turesjolander@hotmail.com

1981 - 1982.

Elected Secretary and Member of the Board of the National Association of Professional Swedish Visual Artists - K.R.O - Konstnärernas Riks Organisation Stockholm - with over 6.000 members.

1979 - 1986.

Elected as the first Director and Chairperson of the Board, while Curator/ Administrator of the former Swedish National Artist Organisation, VIDEO-NU, Stockholm, an Art Laboratory for new electronic technology financially assisted by the Swedish Government and the Stockholm City Council ( 200 individual and 15 corporate members)

Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden.

National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden.

Gothenburg's Art Museum, Gothenburg, Sweden.

Sundsvalls Museum, Sundvall, Sweden.

Family of Charles Chaplins private collection Switzerland.

Swedish National Television collection Stockholm, Sweden.

The Australian Embassy in Beijing, China.

The City Council of Changchun, China.

James Cooks University, North Queensland, Australia

Qingdao Municipal Museum, China.

'97 China Changchun City, International Invitation Exhibition of Sculpture - Permanent installation of two-of-a kind, 3 meters marble-sculptures, at the Culture Square.

Alvdalens County collection, Sweden. Stone of Alvdalskvartsit.

County Council, Falun City, Sweden. Stone of kvartsit.

Thirty public artworks in Sweden and in addition; international corporate and private

Collections in USA, Australia,Europe and China.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts - Top Project Grant 1975 for pioneering elec-

tronic Artworks since 1966 and for the development of art&technology, 'video-art'.

The Ministry for the Arts, Development Grant, Oueensland State Government, Australia, 1992.

The Royal Fund for Swedish Culture - Video&Television installation/experiment, 1966.

The Swedish Government Ministry for Arts, Project Grant for New Media Experiment1962.

Stockholm City Council, Department for Arts, Project Grant - experimental photo- graphics - lightpainting, 1962.

The Collection Of The Qingdao International Art Exhibiton - China 1999. Catalogue; pp. 11, 296, 316. Published by Chinese Artist's Organisation. ISBN 7-5305-1101-7 Total pages: 315.

Art and Australia ( June 1992 Winter/issue, 3 full pages ) - Fine Art Press Pty Ltd. Australia.

The Courier Mail, Queensland, Australia. Saturday, January 25, 1992; 'Artist to fine tune the relevance of art', by Sonia Ulliana.

Video (Monthly Magazine - January 1979) Linkhouse Publication Group Pty Ltd. UK, 'Video Art at New Castle' by Mandy McIntyre (pp.32-33)

Konstrevy (Volume 1) 1963 'Photographic Development' by Kurt Bergengren. (Pp. 10 - 13, and original cover art: 'Ready Maid/Pop Art'. Publisher; Bonniers Bokforlag Sweden.

National Swedish Encyclopaedia - ( 'Focus' ) 1967, Publisher; Bonniers Sweden. See 'S' for, Sjölander Ture.

An innumerable number of articles in Europe, Australia, China and USA have been published as well as radio and television programs (e.g. catalogue text for installations/exhibitions) by writers as: Pierre Restany, Paris, Öivind Fahlström, N.Y., Kristian Romare, Belgium, Prof. Björn Hallström, Stockholm, Pontus Hulten, Bonn, etc. etc .

Available upon request.

Sundsvalls Museum, 1961, (regional Art Gallery Sweden) - Light paintings. Debut. Solo

Exhibition. Catalogue foreword by Oyvind Fahlstrom.

Simultaneously installation of an outdoor exhibition in Stockholm on billboard space of Monumental size. Solo installations.

Italian artists. Selected group exhibition.

group exhibition incl. Nam June Paik, Bill Viola, etc etc

 Solo installation.

Group exhibition. Foreign artists from 10 nations. Permanent installations of stone sculptures at the Culture Square in the City of Changchun.

" Je ne connais pas Ture Sjolander. En automne 1967 un long voyage en Amerique du Sud ne m'a permis de visiter la 5 `eme Biennale de Paris, ou il exposait, qu'a l'extreme fin de la manifestation. Mieux vaut tard que jamais. J'ai ete frappe par les oeuvres de Sjolander. Par leur esprit vraiment moderne. Par soon instinct sur, son usage poetigue des donnees technologiques des mass media: une liberation iconographique au niveau de la technologie de l'information, du langage de la communication de masse…

d'enregistrement de l'image, l'enterprise de Ture Sjolander apparait comme un magistrature, le cure d'hygiene de la vision. Elle bouleverse nos habitudes de perception reflexe, elle stimule notre conscience et notre gout, elle nous associe au destin structurel de l'image animee.

