Best of Design Matters: Olafur Eliasson

0:00This episode of Design Matters originally came out in October of 2024. I need to be less defensive. I need to release my honesty. I need to come through with my story. From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, Olafur Eliasson talks about creating art that affects viewers by including them. People are actually worth trusting when it comes to looking at art.

0:54Deep down, every visual artist suspects that they can't compete with nature. The scale, the shapes, the forms, the patterns, the light, the colors, the designs, found pretty much everywhere in the natural world, are so perfect, it might just be an act of hubris for an artist to even try to compete. Yet, Olafur Eliasson seems to have found a way to harness some of this natural beauty in his own extraordinary art. His sculptures, his installations, experiments with light and water have been drawing huge audiences for several decades. In 2003, his weather project in London created the illusion of a meteorological event with a giant sun filling Turbine Hall at the Tate Museum.

1:41In the middle of the last decade, he installed giant blocks of melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet in European cities where climate change conferences were taking place. In Switzerland in 2021, he created an indoor-outdoor pond of unearthly beauty. Olafur Eliasson continually provokes his audiences to think about the natural world and our place in it in novel ways. Nowhere is that more apparent in his most recent work. As the newly appointed guest curator for WeTransfer, Olafur has created LifeWorld, a public, site-specific, reflective video installation on billboards in London, New York, Seoul, and Berlin.

2:27We're going to talk about that and much more on today's show. Olafur Eliasson, welcome to Design Matters. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Olafur, I understand you have a number of unique collections. They include vintage light bulbs and antique owls. What is it about those particular objects that intrigues you so much? Owls, yeah, they're not antique in that sense. They are, what do you call that when you have a stuffed animal? A plushie? Taxidermy. Taxidermy. Oh, taxidermy. Very interesting. Yeah, so I have a few collections. I collect meteorites and compasses primarily, and then old bulbs, you know, incandescent bulbs.

3:08So I have like an old people's home for bulbs that are out of use, but they still work in the kitchen in my studio. Toy animals collect that too. Olafur, you were born in Copenhagen where your parents emigrated from Iceland in search of work. Your dad became a cook and your mother was a seamstress. Is it true that your mom was from an Icelandic fishing village that could be traced back to the 11th century? You know, in Iceland, you have this sort of the book of Icelanders and the population of Iceland is so small that everyone is pretty much related to everyone, so to speak. So I have an Icelandic partner, a woman called Edda, and she and I met a little more than a year ago.

3:54She actually checked on an app whether we were too closely related to actually date. So it's not just my family or my mother's family. Everyone in Iceland can trace their family back to 16th, 15th, 14th, 13th century, all the way back to before people settled in Iceland, into Norway, actually, depending a bit. So, yes, I have my family tree. It goes back to the Renaissance. You know, I know for a fact that I have a woman from Napoli. She was a nun, 16th century. So she evidently wasn't a nun her whole life. And I have a North African, what is now probably Algeria, that was a sailor, maybe a pirate of sorts, and he got stuck in Iceland.

4:39So I have him and my family. So I do span a bit. I'm not just Icelandic. I covered a bit of Mediterranean genetic pool as well. I've been to Iceland several times. One of my observations is that it seems to be a very happy people. People there feel very content. to be in Iceland? I think people in Scandinavia normally score high on the sort of the happy charts. I think the social infrastructure and the safety nets should you fall through is very strong. Health, education, social mobility, you know, you can be of a family with no education, you're likely to have social mobility in terms of getting a higher education, unlike, I believe, America.

5:27Okay, one could say there's a lesser chance for you to somehow deviate from your family pattern with regards to education and so on. So in that sense, it's a happy country. And of course, the fact that Iceland is such a small island, there's 300 ,000 people, 350 ,000 people. That means that they have to look abroad. They have to see to collaborate with the world outside. So they're very good in negotiating, very good in conversations. And I would say they're good in diplomacy as well. And I think that has also taught them that you get quite far by being in a good mood or being happy. So the question is whether then people deep down are also happy.

6:10Iceland was a Danish colony up until the Second World War. Iceland was not as evolved as Denmark. Denmark itself didn't really manage Iceland to the same progressive evolution. So there was a number of things that led to a, should I say, a kind of lack of self-esteem in Iceland because it was only once the American with the Cold War came with the silver dollar buying the hearing, the fish of Iceland. Suddenly, Iceland, oh my God, you can have fridges and American cars. And there was the American base in Keflavik, and everyone in Iceland could see the American TV. I grew up when I was four or five laying on my grandparents' carpeted floor in a suburb of Habnafjord.

6:50I was looking at the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, at four o 'clock in the morning when the sun was already shining in the summer. And I remember watching the American TV and the news from America for the soldiers, right? And of course, the news were only good news because the American soldiers are not supposed to get bad news from America. So I thought, oh my God, America is like amazing. There's like everything is perfect in America. So as to the happy country, I am sure they're quite happy because it's a fantastic country. I love it very much, just like I love the rest of Scandinavia, to be honest.

7:23But it also is these kind of very well-functioning democracies. They all suffer from one danger, and that is they start to take themselves for granted. And that is the thing with democracy, right? Once you start to take it for granted, it is actually very wobbly because you start to think, no, I don't really have to vote. It doesn't really matter. Do I have to do anything? I don't have to. I'm taken care of. And then there is this assumption that the country or the system is taking care of you, and you sort of miss the point that you are to be taking care of the democracy in order to be happy.

