Reternity: design of the 20th century

In the winter of 1996-97, four Swedish and two British artists took part in an exhibition centred on Torbjorn Lenskog’s extensive collection of 20th century design objects at the Swedish National Art Museum. Their works engaged with the social life of these objects as design icons, addressing everything from the mentality of collecting, through the ideologies that informed modernism to the cultural malleability of industrial products. For this CD-ROM box set these artist were invited once again to make work in relation to the collection, this time specifically for the digital medium. The goal, as for the exhibition, was to stage a kind of confrontation between different ways of looking at history and its products. In addition to their works, which encompass a wide range of media, the CDs contain a large number of advertising images and photographs of the products in use, as well as excerpts from over 60 post-war documentaries that shed light on the industrial and social context that informed the design and reception of the objects. Quicktime objects and panoramas provide a close up of the items in collection.