,” says Heickell.

According to Heickell and Rastaa, the background behind the documentation was Kurenniemi’s ambitious vision: that a virtual version of him could come to life in 2048.

That’s why he recorded and documented his life as accurately as possible. He recorded and videotaped his events in the city and at home. What wine he had drunk and where he had lunched. A book was compiled from the diary entries in the 21st century Erkki Kurenniemi in 2048 and a documentary film The future is not the same.

The artist’s however, the archive also contains Kurenniemi’s self-filmed sex videos, says Rastas.

“When we digitized all his home videos, in which he filmed the events of his everyday life, we found a lot of the sex life of Kurenniemi and his girlfriends. He was very popular among women,” Rastas recalls.

According to Rastaa, some of Kurenniemi’s female friends were reluctant to film.

“He said that in order for the relationship to exist, it involves him filming them [yhteisiä seksihetkiä].”

However, Rastas emphasizes that the women depicted in the video were all adults.

An electronic music composer who knew the artist Otto Romanowski tells HS that Kurenniemi photographed women a lot. However, Romanowski has no memories of “children’s stories”.

Neither does the media studies professor familiar with Kurenniemi’s diaries Susanna Paasonen has not seen anything referring to child pornography in the archive material.

However, according to Paasonen, there is a lot of home porn in the artist’s archives. In the videos and pictures, Kurenniemi pictures herself and her partners, for example, from the end of the bed.

According to Paasonen, there was one case in the archive where it was not clear whether the woman knew she was being filmed.

“However, the partners were all adults and Kurenniemi’s long-term partners,” says Paasonen.

Since the police have destroyed the 11 CDs that were found to be illegal, it is almost impossible to know what kind of pornography Kurenniemi recorded on them and what he was aiming for with it.