[spectre] Digital Dynamics: Art's New Natures - online exhibition

[Tanya Ravn Ag]

Dear SPECTRE subscribers,



We are excited to share news about an online exhibition addressing current
challenges for art’s place, meaning, and role in a world of rapid
inter-existential changes – now open on StreamingMuseum.org:



ART’S NEW NATURES

Digital Dynamics

in Nordic Contemporary Art



Theatrical monologue, virtual reality,

sound, and brainwave sculpture artworks

responding to the current realities

of social isolation and crises



On view at StreamingMuseum.org <http://streamingmuseum.org>

August 27 - September 30, 2020


With artworks by Æsa Bjørk and Tina Thorsteinsdóttir, Anders Eiebakke,
Lundahl & Seitl, Anne Katrine Senstad and Jana Winderen



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.



INTERVIEW VIDEO

The artists explain in interview videos 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.



ARTWORKS

*Shield* by visual artist Æsa Björk and musician / performer Tinna
Thorsteinsdóttir is an ongoing series of glass sculptures that began in
2015 and is being developed for digital presentation. “Certain events
behave like disruptances and expose what we, or our situation, are made of,
like our Corona situation right now.” Through EEG data of the artists’
brainwaves of emotional states and projections of physical movement,
resonate on the glass sculpture, the work examines how emotional states
affect the brain. “*Shield* transmits the emotions of isolation and
loneliness that exist during the pandemic but are actually widespread.”



*The Park* (2020) by Anders Eiebakke 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."



*AmissingRoom* (2020) by Lundahl & Seitl 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, such as the closing of museums and
theatres, but it is also the tangible presence of exploring the affordances
of reciprocity and the conditions for being together in times of physical
distancing. Passing through walls, into tunnels that travel through a
network of past exhibitions and museums, visitors interact with each other
but somewhat fail to coincide and share each other’s realities. By enacting
the artwork’s score, the two people are led to consider how they balance
resilience and resistance when adapting to a changing environment.



Anne Katrine Senstad‘s short film *UTOPIE/UTOPIA* (2020) features acclaimed
actor Bill Sage in a theatrical monologue performance filmed in city and
land scapes through their remote collaborative process necessitated by the
pandemic. The work is based on a chapter from French philosopher Roland
Barthes’ book *How To Live Together* and it’s concepts of tolerance and the
sovereign good as a place of utopia. Senstad and Sage draw lines to the
current human experience of isolation, societal and political
deconstruction through the absorption of Barthes structural novelistic
lectures on idiorrhythmy, and ways of understanding community,
individuality and spaces. Sage’s reading has been enhanced by composer JG
Thirlwell’s sound treatment for the digital experience.



Jana Winderen’s sound artworks submerge listeners under water and land to
hear the secrets of nature. *Surge* (2020) is included in a collection of
music produced by Touch, London, to support musicians unable to perform
live during the pandemic.



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.

https://www.streamingmuseum.org/



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.

http://digitaldynamics.art/



Digital Dynamics: Art’s New Natures is presented by Streaming Museum and
curated by Nina Colosi and Tanya Ravn Ag.



CONTACT

Tanya Ravn Ag, tanyaravnag at gmail.com


The program is supported by Nordic Culture Fund and the Nordic Council of
Ministers.
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