Gediminas Urbonas
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Rainar Aasrand is an artist and researcher originally from Tallinn, Estonia. He is working across disciplines primarily exploring the human condition within digital platforms that mediate everyday life. His work draws on interdependent and often awkward relations between humans and new technologies with the aim to reveal and exacerbate, through both humor and gravity. For him, this is a quest to find ways to explore the production of culture through aesthetic means by remaining personal and accessible.
During his time at MIT, Rainar has further developed his interest in the statistical quantification of human activities and how this is altering, creating, and bending social and cultural norms. With his endurance performance surplus: numbers are ruining me, which took place on a treadmill over the course of eight hours, he inquired into his own physical limits while meticulously tracking, listing, and analyzing various data that his body emitted. With his work, Rainar continues to explore the collapse of boundaries between digital and physical and how this disintegration can offer us new ways of seeing the world.
Before coming to ACT, Rainar studied cultural theory at Maastricht University and the Estonian Institute of Humanities. He has worked on various film and theater productions, and is part of the SKATKA collective.