JAAKKO AUTIO

Contemplative Sound Art
Immersive Media Installations

BIO

Jaakko Autio is a Finnish sound and media artist working within the field of contemplative sound art. He builds spatial sound architectures that invite collective attention into clarity.

His work emerges from collaborative listening practices and from a sustained inquiry into how shared perception organizes itself. These dimensions are collectively shaped and structurally understood and are intertwined in all his installations.

Autio’s immersive multi-channel environments begin from warmth: breath, proximity and shared presence in space. Rather than delivering messages, he composes the conditions under which perception can settle and reorganize. Meaning does not arrive through explanation. It emerges through duration, embodiment and relational awareness.

This work is not immediate. It depends on sustained attention, repetition and the ability to remain within unstable conditions without forcing resolution.

Beneath this experiential warmth lies a long-term investigation into the structure of lived experience. Autio explores how attention stabilizes, dissolves and re-forms within shared environments. Breath, resonance and spatialized sound function as experiential components rather than symbolic devices. Environmental rhythms — wind, water, resonance and collective presence — gradually become perceptible within these spaces.

The works are not devotional. They are research-based explorations of embodied perception and collective presence, where listening becomes a way of sensing how humans and environments co-organize experience.

Autio’s installations have been presented in museums and festivals across Finland and internationally, reaching over 75,000 visitors in 2024. Recent highlights include OWLA (Oulu Art Museum, 56 singers, 2023), Harmony in Displacement (26 Ukrainian and Finnish performers, 2024), and the ongoing ON THE BORDER series (2022 onward), developed at the Estonian–Russian frontier.

In 2024–2025, Autio realized the extensive RE series, exploring return, resonance and embodied listening as modes of reorganizing attention. This cycle culminated in RE-BIRTH (MUU Gallery, Helsinki, 2025), a 40-channel installation combining breath choir, spatialized piano, tactile low-frequency sound, poetic headphone monologues and generative video.

His current multi-year INTER series expands this inquiry into relational, ecological and multispecies contexts, exploring how environmental rhythms — wind, water, ice and shared presence — become perceptually tangible within human experience.

Educated at Metropolia (BA, 2008) and the Theatre Academy of Uniarts Helsinki (MA, 2013), Autio works from his studio in Toijala, Finland.

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work develops spatial architectures of listening.

I build immersive sound environments where collective attention can settle before intensity gathers. Through breath, voices, low-frequency resonance and multi-channel composition, the installations form perceptual fields rather than narrative structures. The work is not a message but a field — meaning emerges through time, shared presence and embodied duration.

This process is not immediate. It depends on sustained attention and the capacity to remain within conditions that do not stabilise.

At its core, my practice investigates how experience organizes itself in space. Listening becomes both method and medium.

The installations do not require belief systems. They construct conditions in which perception can reorganise on its own.

Rather than producing effects, the work distributes attention.

These environments do not represent, but operate. They function as perceptual conditions in which understanding emerges through direct experience — not through explanation, but through being within the field itself.

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CURRICULUM VITAE

Spatial listening architectures developed through immersive multi-channel installations.

Based in Toijala, Finland

jaakkoaution@gmail.com
+358 44 069 1113
instagram.com/jaakkoautio

PRACTICE

Jaakko Autio creates large-scale spatial sound installations (typically 20–40 channels) that function as perceptual environments. His work builds architectures for collective and durational listening, inviting sustained attention and embodied presence. The practice unfolds through long-term series, each developing a distinct spatial and relational condition over time.

INSTALLATIONS AND EXHIBITIONS

RE SERIES (ongoing)

2025 — Aine Art Museum (Tornio) — Snowball Effect / RE-VERB, Chapter II
2025 — MUU Galleria (Helsinki) — RE-BIRTH
2025 — Galleria Aski (Turku) — RE-SOUND (with Akasaka)
2025 — Möhkönvirta Contemporary Art Exhibition — RE-DITUS
2025 — Galleria Villa Suruton (Savonlinna) — RE-FLORIS
2025 — KITA Galleria (Joutsa) — RE-VERB, Chapter I

INTER SERIES (ongoing)

2026 — Jurmo, Archipelago (FI) — INTER – Jurmo (in collaboration with the John Nurminen Foundation)
2026 — Galleria Oiva, Akustiikka — INTER – Held (TAIKE-funded project)
2026 — Oulu City Museum — INTER – Arrival
2025 — One-to-One Festival (Oeiras, PT) — INTER-WITHIN
2025 — One-to-One Festival (Oulu) — INTER-WITHIN
2024 — Taidekeskus AHJO (Joensuu) — Urbana Hortus / INTER-WITHIN

