Espen Tversland
Norway
Where do you locate yourself in relation to the systems you work with?
I occupy a position among systems in decline: ecological, technological, and ideological. Based in Brønnøysund, and shaped by a life lived across shifting geographies in Norway and Sweden, my practice emerges from the periphery rather than the center. This distance allows me to engage closely with dominant systems—architecture, artificial intelligence, cultural history—without fully aligning with their narratives of progress, mastery, or neutrality.
I work in the aftermath of modernism’s future. Its architectural monuments, technological optimism, and human-centered worldviews persist as material and symbolic residues. My position is neither nostalgic nor futuristic, but attentive to avsondring: the gradual loss of relational, sensory, ecological, and historical connection. I stand within these structures as a conditional participant, listening to what remains when meaning, authority, and futures fracture.
Where are you heading, and what is pulling you there?
The vector of my practice moves through tension rather than resolution. I oscillate between material slowness and technological acceleration, between embodied processes and algorithmic systems. Charcoal drawing, fieldwork, sound, film, and AI-based transformations pull against one another, generating friction as method.
Artificial intelligence functions simultaneously as tool, mirror, and critical object. It exposes how historical power structures—gendered, ideological, extractive—are reproduced through data and automation. I approach AI not as innovation, but as a hauntological medium: a system that generates endlessly while remaining detached from memory, responsibility, and lived experience.
Works such as Hope Springs Eternal, In violent silence horror is born, and Post-Futurism – Avsondringens kretsløp follow this vector by staging encounters between ecological fragility, architectural memory, and technological mediation. The movement is guided by failure, ambiguity, and ethical unease rather than efficiency or clarity. Humor, irony, and poetic abstraction coexist with seriousness, allowing critique to remain open rather than declarative.
How would you describe the space your practice is currently unfolding in?
The space of my practice unfolds as immersive, mutable environments where image, sound, text, drawing, and machine-generated material coexist. These spaces are shaped by existing systems—technological infrastructures, architectural ideologies, ecological conditions—but they are deliberately slowed down, fragmented, and rendered porous.
Drawing functions as artistic research within this space. Charcoal, with its associations to fire, warmth, and residue, becomes a tactile counterpoint to digital speed and immateriality. The installations operate as resonant chambers rather than explanatory frameworks, inviting viewers to sense shifts in scale—from the human to the ecological, from intention to consequence.
I locate myself within systems as a critical inhabitant. Through exhibition contexts and through the artist-run space Hullet, my practice inhabits technology, institutions, and histories from within their fractures. Rather than offering solutions, the work foregrounds entanglement, responsibility, and uncertainty—proposing resonance, attentiveness, and ecological reorientation as counter-practices in an accelerated world.
AI Art experience
One more tool to use for my ideas
Personal experience
my ideas
Unexpected thought
high tech rooted in nostalgia
Prove you are human
we die so slow, we think we live
