Radical Softness

Radical Softness is a visual compendium of American artist Janet Echelman's oeuvre, including detailed project documentation, archival source materials, and a fascinating illustrated chronology. Over the past twenty-five years, Janet Echelman has created monumentally scaled public sculptures using unlikely materials, from atomized water particles to engineered fiber fifteen times stronger than steel. She weaves ancient craft and computational modeling software into an utterly unique art form. Radical Softness is a comprehensive sourcebook that unpacks Echelman's vital practice and her ongoing commitment to Taking Imagination Seriously, the title of her TED Talk which has been translated into thirty-five languages and has more than two million views. It features mesmerizing color photographs, a foreword by fellow creative Swizz Beatz, and contributions from a diverse range of internationally recognized scholars, engineers, designers, architects, and curators contextualizing the interdisciplinary impact of Echelman within the fields of global art history, architecture, computation, and landscape architecture. Gloria Sutton is an art historian and curator whose scholarship focuses on the intersection of computational networks and visual art. She is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History and New Media at Northeastern University and a research affiliate in the Art, Culture, and Technology program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sutton has been a fellow at The Carpenter Center for Visual Art at Harvard University and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.