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, [email protected] The program is supported by Nordic Culture Fund and the Nordic Council of Ministers.
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