BORDER SERIES

2024–2025 — NART Galleria (Narva, EE) — Possible Worlds
2024 — Demolition Art Exhibition (Helsinki) — OrigiNation, Part IV
2023 — COMPOSTER Festival (Tallinn) — OrigiNation, Part III
2023 — Tampere-Maja (Tartu, EE) — OrigiNation, Part II
2023 — Joensuu Art Museum, M_itä Biennial — OrigiNation, Part I
2022 — Porvoo Art Factory — On the Border, Part V
2022 — World Cities Culture Summit (Helsinki Opera House) — On the Border, Part IV
2022 — KOGO Galleria (Tartu, EE) — On the Border, Part III
2022 — NART Galleria (Narva, EE) — On the Border, Part II
2022 — Tallinn Music Week (Narva, Kreenholm) — On the Border, Part I

PARALLEL WORKS

2023 — Oulu Museum of Art — OWLA
2023–2025 — Oulu Museum of Art / care homes — The Song of Time
2024–2025 — Tartu Art Museum (EE) — The Secrets of the Leaning Building
2025 — ARS Kunstilinnak (Tallinn, EE) — Mirror
2022–2025 — Table for Two — various locations (incl. Annantalo, Helsinki)

GRANTS & COMMISSIONS (SELECTED)

2026 — TAIKE — Visual Arts Working Grant (4 months)
2026 — TAIKE — Project grant (INTER – Held)
2025 — TAIKE — 6-month working grant
2025 — Oulu2026 — Arrival (group grant)
2024 — TAIKE — Project grant (Possible Worlds / Narva)
2023 — TAIKE — Regional funds (North Karelia; Northern Ostrobothnia & Kainuu)
2023 — Kimmo Kaivanto Foundation
2023 — EVL Foundation for the Support of Science and Art
2021 — SKR — Residency grant (NART)
2020 — AVEK — Intimacy
2019 — AVEK — From the Same Tree
2019 — SKR — Grace

RESIDENCIES

2025 — AARK Residency (Korppoo)
2025 — Tornio Museum Residency
2024 — Haihatus Residency
2024 — Old Mine Residency (Outokumpu)
2023 — AARK Residency (Korppoo)
2022 — NART Residency (Narva, EE)
2018 — Gjesteatelieret (Vadsø, NO)

COLLECTIONS

2025 — Aine Art Museum (Tornio) — RE-VERB (collection acquisition)

SELECTED COLLABORATIONS

2025 — RE-SOUND (with Akasaka)
2024 — Meeting Point (with Akasaka)
2021 — Waiting Room — dir. Haapoja & Gustafsson
2019 — Waiting Room — Zone2Source (Amsterdam)

SELECTED THEATRE WORK (SOUND DESIGN)

2014–2015 — Kokkola City Theatre — Head of Sound (resident position)
(Selected productions: Onnellinen perhe, Säikky, Metsäjätti, Marian lapset)

2024 — Body Notes – Special Edition — Tanssin talo (Helsinki), dir. Lindahl
2019 — Vihainen leski (Angry Widow) — Helsinki City Theatre (main stage), dir. Virtanen
2017–2025 — Helsinki City Theatre — sound design (selected productions)

2017–2026 — Body Notes — MimoArt Company, Stoa (Helsinki), dir. Lindahl
(award-winning touring production, presented across Europe)

2017 — Vakavuusongelma (Gravity Problem) — Kouvola City Theatre, dir. Linnapuomi

Selected collaborations with choreographer and director Mirva Mäkinen (2018–2020)

TEACHING (SELECTED)

2026 — University of Lapland — sound art & environmental listening
2026 — Uniarts Helsinki (TEAK) — course on sound design and dramaturgy
2025 — SAMK (Kankaanpää) — media art course
2023 — Uniarts Helsinki (TEAK) — guest lecturer

WRITTEN WORKS

2013 — Wholesome Sound — MA thesis, Theatre Academy
2008 — Space, Time, and Silence in Theatre Sound Design — BA thesis, Metropolia

MEMBERSHIPS

AV-Arkki
Teosto
Gramex
Kuvasto
MUU ry
Teme / SVÄL
YÖ ry
Nordic Artists’ Union

EDUCATION

2010–2013 — Uniarts Helsinki, Theatre Academy (MA, Sound Design)
2003–2008 — Metropolia University of Applied Sciences (BA, Film Sound Design)