Dans une societe en plein mutation, ou le peril majeur consiste sans doute dans la mecanisation des esprits et la generalisation d'une passivite sensorielle, d'un modernisme-reflexe saturant l'individu, l'enterprise collective de Ture Sjolander, associant l'art et la technique dans le but d'assurer la survie poetique de notre vision, est une enterprise pleinement humaine, que dis-je, humaniste au sens le plus moderne du terme "

In the short history of video animation the Swedish artists TURE SJOLANDER and BROR WIKSTROM are the pioneers. Their television art programme ' TIME ' (1965 - 1966) seems to be the first distortion of video-scan-line rasters achieved by applying tones from wave form generators.

For almost ten years they have been using electronic image-making equipment for a non-traditional statement. It must be kept in mind, however that SJOLANDER and WIKSTROM have a traditional and solid artistic background. Howard Klein likens the relationship between the video artist and his hardware to that between Ingres and the graphite pencil. It should be added that real artists like SJOLANDER and WIKSTROM have a natural relationship to any image-making equipment. In that respect they differ from most cameramen and tape makers and they may come back some day as pioneers in other fields of art.

In fact they have already surpassed the limits of video and TV using the electronic hardware to produce pictures which can be applied as prints, wall paintings and tapestries.

They have generously provided new possibilities to other artists, they are not working alone on a monument of their own.

It is significant that the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts has decided to support SJOLANDER and WIKSTROM financially.

Stockholm - 1976

We live at a time when borders between the art forms are constantly being redrawn or abolished. Poets arrange their poems as pictorial compositions or record spoken sequences of sound which can hardly be distinguished from musique concrète. Composers are able to build a complete composition around the manipulation of a spoken voice. Artists sometimes create pictures by striking off newspaper photographs or mixing conglomerates of discarded objects and painted areas into something which is neither picture nor sculpture. Puppet theatre is performed by setting mobiles in motion in the constantly changing light effects on a stage.

The border between photography and painting is no longer clear, either, and it is easy to understand why this is so. Tinguély, the creator of mobiles, started out by making a form of reliefs with moving parts, powered by a machine placed at the back of them. After a while Tinguély began to wonder why he could not equally well show the play of cog wheels and driving belts at the rear and let "machine" and "shapes" become a united whole.

Similarly, some photographers have asked themselves why the action of light on photo paper and the development baths could not become a creative process comparable with the exposure of a motif — why camera work and darkroom work could not become one.

Among those photographers we find Ture Sjölander. Among those photo graphic artists, as he calls them, who feel dissatisfied with the dialectic of the traditional photographer’s relationship to his motif: when he searches for his motif, he is the sovereign master of it, choosing and rejecting it —. At the very moment that he touches the trigger, he has become enslaved to the motif, without any possibility (other than in terms of light gradation) to do what a painter does — reshape, exclude, and emphasize in the motif.

This subjection to the motif does not have to be disrupted by eliminating the motif. The photographer simply needs to remove the limits to what is permitted and what is not allowed. To let the copy of a photo remain in the water bath for an hour is allowed (if you want to keep the motif). But leaving it there for a couple of days is the right thing as well (if you want to let the motif diffuse into deformations soft and silky as fur). Scratching with a needle or a razor blade is making accidents with scratches into a virtue — and so on.

In addition, there is the chance of manipulating a figurative or non-figurative motif by copying different pictorial elements into it, by enlargements which elevate previously imperceptible structures to the visible level, even up to monumental dimensions. The tension between scratching lines of light into a developed (black) negative the size of a matchbox and enlarging it on the Agfa papers the size of a bed sheet. This is where the photographer has at his command tricks of his art which the painter lacks, or at any rate seldom uses.

But on the other hand, is the photographer able freely to experiment with the colour? Yes, he is — if he brushes paint on to the negative and makes a colour copy.

He may also, like Ture Sjölander, brush, pour, draw etc. on a photo paper — possibly with a background copied on to it — with water, developing or fixing sodium thiosulphite solutions, ferrocyanide of potassium and other liquids. In that case the result is a single, once-only, art work. In this way he is able to achieve a tempered and melting colour scale of white, sepia, ochre, thunder cloud grey, verdigris, silver and possibly also certain blue and red tones.

In this area, however, it seems everything still remains to be done — but one single photographer’s resources are not enough for the experiments to be conducted widely and in depth. Sweden has recently inaugurated its first studio of electronic music. When will photographers and painters be given the opportunity to explore this no-man’s-land between their time-honoured frontlines?

