ART'S NEW NATURES 
Digital Dynamics in
Contemporary Nordic Art 

Art’s New Natures is an online exhibition of art by internationally recognized Nordic artists that, through different media for online access and presentation, address current challenges for art’s place, meaning, and role in a world of rapid inter-existential changes.

Interview videos The artists explain their creative process in interview videos, and how technological communication platforms bring opportunities to reach a broad international audience that physical art spaces do not. But this also requires them to consider how the nature of their art can be “democratic” in relating across cultures and reflecting the complex state of the world.

About Art’s New Natures highlights how art responds to recently changing modes of human existence with social distancing and shifting realities of commonplaces and public culture. In climates of uncertainty, lockdown, assembly bans, the exposing of social inequities, and physical distancing, art evolves with lesser ties to the ‘art object’ and with a greater emphasis to the experience of art under the conditions of distance. Especially through digital expressions, we see how art explores new modes of proximity through storytelling and takes advantage of connective capacities of global and digital infrastructures for affecting and upholding human inter-relationships and social imaginaries. Art reworks experiences of nearness and distance, what it means to be closely connected or far apart. The artworks in this exhibition emerge in response to contemporary modes of interconnected existence, adaption, difference, and meaning making through hybrid spheres of shared concern and resistance.

Streaming Museum The exhibition is presented at StreamingMuseum.org, which since its launch in 2008 has presented programs of art and world affairs in public spaces and venues around the world, and on its online platform. “In the current world crises where the internet is essential for education, business, cultural and personal communication, it's helping sustain artists’ livelihoods and more artists are recognizing new possibilities of visibility for their art,” said Nina Colosi, Streaming Museum founder and co-curator of the Art’s New Natures exhibition with Tanya Ravn Ag.

Publication Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art

The program evolves on the basis of the publication Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019) edited by Tanya Ravn Ag. From a globally connected Nordic perspective, the book examines how the digital and contemporary art co-evolve because digital technology and culture change the life worlds, imaginations, and tools of artists, the conditions for art’s production and distribution, and artists’ sense of agency and capacity to affect the world and tackle current urgencies. The program is the last chapter in the dissemination series Digital Dynamics: New Ways of Art on how contemporary art is changing with the digital through new environments, new modes of making, new kinds of representations, and new natures in art.

Digital Dynamics: Art’s New Natures is presented by Streaming Museum and curated by Nina Colosi and Tanya Ravn Ag. It is supported by Nordic Culture Fund and the Nordic Council of Ministers.