Kristofer Ström has a hyperactive imagination and just about every skill needed to keep up with it. The Swedish artist is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, character designer, animator and video director all at once, making films and music videos that are character-driven, playful and set in vividly colourful worlds. His techniques run from 2D and 3D to mixed media, and his best-known works include the animated music video Animals for Swedish electronica duo Minilogue, a piece of colourful, blob-like chaos let loose on real-world city streets. He’s also a skilled illustrator, exhibited in London, Malmö and beyond, and a musician and recording artist in his own right, which is why music videos have always been close to his heart. Alongside all the doodling and directing, he continues to perform and release music through his solo project Ljudbilden & Piloten, and has kept up a long-running, much-loved blog of iPhone drawings made on his daily commute.
At Kinomural he presents So Much Stuff in My Head, an animation that feels like a direct record of the overflow of ideas, images and associations running through the artist’s mind. Kristofer Ström transforms this stream of thoughts into a colourful, chaotic and energetic world where characters, shapes and situations appear, disappear and morph into one another. It is a visual explosion of imagination, with no single story and no clear beginning or end. Instead, we get a chain of loose associations, absurd situations and Ström’s unmistakable sense of humour. The piece feels like a brief glimpse inside someone’s mind, before all the thoughts have had a chance to arrange themselves. The film is a collection of improvised animations created in the Looom app on an iPad. The process is a bit like doodling and animating at the same time — without a plan, following a free-flowing stream of consciousness. The piece is complemented by a sound layer in which Ström experiments with a Moog synthesizer and various sound effects.
