johanna jõekalda / Selection of works

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Interspace
| Biennale Architettura | with Johan Tali and Siim Tuksam |
The Estonian national exhibition „Interspace“ speculates on the spatial consequences of a data-driven society and explores the public space-making within an e-state where services and events that once brought people together in physical space now take place online. The exhibition uses live data streams, tracing the shift of public space functions into the virtual domain and revealing the digital footprints left behind in physical space.

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Novel forms of equality
| Estonian Museum of Architecture | with Artur Staškevitš |
„Novel forms of equality“ is an immersive installation that explores social inequality and environmental racism through the lens of a forgotten resident. Moving along a single axis, the camera first reveals contrasting residential environments before turning around and reimagining the city from the perspective of those most affected by inequality. The work proposes empathetic spatial strategies to challenge segregation and rethink equality and engagement in the built environment.

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All people were born by the blue sea
| artwork |
Inspired by Jaan Kross’s poetry on shared origins, inherited paths and unique destinations, the artwork „All People“ focuses on the exploratory graphic motifs of land, people, and nation. Rooted in the Estonian experience, the work reflects an ongoing search in which even arrival is only partial—some discover continents, others a place for thought and belonging.

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Entropy

| Mektory Innovation and Business Center |
„Entropy“ is an interactive installation, echoing the restorative sensation of being immersed in nature. The visitor can engage with the environment and change its level of entropy. At its core is a living thicket that drifts into wild overgrowth if left unattended or without care.

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Input Output
| Estonian Museum of Architecture | with Johan Tali, Siim Tuksam |
Input Output was a pop-up exhibition examining the mechanisms of a data-driven society. Its central element was the social media compass, visualising real-time geolocated social media feed from Tallinn and questioning what constitutes public space.

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Vanishing point
| Gallery of the Estonian Academy of Arts |
"Vanishing point" depicts a space where the boundary between dreaming and reality remains fluid and undefined. New dimensions of reality emerge for the visitor only when viewed from the right angle—creating an imaginary trompe l’oeil like extension to the existing space. At all other angles, the space dissolves into distortion.

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Launching the VR Lab at the Estonian Academy of Arts
| research project |
Virtual reality applications allow us to experience layers of reality that are otherwise invisible, expanding our perceptual amplitudes and the umwelt. The VR Lab of the Estonian Academy of Arts explores these technologies as a creative medium for designing interactive spaces that are otherwise difficult to imagine and design due to their large amount of variables. (The videos show a studio examining how VR’s freehand modeling possibilities could shape new formal topologies in the near future.)

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Applying biometric data in interactive design solutions

| research project | with Artur Staškevitš |
The research explored interactive spatial prototypes that adapt in real time, reconfiguring their spatial parameters in response to users’ biometric data. By combining designer-defined adaptive logic with real-time user feedback, the research reimagined space as a responsive system shaped by human experience.

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Spatial experience analysis of a 48-hour holding cell
| research project | with Artur Staškevitš |
Measuring experiential data to evaluate user experience in a sequence of spaces and procedures that lead to a detention in a 48-hour holding cells of the North Prefecture of Tallinn. The experience analysis graph illustrates the changes in detainees’ activity levels during a simulated arrest, based on temporal variations in GSR and HRV data. The data was used to inform the interior architectural design brief.

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Immersed
| artwork | with Artur Staškevitš |
"Immersed" is an interactive virtual environment that adapts in real time based on observer's activity level. The landscape is scanned from a real, physical space. The water levels shift in response to sensor data, revealing and concealing different spatial conditions. Through measured activity levels, the system creates the experience of influencing matter through thought, as the virtual environment continuously reshapes itself to stimulate and respond to the user’s state of being.

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Cornucopia
| with Artur Staškevitš |
The project explores how environments with different tectonic qualities can be created from similar basic elements that vary in scale, arrangement, and level of order, stimulating users’ playfulness and their ability to form spatial connections.

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"Interspace - a collection of essays on the digital and the public"
The Estonian national exhibition "Interspace" was accompanied by an essay collection and a print series of the same name. The texts focus on the changes in the notion of the public and the digital, and together form a definition of contemporary public space.

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Renewal

| Tallinn facility of the Greenergy Data Centers |
"Renewal" presents a speculative landscape derived from datasets that map the growing share of renewable energy. Tens of thousands of freely moving particles occasionally resolve into configurations that resemble distant contours of real landscapes revived as a result of renewable energy use.

Psychotectonics

| Gallery of the Estonian Academy of Arts | with Meri-Kris Jaama |
The exhibition was based on a series of lab experiments on measuring, recording, analyzing, and amplifying spatial experience. Test subjects were placed in controlled virtual environments designed to challenge their spatial perception. The exhibits were created from the recordings of test subjects bodily movement, lines of sight, and shifts in mental states etc. The exhibition demonstrated how spatial experience can be captured in the form of data and how new kinds of spatial experience can emerge from this.

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Mutual feelings
| research project | with Meri-Kris Jaama |
Electroencephalography, galvanic skin response and heart rate variability sensors were used to measure user’s positivity-negativity and activity-passivity levels (by the valence-arousal method) while experiencing different spatial stimuli. Digital workflows were developed to map the experience data on spatial models and use it as a source in the design process.

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AvaLinnAR
| AR application for Tallinn Strategy Center | with Teele Jürivete |
Developed for the Pollinator Highway biodiversity project, "AvaLinnAR" offers virtual spatial experiences of future developments and creates an inclusive platform for urban planning. Murals—created by Estonian street artists on local garage walls—are used as trackers to bring three-dimensional virtual information layers depicting Tallinn’s future public-space developments to life.

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Pattern Building
| AR application for the Estonian Academy of Arts |
The AR application enables different building configurations—from a single family house to a hospital—to be visualized on the structural framework of factory-produced timber modules. This provides an immediate, real-scale overview of the possible volumes, interior layouts, and finishes of the building.