These photographs were taken by weather cameras in Finland every twelve minutes. From that point, the Finnish weather authorities/authorities who observed the weather uploaded the images online to be viewed for 24 hours before they disappeared. This presented an opportunity for Finnish artist Tatu Gustafsson to perform for the weather camera and document his choreographed weather memory before the speed of the weather camera and its platform further dissipated his image into the ether. Where do all of those displaced images go when they are deleted? Is there such a thing as being truly deleted? Can we or anything ever truly be removed?

Is there a digital Wizard of Oz pulling a digital lever omnisciently cancelling our discarded bodies, birthday cakes, ex-lovers, and trophy moments into the bliss of oblivion? I doubt it. The worst part of this is that I know our digital constitution will always be trapped like the Zod trio in Superman II, filed away in glass hurled into a digital sun. No point in pulling the mask down; there is no escape. An honorary death used to include erasure, a sense that as quoted elsewhere by Conan O’Brien, “All Meat is Pain”. He did not say that, but he did suggest that “All graves go unvisited, eventually” and that in the face of being digitally manacled to a sequence of binary numbers reconstituted like digital Soylent Green sounds positively delightful. No further extraction is required. No partial upload elsewhere, no faux resistance, no currency, no economy, matter slowly broken down and inhaled by the living in a vapor cast from what is left from the bio-form of the earth.

Studying Tatu Gustafsson’s strangely titled I on the Road (FW: Books, 2024) has left me with many questions about the state of things. I think of the performance in the artist’s work, and I applaud the idea of giving up pressing the button at all, instead using one’s self as a blunt instrument to force the state to observe one of their citizens. I wonder what would happen to carry out a crime under similar circumstances, dragging a body to a new location and waiting for twelve-minute intervals to display the corpse to force it to also perform in the digital collective. I would not worry about being caught. I would already live forever in the w(aether). I would become the slow mist eating at the cables of things, if not the Internet. When I am not thinking of dragging bodies around to various Finnish weather camera sites, I am reminded that this performance is all there needs to be.

Imagine sitting on the road divide waiting, corpse on your knee and forcing it to mime lyrics to your least favorite/worstest Taylor Swft song, hand under its resisting jaw up and down, up and down, klack, klack, klack teeth klack klack klack, not quite knowing the words, fumbling with them, it’s eyes cold blue, reflecting the street lights as snow sticks to the unmoving irises, body more rigid to position with the successive intervals of capture due to stiffening in the Finnish cold. I prefer to see myself in a Santa Claus suit and my companion in a Dora the Explorer sleeping bag, though the corpse is adult but genderless. We used to scream for ice cream. We must prepare for summer. Be the nagging, persisting creatures that we are. Is this still playful? Why am I haunted? Is oncoming traffic a gift or a crime? What isn’t overkill is unmemorable. You could alternatively present flowers to the weather camera, or a series of signs like Bob Dylan did when he was activating his inner activist, creating no less than an ant’s fart of progress. Still, you don’t need to know the weatherman to know which way the wind blows, amIrite?

I do not need to elicit the Grand Guignol of Baltic melancholia to prove Gustafsson’s point, namely that, second to the uncontrolled portraits, 90% of success is showing up. The other 10% has to do with one of two things, but I will give you three for safe measure. 1) Your attractiveness 2) Your social pedigree 3) Your ability to manipulate objects and people.

Metaphor aside, another fascinating component of Gustafsson’s book is the near-decade worth of images that he acquired through his methodology. You see this reflected in the quality of his indexed images. There are some quite irresolute images within the batch that I can only imagine were some of the earliest experiments between the period of taking the photos from 2012 to 2021. I can only assume the project has finished, but that is hard to tell. Why not continue? What a fascinating archive of material this would be, over a lifetime of hunting and gathering images, which further begs the following questions: Who is collecting who? We assume that the weather camera is collecting Gustafsson’s forlorn and, at times, downright creepy images, but in reality, it may very well be that Gustafsson is collecting geography and technology owned by the state. There is no implied ownership in this sentiment, but imagine cataloguing, as Gustafsson has done all of the Finnish weather cameras. I am not sure what it would mean, but it is fascinating that he uses his own body to demarcate less his portrait than the apparatus of his interests.

Aesthetically, the work is quite miasmatic and haunting. The locations, the netherworld between urban experience and rural experience, and the road, as it were, are such strange places to make these images. They exude a Ballardian sense of our fixation with travel and the automobile but also suggest a peculiar space in which humans are not always allowed to walk- this is seen in particular when the images include what appears to be a busy freeway. It suggests a state of uncanny in which the artist walks in front of the camera, just out of reach of passersby, and looks at us through the weather camera. I am reminded of Jon Rafman and Doug Rickard’s Google projects, but this takes a slightly different shape with the artist’s inclusion. I might also obliquely reference Sophie Calle, Jules Spinatsch, and Kurt Cavieziel.

I am reminded of the incident at the Hotel Cecil in Los Angles of the death of Elisa Lam or perhaps a strange sense of the apparition found in the remake of the movie The Ring with Naomi Watts. Gustafsson is not altogether clear in these images, and he watches me through the book. A parallel point of interest is to discuss the real feeling of being surveilled while looking through the book. As the technology fits a particular genre of non-human CCTV surveillance photography, so then does the artist reformat this genre into something that he can hack and present a type of gaze from the beyond. It is a supernatural gaze inspired by technology. There are always more questions.

The book itself reads like an experiment between index and typology with the locations of the cameras semi-documented on the back of the book. Still, crucially, all reference points are left to the periphery. The colophon is on the spine, the index of the locations are on the back and outside of the title page, and the book is conceived of image after image of Gustafsson on his journey to be captured and to capture the weather cameras in Finland. This is not a Hans Gremmen design, which was a surprise as it found its way to his publishing house. That said, Tuomas Kortteinen’s design feels at home in the publishing house. This is a very healthy and positive attitude for the publisher to take. This came out quite late last year, but it has been a source of inspiration in 2025 and is a powerful title for all the reasons I have mentioned.

Tatu Gustafsson

I On the Road

FW:Books