Composed of twenty moving-image works, Situations marks a new direction within Swahn’s practice. Text, sound, and image come together in short scenes that sit somewhere between memory, sketch, dream, and observation — works that feel less constructed as compositions and more encountered as passing states.
Built through a custom web-native system, the series draws from the visual language of early home computers, text adventures, demo scene graphics, and low-resolution game environments of the 1980s and 1990s. But rather than recreating retro systems or aesthetics, Swahn returns to the particular atmosphere those environments produced: small worlds shaped through limitation, suggestion, and imagination.
For the first time, language takes a central role in his work. Brief fragments of text appear within the compositions alongside repetitive synthesized soundtracks and sparse pixelated forms. Running trails at night, distant fireworks, landscapes passing in darkness, moments of stillness or uncertainty - the works do not present linear narratives so much as fragments of thought or emotional states.
This shift toward something more personal marks a departure from the more formal and geometric concerns of Swahn’s earlier series. Works such as Farbteiler (2021), Punktwelt (2022), and Funktor (2023) explored colour, structure, and abstraction through systems of geometric organisation.
Installation view
In Autoscope (2024), Swahn expanded those investigations into a fully chromatic universe composed of abstract environments and perspectiveless landscapes, where mountains emerged through cones and pyramids, oceans through sine waves, and forests through repeating cylindrical forms. Across those works, colour functioned almost architecturally - as a material capable of constructing entire spaces and atmospheres.
His first release with SOLOS, Soma, pushed this further. There, form dissolved almost entirely into clouds of chromatic particles and shifting bodies suspended between abstraction and figuration. Suggestive of cellular structures, constellations, or formations of matter, the works moved away from fixed geometry toward something more unstable and atmospheric.
Situations continues this movement away from rigid structure, but in a quieter and more intimate register. The geometric systems remain, but they now function more like frameworks for memory, rhythm, and emotional association. Sound and text open the work outward, allowing personal experience and subjective states to enter more directly into the compositions.
Music plays an essential role throughout the series. Swahn, who has worked with sound and composition since childhood, combines simple synthesized tones, loops, and repetitive structures that shape the pacing and atmosphere of each work. Image and sound move together in ways that recall early computer games and demo culture, where graphics, music, and code existed as part of the same expressive space.
Erik Swahn, Soma
“ I was imagining some kind of digital folk art — something very simple, not that technical, but evocative somehow.”
Erik Swahn
Soma, detail
Underlying the series is an interest in forms that exist slightly outside traditional ideas of fine art: embroidery samplers, amateur graphics, software demos, text adventures, and other vernacular or domestic forms of image-making. In Situations, these references are absorbed into a visual language that feels both familiar and difficult to place - suspended somewhere between personal memory and collective technological history.
Born in Sweden, Erik Swahn works across generative systems, moving image, and sound. His practice explores perception, colour, rhythm, and the emotional possibilities of computational systems. While grounded in algorithmic processes, his works consistently resist pure formalism, instead searching for atmosphere, ambiguity, and moments of psychological resonance.
Bio
Erik Swahn (b. 1977) is an artist and architect based in Sweden exploring the minute details of procedural art. Initially, Swahn’s artistic practice included physical mediums such as acrylic, ink and charcoal before transitioning to creative coding. His practice investigates colour, pigment blending and overlapping forms with a pointillist style…