Conversation Series: Art’s New Making

There is no doubt that contemporary art has and is changing in relation to the digital sphere, and that the technological development of recent decades has greatly influenced art’s production, distribution, interfaces and forms. Curator and scholar Tanya Ravn Ag has focused her research on the study of the ways in which the meanings, places and roles of art change with contemporary technological culture. In 2019 she published 'Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art' based on artist interviews and perspectives from curators and theorists. She has continued this work since the book's publication, creating a series of four conversations with artists, scholars and curators grouped around specific themes focused on art's new virtual and augmented environments, art's new ways of making with digital materiality, art's new representations, and art's new natures when acting in a world undergoing lockdown and social distancing. The below interview, titled Art’s New Making is the second of these conversations and serves as an exploration of new roles for art. It includes contributions from Laura Beloff, Elizabeth Jochum, Saara Ekström, Morten Søndergaard and Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen, and was initiated and introduced by Tanya Ravn Ag and edited by Vanina Saracino. [...]
With a point of departure in the book Digital Dynamics in Nordic Contemporary Art (Intellect, 2019) that examines how digital technology and culture influence contemporary art, this conversation addresses the topic of ‘art’s new making’ by asking: What drives creative artistic pursuits today? How can we understand art’s ecologies when involved in making the ‘new’? What might the pursuit of art’s ‘new’ making promise, demonstrate, and feed forward?
Participants of this conversation include (in order of response) Laura Beloff, Elizabeth Jochum, Saara Ekström, Morten Søndergaard and Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen. It is initiated and introduced by Tanya Ravn Ag and edited by Vanina Saracino.