New book on light, science and art

Next step mobile charger No. 1 million on the bestseller list

New book on light, science and art

To be published Dec. 13:
Tor Nørretranders and Olafur Eliasson
Light! On light in life and the life in light
Pre-order with a discount (before Dec. 1)

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!