Stockholm, 1961.

"Man at the Moon". is the name of the LP Record.

 "HISTORIC INNOVATION"

Letter from: RUTT ELECTROPHYSICS, 21-29 West 4^th Street, New Yourk,N.Y., 10012. March 12, 1974.

Extracts;

"I am writing a detailed magazine article about the history of video animation.

From literature avaiable I gather that a videofilm program, "MONUMENT", broadcast in Stockholm in January, 1968, was the first distortion of video scan-line rasters achieved by applying tones from wave form generators.

This is of such great importance - historically - that I would like to obtain more detailed documentation of the program and of the electronic circuitry employed to manipulate the video images.

I understand from your New York office that there may have been a brochure or booklet published about the program.

I will be happy to pay any expense for publications, photcopies or other documents about the program and its production -particulary with regard to the method of modulating the deflection voltage in the flying-spot telecine used.

"Video synthesis" is becoming a prominent technique in TV production here in the United States, and I think it will be interesting to give credit to your broadcasting system and personal for achieving this historic innovation."

( A number of authentic documents/letters from this communications is avaliable)

No "detailed article" or even magazine was never reported or later presented after receiving the vital information from the Swedish Broadcating Company, by Rutt Electrophysics)

Having seen your interesting Stockholm exhibition of portraits of the King of Sweden made with advanced electronic techniques I have been struck by the connection between this new type of image creating and the music-and-light art presented by The Pink Floyd.

I think that your work could and should be linked with the music of The Pink Floyd in a television production, and I would like to suggest that we start arranging the practical details for such a production immedialtely. With all his experiences from filming in the USA and elsewhere I also feel that Mr. Lars Swanberg is the ideal man tp help us made the film.

Please get in touch as soon as possible.

Yours sincerely

Andrew King

electronic painting 1968

TURE SJOLANDER/LARS WECK

We create pictures. We form conceptions of all the objects of our experience. When talking to each other our conversation emerges in the form of descriptions. In that way we understand one another.

Instantaneous communication in all directions. Our world in television! The world in image and the image in the world: at the same moment, in the consciousness and in the eyes of millions.

The true multi-images is not substance but process-interplay between people.

"Photography freed us from old concepts", said the artist Matisse. For the first time it showed us the object freed from emotion.

Likewise satellites showed us for the first time the image of the earth from the outside. Art abandoned representation for the transformational and constructional process of depiction, and Marcel Duchamp shifted our attention to the image-observer relation.

That, too, was perhaps like viewing a planet from the outside. Meta-art: observing art from the outside. That awareness has been driven further. The function of an artist is more and more becoming like that of a creative revisor, investigator and transformer of communication and our awareness of them.

Multi-art was an attempt to widen the circulation of artist's individual pictures. But a radical multi-art should not, of course, stop the mass production of works of art: it should proceed towards an artistic development of the mass-image.

MONUMENT is such a step. What has compelled TURE SJOLANDER and LARS WECK is not so much a technical curiosity as a need to develop a widened, pictorially communicative awareness.

They can advance the effort further in other directions. But here they have manipulated the electronic transformations of the telecine and the identifications triggered in us by well-known faces, our monuments. They are focal points. Every translation influences our perception. In our vision the optical image is rectified by inversion. The electronic translation represented by the television image contains numerous deformations, which the technicians with their instruments and the viewers by adjusting their sets usually collaborate in rendering unnoticeable.

MONUMENT makes these visible, uses them as instruments, renders the television image itself visible in a new way. And suddenly there is an image-generator, which - fully exploited - would be able to fill galleries and supply entire pattern factories with fantastic visual abstractions and ornaments.

Utterly beyond human imagination.

SJOLANDER and WECK have made silkscreen pictures from film frames. These stills are visual. But with television, screen images move and effect us as mimics, gestures, convultions. With remarkable pleasure we sense pulse and breathing in the electronic movement. The images become irradiated reliefs and contours, ever changing as they are traced by the electronic finger of the telecine.

With their production, MONUMENT, SJOLANDER and WECK have demonstrated what has also been main-tained by Marshall McLuhan: that the medium of television is tactile and sculptural.

The Foundation for MONUMENT was the fact that television, as no other medium, draws the viewers into an intimate co-creativity. A maximum of identification - the Swedish King, The Beatles, Chaplin, Picasso, Hitler etc, - and a maximum of deformation.

A language that engages our total instinct for abstraction and recognition.

Vital and new graphic communication. A television Art.

Kristian Romare, Sweden 1968