This publication examines how digital culture influences how artists work today, the intuitions and imaginations they work from, their orientations and inquiries. Based on interviews with 78 artists belonging to the Nordic art context, this book examines art’s changing trajectories, meanings and roles in our present condition influenced by dynamics of digital culture. The book particularly examines how the digital influences current artistic thinking in perspective of the Nordic regional context, which, affected by technology and globalization, is experiencing large shifts in its socio-political conditions and international outlook. This condition evokes new urgencies for artistic response and engagement. The book points to how digital dynamics stimulate reformulations of political aesthetics in art and its role in society, while opening up for new modes of agency for the artist and, not least in perspective of the declining collective project of welfare state, enables art’s engagement to be brought beyond inquiries focused on a sense of ‘collectivity of the state’ towards a sense of ‘connectivity with the world’, approached as a laboratory rather than an object of representation.
Published by Intellect, and distributed by Chicago University Press.
Forthcoming in Fall 2018.
CONTENTS
Introduction
Tanya Toft Ag
Artist Testimonials
Image Section
Dynamic Seclusion: Nordic Noir And Digital Culture
Jonatan Habib Engqvist
Concretism And Danish Digital Art – New Political Dialogues From An Avant-Garde Perspective
Jens Tang Kristensen
The Arts Of Instituting
Jamie Allen and Bernhard Garnicnig
Representation, Complexity And Control: Three Aspects Of Technology-Based Sonic Art
Jøran Rudi
Uneasy Listening: Perspectives On (Nordic) Sound Art After The Digital
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay
Reformulations Of The “Natural” World: Jana Winderen’s Sound Installation The Wanderer
Ulla Angkjær Jørgensen
Intertwining Of The Digital And The Biological In The Artistic Practice
Laura Beloff
In Between Worlds
Björn Norberg
Virtual Worldmaking: Cultivating Digital Art Practice
Elizabeth Jochum and Mads Deibjerg Lind
Radical Rematerialisation: New Political Aesthetics In Contemporary (Digital) Art
Tanya Toft Ag
Critical Thoroughness: The Dynamics Of The Artist As User And Producer Of Digital Elements
Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen
Interactivity Dynamics
Lorella Scacco
Where The Inaction Is: The Politics Of Digital Things And The Significance Of The Lab… In the Practices of Laura Beloff, Kollision, and Mogens Jacobsen
Morten Søndergaard
Visions And Divides In Icelandic Contemporary Art
Margrét Elísabet Ólafsdóttir
Digital Dragons Of The North: On Digital Dynamics And New Nature In Nordic Aesthetics
Stahl Stenslie
Conclusion: (Digital) Horizons for Nordic Contemporary Art
Tanya Toft Ag
Cover photo: Jana Winderen, Jana Winderen (2014), Krísuvik, Iceland. Photo by Finnbogi Pétursson. Courtesy of the artist.