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
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.
A wonderful e-book on compassion and how to cultivate it, nourish it and train it was published today by Tania Singer and Matthias Bolz at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. Bringing together many fields of study and practice, the book gives a wide panorama of the compassion problem: How do human beings learn to care for each other? Truly an important challenge in terms of knowledge and practice. The book has beautiful art work by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson at whose Studio in Berlin the book was presented.
The book is available for free download in several formats at the info page for the scientifically based project of practical importance.
Also available is a 38-minute film on many of the issues involved:
Raising Compassion from Studio Olafur Eliasson on Vimeo.
The e-book is mentioned in my recent Danish-laguage book “Vær nær” on empathy, compassion and social connectedness. Parts of the book were vailable for me in writing the book. I thank Singer and Bolz for their courtesy.
