Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art Book Talk, Panel, Performance w...
Event Information
Description
NOTE ON PERFORMANCE
**Audiences are advised to download the Unknown Cloud Caretaker app in advance, and bring their own smartphone and (non-Bluetooth) headphones in order to participate.**
Affected by technology and globalization, the Nordic region is experiencing large shifts in its socio-political conditions and international outlook today. The book Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019), edited by Tanya Toft Ag, looks at digital influences on contemporary art, with particular attention paid to the national and international Nordic socio-political context.The book launch will begin with a participatory performance by Swedish artists Lundahl & Seitl of Unknown Cloud On Its Way To…, a nomadic, immersive, and connective audio experience that creates a global ritual to connect us to our own and other bodies, far and near.
To participate in the performance, download the free app Unknown Cloud Caretaker and bring your smartphone and a set of (non-Bluetooth) headphones to the performance. Using a tool called Nagoon, this app consists of a three-dimensional soundscape connected to existing environments on location, and follows the movements of the planets in real time. At simultaneous events, this immersive experience will be shared between audience-participants at Scandinavia House and at various locations in the Nordic region. Download Unknown Cloud Caretaker here.
Following the presentation, Tanya Toft Ag will present a book talk on Digital Dynamics, and its exploration of art’s contingent evolution with technology and digital culture, beyond familiar depictions of ‘Nordic aesthetics’ in art. Toft Ag will discuss how the book examines ways that digital technology and culture profoundly change contemporary art through the ways they affect the life worlds, imaginations and tools of artists, as well as the conditions for art’s production and distribution and artists’s sense of agency and capacity to affect the world and tackle urgencies. It explores art’s role and inquiries particularly in response to changing conditions of the welfare state — affected by technology, globalization, and current shifts in international outlook.The book launch, performance, and continuing program in New York City, Digital Dynamics: Art’s New Natures, is presented in collaboration with Streaming Museum.
SCHEDULE
1:30 PM: Welcome and artist introduction
2 PM: Participatory performance, Unknown Cloud On Its Way To…
3 PM: Book talk by Tanya Toft Ag
About The Performance by Lundahl & Seitl
Programmed to exist globally until 2057, the Cloud travels across national borders, large cities, remote villages, islands, mountains, and across the sea. Immersed in a connective experience in the cloud, audiences will explore participation, trust, and compassion – the cornerstones of an engaged and humane society. Unknown Cloud On Its Way To… is a participatory performance. Central to the work is the audience-participants’ own being in time and their ability to create relations with the lifeworlds of others. Synchronized via Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and a downloadable APP to participants’ own smartphones, the Unknown Cloud creates an unusual situation of a global ritual that connects us to our own and other bodies, far and near. The work is featured in the book Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019).
To participate, download the free app: Unknown Cloud Caretaker.
This uses a tool called Nagoon consisting of a three-dimensional soundscape. It is connected to existing environments on location and follows the movements of the planets in real-time. At simultaneous events, the immersive experience will be shared between audience-participants in New York City and in various locations in the Nordic region.
About Digital Dynamics: Art's New Natures
The book Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019) launches a program of talks, texts and exhibitions throughout 2019. This will discuss, disseminate and show how contemporary (Nordic) art changes with digital culture and technology. Program activities in New York City will explore a core theme of the book: Art’s New Natures. This announces how, rather than a romanticized idea, contemporary artists return to nature as an experimental and living laboratory, engaging methods across a broadened and interdisciplinary artistic landscape. Influenced by environmental aesthetics of biological organisms in combination with technology, artists employ scientific, ethnographic, sociological and other world excavating methods to extract new imaginaries and presentations of nature. They combine scientific technologies with social networking and political actionism to remodel ‘natural’ environments.
Art’s New Natures questions how, in these and more ways, art invokes closer connections with nature’s global ecosystems, deeper human relationships with the environment, living matter, planetary phenomena, and with the Anthropocene itself.
The program is developed in collaboration with Streaming Museum.
About Tanya Toft Ag
Tanya Toft Ag’s research and projects examine urban media aesthetic phenomena and (media) art’s engagement with societal and urban change, in a global perspective. Since ancient times, art and the arts have been anchor points of human consciousness and considered fundamental to building up societies. Today, as we race our cities towards increasingly smart, technocratic and rationalized futures, we need to continuously explore how art’s sensibilities, inquiries, and political aesthetics can affect the ecologies from which our innovations and cultures emerge and bring us towards more sustainable, and more critically and ethically conscious, realities.
Tanya Toft Ag’s curatorial and academic work and teaching evolve around this inquiry of examining processes of change in contemporary societies and urban environments at architectural, hybrid, and worldly scales. This is with point of departure in human perceptual-sensory experience and our sensible modes of evolving with immersive environments of technological, spiritual, and natural qualities.
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