What if? Books for the future.

Marte Aas and Line Bøhmer Løkken have invited artists Guri Dahl, Sverre Strandberg, Dagny and Charlie Hay (The Hays) to create a work that speculates on the photobook of the future. How will the photo book change, evolve and be affected by new times and technology?

Sverre Strandberg has created the book Not Alone, which contains license-free images from all over the world, downloaded from various digital image-sharing platforms. These images, often used as illustrations in content production, significantly impact how the world is visualized in media, despite their lower status as photographs. What makes an image generic, and what arises when sorting and assembling such imagery? How will the photographic medium be shaped as digital technology makes it even easier to share, recycle and create “reality”? During the festival, Strandberg’s book can be exchanged for a photo taken by the buyer. This encourages the further circulation of photographs in an eternal metamorphic loop.

Guri Dahl has created the handmade, unique book Flyer, an experimental representation of a flight. The book is a Leporello book inspired by Japanese paper folding techniques, and has no fixed beginning and end, but is experienced as a non-linear and suggestive narrative about a way of moving that may not be possible in the future. Something is in the process of disappearing and becoming a memory, a reminder for future viewers.

The Hays' project for the festival is called The Last Language, an experimental photobook in the form of a device, a mutoscope. The mutoscope was patented in 1895 and is one of the earliest film-viewing devices in history. It works much like a flip book. The Hays have created a photo book for an audience that only wants to be entertained. At the same time, they envision the book working as a kind of Brechtian “lesson” in that it also shows what it takes for people on Earth to survive. Is this what the last photo books on Earth will look like? The mutoscope and various other publications are installed in a green newsstand (made in collaboration with Tor Simen Ulstein) placed in a post-industrial landscape.

In addition, the exhibition shows the film Wherever You Go, There We Are by Jesse McLean. The film is an experimental travelogue based on old postcards of North American landscapes and a narrative featuring an automated correspondent who becomes increasingly frantic and clumsy in his desperate attempt to capture our attention. What we perceive as “natural” slips imperceptibly into becoming synthetic and artificial.

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