Engelska

Behind the Scenes gives you an inside look at today's design industry and the challenges it faces, the commercial undercurrents that shape and define it and a glimpse of those in power. The book includes subjects such as design media and PR and the relationship between the two, payment methods in the design industry, the escalating speed of the new and the effect it has on the products, as well as the importance of pricing. Behind the Scenes is a book debating the issues around design that rarely is spoken about.

Norway Calling, the book of contemporary Norwegian design, is a kind of answer to the question of why Norwegian design is arousing such pleasure and curiosity today the world over. It is the first book to mirror the exciting northern trend, introducing some of the principal figures and some of their most important projects - an excellent opportunity for design-lovers to acquaint themselves with the vigorous development of Norwegian design after such titans as Sverre Fehn, Grete Prytz Kittelsen and Arne Korsmo. After years of silence there proved to be a new, living world of Norwegian design. Now widley known designers and architects such as Snøhetta, Daniel Rybakken, Norway Says and Arne & Carlos bare witness to this forceful trend.

The growing flow of digital culture depends on the hidden protocols of its underlying systems. To explore how interfacing shapes spectatorship online, this pioneering study pinpoints experiences of flow through the friction of photo-based glitch art by Phillip Stearns, Rosa Menkman, and Evan Meaney. Homing in on the viewer, these three cross-disciplinary case studies present and analyze material that is new to the art-historical context. In particular, they focus on how glitched artworks in online environments make viewers aware of their own activity within the flow, causing a break from the increasingly naturalized integration of system and individual. When a glitch invites the viewer to try out different positions in relation to the system, a tactical spectatorship unfolds.

Lotta Antonsson's work recalls her fascination with the late 1960s and 70s, in a style where documentary and fiction blur in a merging of social and sexual revolutions. From a process that utilizes techniques of collage and montage there emerges a personal way of looking at the ephemeral nature of things, whether printed matter such as magazines and books, or natural objects such as shells, minerals and driftwood. Antonsson's analogue cuts and repetitions seize upon the allegorical potential of image fragments, liberating fashion and erotic photography to become explorations of the gendered aspect of their histories. Antonsson belongs to the generation of Swedish artists who emerged in the early 1990s, whose work was inspired by postmodernist art and theory (including a questioning of the male gaze as well as the construction of the woman as an object) and often use humour, irony and self-distance as part of their method.

Ljusbacken was one of the leading communes in Sweden in the 1970s. It represented much of what came to be associated with the "hippie movement" and later the "prog movement". Much of the most extreme phenomena in the movement resided here. Healing, primal scream therapy, yoga, meditation, drugs, sexual liberation were essentially important ingredients. In Ljusbacken, artist Joanna Lombard visits the mythical place of her childhood home, searching its surfaces for an answer to an unknown question. The book is the artist's journey of facing the memories and extracted stories that were generated during her childhood in the commune. Using contemporary photographs of the places where the stories unfolded a tension is created between the stories' time and space.

The impact of our industrialized culture on nature - including the exploitation of natural resources, global warming, and climate change - is one of the most crucial and urgent issues of our times. Environmental centers have developed within several scientific disciplines with a common global interest - trying to secure the future of our existence in the world as we know it. The book Broken sets out to investigate environmental change and explore our relation to nature. It also follows in the photographic tradition of raising awareness and supporting policymakers, politicians, researchers, environmentalists, and activists. Featuring texts by seminal environmental photographers and theorists, the book Broken re-evaluates early environmental photography and investigates new ways of experiencing and visualizing landscapes in an interdisciplinary context.

<p>This book explores the notion of belonging in contemporary photography in Turkey and Sweden. Throughout the investigation, Erika Larsson uses the term engaging to bring together a range of theoretical perspectives in order to move beyond a representational take on photography. In so doing, her aim is to approach particular photographic works as affective, embodied, and situated interactions or acts. Through the lens of these theoretical perspectives, she explores a number of different photographic projects that in one way or another deal with the notion of belonging.   </p><p>Larsson argues that affective and embodied perspectives are significant and often overlooked both in terms of contemporary photography and theoretical discussions around belonging. In bringing these two themes together, the explorations reveal previously unforeseen aspects of how experiences of belonging are shaped, felt, and negotiated through contemporary photography.  </p><p>In order to bring close attention to certain photographic works and how they function within particular situated space, Larsson focuses on works from the areas in and around Sweden and Turkey, but the discussion also reflects on the wider question of European experiences of belonging. </p>