Selfportrait, 2005.
Jonas - The story so far
The year is 1975, the place is Jakobstad, mid-western Finland. Kristina and Sthure got a little boy, they decided to give the name Jonas. He doesn't recall much of what happened until he's about five years old and one of the earliest memories he has is building things out of Legos and from then on he has always been constructing things.
When he was eight the family moved to the countryside, to a village called Sandsund. The nature was always close by, it was literally just a few meters to the forest, and Jonas spent a lot of time playing in it. When he moved he also lost touch with his old friends but got new ones relatively fast, one of those friends had got his hands on a computer, a Sharp MZ-700, that he didn't really know what to do with since it had no games. So Jonas ended up buying it and discovered the programming language Basic. Because there was no games on the machine Jonas ended up making his own, so by the age of eight Jonas was a programmer. School sucked, there was always too much other stuff going on in his head. Things like Dinosaurs, UFOs and Programming, to name a few, but he managed somehow.
On his 15th birthday his grandmother wanted to give him something special, he got the choice between a moped and a new computer, well that was an easy choice. The Amiga 500 that was a new and powerful computer then so that was the weapon of choice. That computer could do decent sound, it could play four mono channels at ones, that was awesome and he started making music. He had been playing piano and recorder before that but it was something he never really got around to do very much, to quite a big extent because they didn't own a piano.
The early music was something that could with a little stretch of the imagination be called "hardcore rave" almost exclusively 4/4 beats with a high hat on every 16'th going on around 150 beats per minute, the important thing was not so much how it sounded but that it was loud. He also started doing graphics, raytracing 3D graphics has always fascinating him, and with a such fast computer as the 7 MHz Amiga 500 such things were possible. In all honesty with the 320 x 256 pixels resolution of the screen it is like rendering small previews in todays standards.
When he finished the compulsory school and had to start thinking about career options there was no question about it, computers all the way. So he studied to become a computer mechanic, and later a computer support person. But at some point it dawned on him that computers are just tools, it's what you do with them that are important, like if an artisan was studying how to build hammers, and the strong interest in computers slowly faded away, he still used them on a more then daily basis but it was not the computer that was interesting but what he could use it for. He got a better Amiga, then a PC and another PC and another PC, and then got totally sick and tired of PCs... Switched over to Macintosh and that's what he uses now.
Around the year 2000 he got an interest in photography and bought his first camera, it was a (almost) 2 MPx Fuji compact digital camera. which he quite soon grew out of. The need to experiment, to do things that was more then the occasional snapshot, was too great so he bought the best digital camera he could afford, a Minolta Dimage 7i. It had much controls that were about the same as the film SLR's of that day, but soon that also hit a creative wall. What now he thought, the digital cameras weren't good enough, should he really go to analogue cameras, that would be a step backwards in the evolution of the media and being a total geek that seemed a bit wrong, but he did, he bought a Nikon FM3a, a fully manual SLR that had no limitations, other then the fact that film was expensive. By now photography really had become his primary interest and he shot mostly nature and landscape on slide film that he scanned into the computer. He got all kinds of lenses filters and weird accessories for the camera and loved it dearly. He didn't have any job for quite some time, which sort of suited him just fine, then he could be out all night doing his art. He just went to courses and short time jobs, everything from managing football fields to programming web pages.
He decided that he wanted to study photography, but that was easier said then done. He applied to a few schools but his grades wasn't so good and his portfolio was a bit lame, but then after getting rejected over and over for the second year in a row he got accepted to a school in southern Finland, on a one year art photography course. This was really good for him as he learned how the darkroom and film lab worked and how to do the whole photographic process by hand, he already knew the digital part. From that school he got a chance to apply to an English university and to his amazement he got accepted to BA Hons. Photography & Media Arts. at University for the Creative Arts in Maidstone.
In the first year at the University he got an interest in video and started making video works, almost as much video projects as photography. Even if the choices of media becomes wider he hasn't dropped anything, He still makes music, under the alias Ambient Light, he still likes to model and render 3D scenes and of-course he's still doing photography and video.
Jonas has had 3 public photography exhibitions:
- Galleri Zebra, Karis, Finland. 2005 "Vargtimmen" (Hour of the Wolf)
- S-Galleria, Helsinki, Finland. 2005 "Vargtimmen" (Hour of the Wolf)
- Royal Star Arcade, Maidstone, UK. 2007 "Roots"
- (upcoming show) Candid Gallery, London, UK. 2008
Jonas has had his music featured on:
- Goddard Space Flight Centre. 2003, A NASA educational film
- Darker Projects, an audio drama. 2007
- Many of his own videos has his specially composed music.
- And lots and lots of podcasts and independent radio.
- Ambient Light - Shiver (Internet Release, 2006)
- Ambient Light - Idun (will be released in 2008)
That was what I do, continue to the next page if you really wanna know who I am.
Me photographing a rock (?) in Abisko, Sweden. 2007
Photo by my Mother, Kristina Thomén.