Light! by Tor Nørretranders and Olafur Eliassaon was published today.
The window of leading Copenhagen bookseller Arnold Busck has it on display at the popular pedestrian street Købemagergade in central Copenhagen.
Also visible in the window is Olafur’s Little Sun.
The book is also available on the net e.g. the shop at this site or Amazon.co.uk
The new book on Light! co.-authored by artist Olafur Eliasson and myself, is already number 1 million on the bestseller list at Amazon.co.uk.
Pretty good to be a on the bestseller list, considering the fact that the book is not published yet. So nobody has had a chance to buy it.
Actually, ranking as number 1,054,689 on the bestseller list means that over 1 million books perform better in terms of sales.
But all that will change when the book is opublished and in the bookstoresfrom this Sunday, December 13 . Buy or preorder!
A visually moving and verbally hard-hitting criticism of modern light culture will be published in the darkness of December 13 when light starts to be celebrated at the Nordic Lucia day.
Together with artist Olafur Eliasson I have created an entertaining and thought-provoking book. Richly illustrated with the wonderful visual world of Olafur’s, the book is a rupture with low-energy light bulbs, designer lamps, overcast weather in the living room and bad lighting philosophy.
The book has three main strands: A main text (which I wrote); a series of quotes from long wlaks with microphones where Olafur and I discuseed light; and a series of about 70 images from Olafur’s world. Everything in four colours, beatifully printed.
The book is about:
What we see
Rainbows
Incandescent light bulbs
Strip lights
Energy-saving bulbs
Colour rendering
Darkness
LEDs
Quantum dots
Lasers
Sunshine
Overcast skies
Designer lamps
Shadows
Life on Earth
Circadian rhythms
Our daily food
Colours
Coloured shadows
Attention
After-images
Colours in the snow
DIY
What to do together
Here are the unbound prints of the Danish Lys! and the English Light! – both to be published on December 13. This is a work in progress: The final book will be more beautiful than these stacks of paper without binding.
Back cover
How should we light our lives and homes? How can we pay regard to the climate and our quality of life at the same time? Can LED and other new technologies help us? To find the answers, we need to ask what light means to being human.
In words and pictures writer Tor Nørretranders and artist Olafur Eliasson explore darkness and light, shadows and colours, lamps and light quality.
Light! discusses the tremendous possibilities open to us for bringing the light in our lives to life.
Olafur Eliasson (b.1967) is a Danish–Icelandic artist. He creates works that explore how we see light and how it affects us. Their simplicity and clarity derive from Olafur’s philosophical commitment to understanding sensory perception and and how we act in the world.
Tor Nørretranders (b.1955) is a Danish writer. His books explore the way we perceive the world and how it perceives us. The everyday cheerfulness of the language in the books derives from Tor’s theoretical commitment to understanding the nature and scope of knowledge and expression.
Light! is also published in Danish as Lys!
The two editions are exctly the same — except from the language.
Both the Danish and English version costs DKK 300 (≈ USD 44 or EUR 41).
204 pages, richly illustrated, hardbound.
Published by Forlaget Tor.dk
Available in bookstores – physical and on the web.
