top of page
ART'S NEW NATURES
Digital Dynamics in
Contemporary Nordic Art
Home: Welcome
Jana Winderen (2014). Krísuvik, Iceland. Photo: Finnbogi Petursson
Art’s New Natures features theatrical monologue performance, virtual reality,
sound art and brainwave sculpture by
Nordic artists responding to the realities
of social isolation and crises in 2020
The program is made possible by
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 (http://digitaldynamics.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 (http://digitaldynamics.art/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 (https://streamingmuseum.org)and curated by Nina Colosi and Tanya Ravn Ag. It is supported by Nordic Culture Fund and the Nordic Council of Ministers.
Æsa Björk & Tinna Thorsteinsdóttir, "Shield" (2015-ongoing)
By mapping their brain activity with EEG recordings, Æsa and Tinna set out to interpret the border between an intangible emotional state and the physical manifestation of brain activity. Feelings of isolation and solitude emerged through the composition of glass, electronics, brainwaves, video projections, and transducer speakers.
Anders Eiebakke, "The Park" (2020)
This theatrical monologue on film depicts the experience of the Corona-epidemic as an invisible threat. “It's a cinematic diary which contains everything: melancholy and anxiety, beauty and brutality, fact and fiction, both subtle and hard-hitting societal critique."
Lundahl & Seitl, "AmissingRoom" (2020)
This work is an app that transforms our smartphones to makeshift VR goggles through a physical process between two people. It is a poetic score of moving, sensing and reflecting on the absences created by the pandemic, but it is also the tangible presence of exploring the affordances of reciprocity and the conditions for being together in times of physical distancing.
Anne Katrine Senstad, "Utopie / Utopia" (2020)
This short film features Bill Sage, film and TV actor, in a theatrical reading performance set in city and land scapes through their remote collaborative process necessitated by the pandemic. The work is based on the theories of Roland Barthes’ book How To Live Together, and its utopian concepts of tolerance, considered a place of utopia. Senstad and Sage respond to the current human experience of isolation, societal and political deconstruction.
Jana Winderen, "Surge" (2020), "Out of Range" (2014)
Winderen composes audio environments of creatures which are hard for humans to access physically and aurally – deep under water, inside ice or in frequency ranges inaudible to the human ear. "Out of Range” (2014) resonates with this sense of the secrets of nature, just as the world is overtaken by an invisible virus. "Surge" is included in "Isolation", a collection of music produced by Touch, London, to support musicians unable to perform live during the pandemic.
Artists in conversation
Through different media for online access and presentation, the artists address the current social and pandemic crises, for art’s place, meaning, and role in a world of rapid inter-existential changes.
bottom of page