Olafur Eliasson is an artist who likes to experiment on the environment and see how the result affects people individually. He tries to create an immersive real life experience for his viewers. His aim is to manipulate the perception of reality through the environment.
His practices are mostly based on creating an experience for his audience. He wants each experience to be unique for each individual. He does this by actually using a space and using motions, colors and even light. Experimenting about how colored light affects other colors, he plays a lot with visuals, the angle of the viewers’ eye to create an effect and the size of his work to create an emphasis on both the size of environment and the size of the watchers. He also uses smoke and mirrors to create an emphasis on an empty space. He did include some knowledge from physics and geometry in his work, for example he found a way of affecting the time sequence of some motion through an elliptical mirror. Geometry along with angle of sight can create some great impact. Another interesting thing was how he uses white light to capture the natural color of sunlight in different areas of the world.
One of his works was the rainbow called ‘Beauty’ in 1993, where the angle of the eyes plays a really important role and the concept behind was about trust in what you can see which I believe is really interesting. Another thing he did was the ‘New York City Waterfalls’ which again had a nice concept to it since the sizes there were really important. Moreover, there’s his project of the ‘yellow room’ to show how white is essential to obtain other colors and how people suddenly became attentive to everything else when there is a sudden change in what they use to see every day, colors. The ‘Weather Project’ was one that really caught my attention, since it’s about the consciousness about the climate and even the process of making the project is mesmerizing, especially when he talked of fooling the mind with the reflection of the mirror. Olafur also talks about how the different school of people could share that same place which again bring a sort of revelation of interaction between humans.
He also worked on some architecture as well like the ‘Harpa’ in Reykjavik, Iceland where the structure of the building was simple however it was really strong and it could hold it’s room which was a lot thicker. Moreover there’s the ‘Fjordenhus’ in Denmark, which had an interesting curved design which had a quite drastic effect according to the angle of the viewer’s eye.
Once again he surprises everyone with his work ‘Reality Projector’ where he tried to bring the abstract to real life where there will be the shadows of a structure moving along with sound in a giant space where the people will feel small inside. He tries to stay as long as possible away from explanation since he wanted each viewer to think of a different concept behind it.
Finally, another intriguing work he did was the ‘Ice Watch’, which was so simple but yet through the attitude of the people it again put a lot of emphasis on the way a person reacts to his environment in specific situations.
He also explained his working process, starting from thinking to obtaining ideas and giving the idea a concept to the sketching part and what he call the language, where he explain the design. Proceeding to the modeling process where there will be lots of trials to finally reach the final desired idea.
A few artists and designers he mentioned were his father who has been a great influence to him in his childhood, Buckminster Fuller, who inspired him to look into geometry. There’s also Einar Thorsteinn, who in fact have met Fuller and collaborated with Olafur for a few years when he was dealing with architecture and Sebastian Behmann who is a head of design.
I believe that his most useful idea would be ‘The Weather Project’, since it has both elements from the yellow room which had this feature where it would drag the attention of the viewers towards what they were not able to see before. As I mentioned early the making process was really interesting as well. I also enjoyed how he uses the fog to add some emphasis on the area in there, that was really clever in my opinion. Furthermore, there was this kind of emotional and psychological part of this project where he talk about how each individual were interpreting this work in a different way yet they seemed to be quite happy together. I believe that this was a really great experience and that if studied properly we might find some interesting theories on humans and socialization.
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