Simo Rouhiainen was born in 1969, and lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. His major artworks are a perfectly balanced mixture of the visual, the musical and the interactive-falling into a slimly populated category of works summed up in one word by Perttu Rastas, Senior Media Curator at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, as “stimulationist”.

"Mir" (2003) is an interactive installation where the user "plays” images to the rhythm of electronic music created for the piece by Tapani Rinne & New Composers. Video clips from St. Petersburg and Helsinki are interspersed with one another and assigned to keys on a Midi keyboard. The user's fingering of the small piano keyboard creates a visual montage, and cities and human destinies intertwine in unexpected ways. “Mir” debuted in "The Return of the Mir Iskusstva" exhibition at the History Museum of St. Petersburg, Rumiantsev Palace, 2003.

The interface in Rouhiainen's pieces “Mir” (2003) and “Fluxville” (2002) is extremely self-referential-the audio tracks and the keyboard reinforce each other as pure constructions of modern technology. But the content of the smaller pieces within these pieces-the video loops that the user “plays”-transcends the tools and connect the user directly to what seems like Rouhiainen's personal experience. You are tricked at first into believing that you are objectively watching and vaguely manipulating a giant music video, but once the flood of images become familiar, they also clearly become someone's point of view. On a world rushing by, city after city, at an ever-quickening pace.