Haraldur Karlsson

I am a multimedia artist whose practice lives at the intersection of technology, science, and art—charting the territory where data becomes poetry, where measurement becomes meaning, where the clinical gaze softens into wonder.

For over twenty-five years, I have worked with interactive installations, video art, and new media technology, always asking: What happens when we use the tools of science not to distance ourselves from nature but to remember our place within it? How can technology help us see not just more clearly, but more deeply?

My journey began with post-graduate studies in Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where I had the privilege of studying under video art pioneer Steina Vasulka. That apprenticeship shaped everything that followed—not just technically, but philosophically. Steina taught me that technology is never neutral, that every tool carries a way of seeing, and that the artist's task is to bend those tools toward revelation.

After my studies, I returned to Iceland University of the Arts where Steina and I became colleagues. Working alongside someone who had helped define video art as a medium taught me the value of rigor married to imagination, of technical precision in service of poetic truth.

In 1999, I founded the New Media Lab at the Iceland Academy of the Arts, creating a space where students could explore the emerging territories of interactive media, sensor technology, and real-time processing. For nearly a decade, I taught across departments—Fine Art, Theatre, Dance, Design—always working to dissolve the boundaries between disciplines.

My international practice has taken me across Europe—extended periods in Amsterdam working at STEIM, residencies in Oslo at Atelier Nord and with the experimental film platform Atopia, and ongoing collaborations with institutions like V2_ Rotterdam, Ars Electronica, and IRCAM.

For fourteen years, I organized RAFLOST Festival for electronic music and visual arts, creating a space for experimentation and exchange that brought international artists to Iceland and Icelandic artists to the world.

Currently, I work as an elementary school teacher at Breiðagerðisskóli in Reykjavík, teaching mathematics and social studies to fifth graders. This might seem like a departure from my artistic practice, but I see it as an extension of the same inquiry: How do we teach people to see? How do we make the abstract tangible? How do we cultivate curiosity rather than compliance?

Whether I'm helping a student understand fractions or an artist understand Max/MSP, the principle remains the same: create conditions for discovery, hold space for wonder, remember that every expert was once a beginner.

My work has always been animated by a simple question: What if technology could help us not to escape nature but to recognize ourselves as part of it? What if the telescope and the microscope were not tools of domination but instruments of kinship?

I believe that the most profound discoveries happen at intersections—where art meets science, where the ancient meets the instant, where the cosmic meets the cellular. I work in those liminal spaces, building bridges, making translations, creating conditions for others to make their own discoveries.

After twenty-five years, the work still feels new. There are still patterns I haven't noticed, connections I haven't made, ways of seeing I haven't yet imagined. And that persistent sense of possibility—that the next project might reveal something essential—is what keeps me going.