Aapo Nikkanen

Happiness at the touch of a button?

Artist, researcher, and trained hypnotherapist Aapo Nikkanen invites the audience on a journey that allows them to connect to personal moments of happiness. During the performance, the audience is guided to hypnotic trance, and taken to an inner journey through their unconscious.

Joy Machines explores well-being and the ways in which media and technology shape our striving for happiness. Moving between individual notions of contentment, technological visions, and contemporary anxieties, the work invites the public to reflect on what constitutes lasting happiness.

Joy Machines features an original sound design by Raudie McLeod.

Aapo Nikkanen is an artist, researcher, and trained hypnotherapist. His current work focuses on hypnotic performances and photography.

In his performances, the guests visit speculative realities through hypnosis. The works address how contemporary systems increasingly operate at the level of cognition, shaping how we interpret, trust, and respond to the world.