An embracive, multi-perspective tour through and beyond Nordic artistic experiments, conceptual reconfigurations and new modes of artistic agency.

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 recasts the Nordic art context in an expanding digital condition and reveals horizontal ways to write its histories.

Over the past few decades, the Nordic region has witnessed large shifts in its political, social and international outlook. Meanwhile, its art, commonly described as introverted, contemplative and wild, is also undergoing changes. As technology embeds itself further into the contemporary art scene, there is a renewed need to examine the role of art in society and everyday life, and to consider how the digitalization of art has tackled socio-political realities, locally and in the wider world. Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art includes a collection of testimonials from 78 artists, connected to Nordic art, who employ concepts and/or tools relating to the digital in their practice. Their statements form the basis of the essays in Part 2, penned by leading scholars affiliated with the Nordic art context, which inquire into the digital influences on contemporary art, with particular attention paid to the national and international Nordic socio-political context. Landscapes, nature, minimalism, melancholia--this book examines how these traditional Nordic tropes hold up in the growing field of digital contemporary art, and asks: to what extent have digital dynamics been adopted into the imaginaries and practices of Nordic artists?
 
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.Affected by technology and globalization, the Nordic region is experiencing large shifts in its socio-political conditions and international outlook today.  As digital dynamics affect life worlds, contemporary artists are making new inquiries in response to the changing Nordic context. As a result of these ever-evolving circumstances, conditions and motivations for making art change as well. As technology and digital culture become more deeply embedded in the contemporary art scene, there is a renewed need to examine the role of art in society and everyday life, and to consider how the digital inspires artists to evolve and tackle socio-political realities, locally and in the wider world.

An analysis of the ways film and media create topographies of cities, architecture, and metropolitan experiences.

Narrating the City examines how film and related visual media offer insights and commentary on the city as both a constructed object and a lived social experience. It brings together filmmakers, architects, digital artists, designers, and media journalists who critically read, reinterpret, and create narratives of the city. Analyzing a variety of international films and placing them in dialogue with video art, photographic narratives, and emerging digital image-based technologies, the authors explore the expanding range of “mediated” narratives of contemporary architecture and urban culture from both a media and a sociological standpoint. 

The authors explore how moving-image narratives can create cinematic topographies, presenting familiar cities and modes of seeing in unfamiliar ways. The authors then turn to the new age of digital image making and consumption, revealing new techniques of representation, mediation, and augmentation of sensorial reality for city dwellers. The book’s emphasis on narrative also offers insights into critical societal issues including cultural identity, diversity, memory, and spatial politics, as they are both informed by and represented in various media.

In recent history, the arts and sciences have often been considered opposing fields of study, but a growing trend in drawing research is beginning to bridge this divide. Gemma Anderson’s Drawing as a Way of Knowing in Art and Science introduces tested ways in which drawing as a research practice can enhance morphological insight, specifically within the natural sciences, mathematics, and art.
 
Inspired and informed by collaboration with contemporary scientists and Goethe’s studies of morphology, as well as the work of artist Paul Klee, this book presents drawing as a means of developing and disseminating knowledge, and of understanding and engaging with the diversity of natural and theoretical forms, such as animal, vegetable, mineral, and four dimensional shapes. Anderson shows that drawing can offer a means of scientific discovery and can be integral to the creation of new knowledge in science as well as in the arts.
 

When the lights dim in a movie theater and the projector begins to click and whir, the light and sounds of the motion picture become the gateway to a multisensory experience. Moving beyond the oft-discussed perceptual elements of vision and hearing, The Multisensory Film Experience analyzes temperature, pain, and balance in order to argue that it is the experience of film that’s inherently multisensory, not the medium. Luis Rocha Antunes here explores the work of well-loved filmmakers Erik Jensen, Gus Van Sant, and Ki-Duk Kim to offer new insights into how viewers experience films and understand their stories. This is an original contribution to an emerging field of research and will become essential reading for film scholars.

Proposing a new way of understanding the relationship between the city and personal identity, The City is Me argues that there is no longer a distance between the two. The result of extensive research about our notions of the city and the person throughout time, this volume explores the technology, research findings, and new ideas that have made it impossible to sustain conceptions of the city that are based on the criterion of a boundary. Showing how this shift mirrors the decentralization and fragmentation of personal identity in a globalized world, Rosane Araujo confronts the challenge of rethinking urbanism in a way that corresponds to the risk and uncertainty—but also to the possibilities—of today’s cities.

 Since the 1990s, filmmakers in Turkey have increasingly explored notions of gender, genre, cultural memory, and national and transnational identity. Taking these themes as its starting point, this book—the first English-language directory of Turkish films—provides an extensive historical overview the country’s cinema since the early 1920s.

 

In the first book-length study of Tarot cards on the silver screen, Emily E. Auger contextualizes cartomancy—the practice of fortune telling via playing cards—and dives deep into its invention and promulgation in film. After providing an introduction to divination and cartomancy, Auger offers detailed descriptions and analyses of the roles that cartomancy and Tarot cards play in films. The book features an abbreviated filmography—including nearly 200 films—detailing their relationships to cartomancy. As Tarot communities continue to grow worldwide, Cartomancy and Tarot in Film will be of interest to scholars of esoteric studies, film, folklore, playing cards, popular culture, and religion, as well as diviners the world over.

Lure of the Big Screen explores contexts of film exhibition and consumption in rural parts of the UK and Australia, where film theaters are often highly valued as spaces around which isolated communities can gather and interact. Going beyond national borders to highlight transnational stratifications in the rural cinema sphere, this book examines how film theaters in areas of social and economic decline are sustained by resourceful individuals and sub-commercial operating structures. Systematic analysis of cinemas in nonmetropolitan locations has yielded an original five-tiered clustering model through which Karina Aveyard recognizes a range of types between large commercial multiplexes in stable regional centers and their smallest improvised counterparts in remote settlements.

The past twenty years have seen major changes in the ways that television formats and programming are developed and replicated internationally for different markets—with locally focused repackagings of hit reality shows leading the way. But in a sense, that’s not new: TV formats have been being exported for decades, with the approach and methods changing along with changes in broadcast technology, markets, government involvement, and audience interest. This book brings together scholars of TV formats from around the world to analyze and discuss those changes and offer an up-to-the-minute analysis of the current state of TV formats and their use and adaptation worldwide.