This book takes you through and beyond a map of Nordic artistic experiments, conceptual reconfigurations and new modes of artistic agency. Edited anthology published by Intellect, 2019.
Offering an in-depth exploration of art’s contingent evolution with technology and digital culture, this book goes far beyond familiar depictions of ‘Nordic aesthetics’ in art. It explores art’s role and inquiries in response to changing sociopolitical realities in the welfare state and in the wider world. First-hand perspectives of pioneering and pivotal artists form the basis of chapters penned by leading scholars and curators of Nordic art.
Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019) recasts the Nordic art context in an expanding digital condition and reveals horizontal ways to write its histories.
Chapters by Tanya Toft Ag, Jamie Allen, Laura Beloff, Budhaditya Chattopadhyay, Jonatan Habib Engqvist, Bernhard Garnicnig, Elizabeth Jochum, Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen, Jens Tang Kristensen, Mads Dejbjerg Lind, Björn Norberg, Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir, Jøran Rudi, Lorella Scacco, Morten Søndergaard, Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen, and Stahl Stenslie.
Tanya Toft Ag (editor) is a curator and scholar specializing in media and digital art and its urban implications.
Published by Intellect 2019, distributed by Chicago University Press and John Wiley & Sons.
ISBN 9781783209484
Cover image: Jana Winderen, Jana Winderen (2014). Krísuvik, Iceland. Photo by Finnbogi Pétursson. Courtesy of the artist.
Details on artists, authors, chapters and more:
www.digitaldynamics.art
Details on book launch 23 February 2019 at Scandinavia House, New York City
Details on dissemination project based on the book, Digital Dynamics: New Ways of Art
This book achieves to forge new pathways in the studies of contemporary art by expertly balancing regional, national, and international contexts for understanding Nordic artistic practice shaped by digital technologies. Short artist testimonials and chapters by seventeen experts in Nordic digital art trace the variety of influences that have been affecting the art scenes in the region. Structured around dynamics including materiality, perception, and collaboration, as well as nordic noir, political dialogues, and institutions, the text provides a much needed account that links people, places, and events within a matrix of local and global influences. Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art both provides an indispensable survey and expands the art-historical canon by exploring uncharted territories.
Contemporary digital culture is both global and local, or ‘glocal’ as the catchword goes. The interplay of traditions and ideas matters and is necessary to explain the complexities we all are dealing with in our daily lives. This book offers a valuable contribution to the ongoing discussion by offering a Nordic perspective – or rather, perspectives: as the varied contributions show, the digital arts and cultural initiatives that originate in the Nordic countries are anything but monomanic.
Erkki Huhtamo
Professor of Design Media Arts and Film,
Television and Digital Media, UCLA, Los Angeles
With this vast exploration of the artistic landscape, the media art compass points to a North that was not clearly mapped, revealing the political, social and aesthetic strata and their interweaving tectonics that underlies the most contemporary forms of Nordic art practices.
Maurice Benayoun, artist and Professor at City University of Hong Kong
A timely introduction to the ways in which digital culture has changed art practice in the Nordic Region.
Ina Blom
author of The Autobiography of Video. The Life and Times of a Memory Technology (2016)
Rich source on ‘The Digital & The Arts’ – great to explore.
Oliver Grau
Professor for Image Science and Member of
Academia Europaea
