Finnish actor Santeri Karl-Henrik Kinnunen, the son of 2 actor-parents, found early immersion spending time on a farm as a Helsinki city child. There he became utterly fascinated by horses, learning to ride & go somewhere else with his thoughts & dreams, immersed in the countryside.

Kinnunen is a veteran of the Helsinki City Theatre & has acted in the KOM Theater as well as the Finnish National Theatre. He is also a veteran of many Finnish film & television productions.

His second immersion was losing himself to rediscover himself in his acting roles in stage productions such as MacBeth & in films such as A Charming Mass Suicide, Matti: Hell Is for Heroes, & Hellsinki.

But his strangest pleasure as a professional actor is as a voice actor for which he supplies the Finnish voice of Buzz Lightyear in the Toy Story series & Captain John Smith in Pocahontas. He finds it fascinating that he can find immersion using his voice even if they’re only the disembodied voices of animated 2-dimensional characters…

The Swede Anders Kreuger is a curator, writer & educator. He has been the director of the renowned Kohta Gallery in Helsinki since 2019. Prior to that, he was the senior curator at HKA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, the director of the Malmö Art Academy, & was a member of the Programme Team for the European Kunsthalle in Cologne. He was a founding member of the Nordic Council of Minsters Information Office in Vilnius, served as the director of the Nordic Arts Center in Helsinki & has served on the editorial board of the London-based art journal Afterall as well as the Ghent journal A Prior.

He has also worked as an independent curator, organizing numerous exhibitions throughout Europe. He has taught at the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen, Royal College of Art in London, & other European art academies. Served as an advisor to the Raqs Media Collective at Manifesta 7 in Bolzano. Anders Kreuger regularly writes essays for catalogues & journals, & has edited numerous publications.

He has been deeply & personally immersed in words, reading, & language since his childhood experiences immersed in reading children’s books. As a curator he thrives on how words affect his work as a curator & loves working with, for & through people as his way of constructing a situation that allows the viewer to become immersed in an exhibition.

I met Anders in Helsinki through Martti Aiha, the acclaimed Finnish artist known as Mara, a long time friend of my wife, librettist Maija-Leena Rems. Mara, sadly recently deceased, was on the founding board of Kohta Gallery. Anders & I had many conversations about shamanism & the influence of the oldest ideas on the contemporary world. Growing from this shared interest, Anders created the gallery show, Charlie Morrow, A Gathering which included Winter Solstice Celebration with musicians around the world. Currently, he is curating the Yes & No Tation gallery show which is paired with Sound Circus, a public event.

Subjects discussed: Telepathy, AI, immersion, written language, thought before language, reading minds, inducing immersive states, seeing images in objects, shamans, origin & development of language, Chomsky, galleries, curation, museums, cave paintings, dream singing, desire to connect, Stalin, Finland, comparative linguistics, arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, Cratylus, Andaman Islands, Navajo, Elias Canetti, Fascism, Trumpianism, color theory, Kandinski, & so much more…

Harri Koskinen is a man of many talents. Born in 1970 in Karstula, Finland, with a populations of a population of 3,625 is located in Central Finland.

Harri studied design came to Helsinki city to st at the Institute of Art & Design. He's best known as a leading innovator of Nordic design for, among other things, his award-winning Block Lamp, the familiar light build inside a rectangular brick of glass, which is exhibited in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He has designed furniture, packaging, pots & pans, turntables, hotel rooms internationally & many other immersive spaces, but most importantly for us here at iMMERSE!, the Genelec 8000-series of speakers for cutting-edge sound systems. Soon being released, Genelec headphones.

I met Harri in New York City in the first years of this century. He had designed a traveling show of Finnish design and engineered the installations. Typical of Nordic society, Finnish designers have worked together for decades to build on their shared values of several generations. Similarly, Finnish architects and orchestra conductors generate a wave of multigenerational forces. Sweetly, the meaning of architect Alvar Aalto’s family name. Mr. Wave.

Later, Harri gave a home to a MorrowSound 3D showroom system in his Helsinki design company offices. We have collaborated on the show Sound Glass Space 2012 in the Akusmata Gallery in Helsinki and on a floating chair for listening to 3D sound.

Harri’s design includes sound, light and physical materials. How fitting that he named his company, Friends of Industry ltd.

Topics discussed: first immersive experience, biking through woods, Finnish countryside, milk cans, playing bass, LPs, ACDC, Genulec speakers, design of sound systems, art, glass