Finnish media and live cinema artist, teacher, investigator, curator and cultural activist. Her work has been described as "A dark delirium of images, a disintegrated vision on a complex world – a digital version of William Blake's poetry".
Her style ranges from minimal abstractions to multilayered compositions following a dreamlike narrative journey. She processes her visual material with MAX/MSP/JITTER, Isadora and Modul8. She has given lectures and written articles on various themes including live cinema, VJing, robots, audiovisual and digital culture and tactical sound. In 2006 she published her thesis on LIVE CINEMA language and elements, (Media laboratory, Helsinki) which gathers her experience on real-time visuals. The following year she edited widely distributed special issue on LIVE CINEMA for a:minima magazine/book. Her latest workshop titled Audiovisual Real-time Creation took place in Spain, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Finland, Mexico, USA.
SOLU: Trilogy Kaamos
Mia Makela juxtaposes the narrative abstraction typical of music videos with digital pictorial practices, thereby developing a new poetic dimension of the audiovisual field. The shadows on screen mirror the contents of the visual fields of two women walking into the middle of a forest in search of a magic cure for blindness. On their return, they cannot find their way out: either they are lost or the world around them has changed due to the approaching Finnish darkness. (...) Kaamos is a clear example of "live cinema" in which the central story plot is composed of intuitions and sensations, rather than linear texts. Real time video software manages to control the development of the situation according to the emotional improvisation of the artist (...) The software thereby contributes to the video at a metanarrative level (a digital alchemy by means of which earth turns into fire)". Makela's work suggests an active process that never attests to the end of a piece: "video is just a moment in the life of the performance, Kaamos is already different from the time when I made the video, as new combinations have come up which I hadn't tried before." (Carlos T. Mori, HAMACA Catalogue)
11 Dec 11:00 p.m. Theatre — SOLU: KAAMOS /FIN/
— A/V performance — Live Animation
12 Dec 2:00 p.m. Theatre — MIA MAKELA /FIN/: LIVE CINEMA („live animation practice")
— lecture and workshop — Live Animation