7:57So there is a bit of this disillusioned kind of self-picture, self-reference. I want to talk a little bit about your upbringing. You were, I think, about four years old when your parents separated, and your dad left Copenhagen and went back to Iceland. How did you manage with that distance at such a young age? Yeah, my parents, they divorced when I was even younger than four. My father stayed in Denmark first for some years. My father was an artist and just finished his education as a cook. Back there, it was called a cook and not a chef. And my mother was a seamstress and was trying to finish her education as a tailor.

8:40They were both around 20 when they got me, so they were very young. And my father kept sending me pencils and papers. I did not see him so often, but I did see him at least a month, once a month, every second, months or so for a weekend. And what I did, based on my father's advice, I would just, instead of trying to draw something that looked like something, and bear in mind I was only four or five or six or something, I would just sort of do some crazy noodles, some random sort of noodles, and then I would fill out the gaps. You know, just like kind of with a black pen, I would sort of circle many, many circles and then I would fill out all the gaps.

9:15And my father said, try to find a cat. Try to look for a house and a cat. And then I somehow used my imagination and said, oh, there's a cat there. Look, there's the eye, eye, nose and I'll just add a few ears here. So in a certain way, my father aspired to a creative type of imagination, the imaginative. My mother, unlike my father, She was very disciplined. She actually made sure that I got to school. She was a seamstress. She made sure that I was dressed, but we didn't have any particular money. So I was wearing relatively fashionable clothes, like box trousers with shoulder straps. And there I was getting increasingly good at drawing and looking somewhat okay, being very shy, impossible at football, and socially a little bit more focused on trying to impress with my drawings, just like I tried to impress my father with my drawings.

10:07When I finally saw him, I said, look what I did. And I'd filled out the paper to the edge to make sure that he couldn't say, oh, look, there's a white spot there. You didn't paint that. And now, of course, later in life, I realized, oh, my God, my God, I was working hard to make my father like me. I wonder if I thought it was my fault that they got divorced or whatever one. And you know how it is when you grow up. Well, kids always think that. I did. Yeah, so in a sense, it was not easy. It was also not so bad. As it turned out, okay. And my mother in particular has devoted her life to provide a safety upbringing for me.

10:42And I had the luxury of having a father who had a lot of very inspiring thoughts and ideas. And he would hike in Icelandic landscapes with a staffily and a painting. And he would literally, like in the good old days, stand in the nature and paint a waterfall, but in a really abstract way, like full of people falling down instead of water falling down. And I would be like this small chap I was. I would be sort of running around him and climb up the mountainside and roll a rock down the mountainside and see if I could hit a leg of the tripod of the staffily of his or make a little dam for the water.

11:17So I could make a kind of the floodgates or dam crossing down and a sort of tsunami coming down my father's way. In that sense, I did have a lot of time on my own where I was actually given the opportunity to be in nature. And this is where my relationship with Icelandic nature actually started, I would say. I read that by the time you were nine years old, you could draw all the bones in a hand. And by the time you were 14, you could draw every bone in the body with remarkable photorealistic accuracy. Yeah. So my mother noticed, my God, my son, you're good at drawing. Let's put you to drawing school, where my father was like, well, he doesn't need to go to drawing school.

11:59He doesn't need to learn to draw. You just be abstract. Look at Rausenberg. So my father showed me Rausenberg. He showed me the pop artist. And my father was a huge fan of Jasper Johns. He explained to me that Rothko actually is about something. It's not really sure what, but it's something. And look at this goat with a tire around it. That was a Rausenberg goat with paint in the fur and a tire. And I said, why on earth? Because in Iceland, you had a lot of sheeps everywhere. So I was like, why does the sheep have a car tie around it? I was five years old. And my father said, don't you see it?

12:32This is nature versus culture, fighting. The culture is the human. So in a sense, my mother taught me in a drawing school. I took private lessons. And credit to her for doing that because the drawing teacher, he was tough. So I can say that looking back that I grew up with a great support and love and compassion from my parents to follow my dream. It seemed that even at a young age, you were starting to think more conceptually. I understand that at one point, you set up a studio on a boat, suspended a pen above a sheet of paper, so that the rocking of the waves would produce drawings. Yeah, it was me and my father.

13:12My father had to work as a fisherman. He was a cook on a fishing boat. And, you know, being a cook on a fishing boat in Iceland means that you are basically emptying out the oceans for fish, right? Because there's like 60 people or 30 people working on a one-month-long journey with this kind of incredible industrial freezing machine that fishes and freezes. So my father would cook for these 30 people in shifts. And the little bit of time he had in between, he would make art. He had a tiny little studio on the boat. So I, who didn't see my father very often, I at that point was in art school. But on the ocean, I would talk to him, and we would either play chess, and he would not have the chessboard, I would have the chessboard, and he would say E7 to E8 or like that, having it in his mind.

13:56He was very good at that. Or we would talk about art. And we also talked about how could we make something together when we were never together. So we came up with this idea of putting a steel ball on a piece of paper inside of a frame, and the frame was actually like a tray for food. And then he would put ink on the ball. And then later we realized a tennis ball was beta or we found different types of balls. Or we hung a pen in a string because at that time he would sail north of Russia in the polar sea there. It was a horrible ocean, absolutely wild. And the boat would be rocking really intensely.

14:31So we made these spectacular drawings with either balls or pens where the rocking of the boat would be drawn over maybe a week onto a paper. So it was like the ocean drawing itself onto a paper. It was like turning the boat into a pencil, basically. So we had good fun with that. And soon after that, actually, my father got very sick and died. So it has a strong sort of memory for me because I'm now looking back today. Of course, I'm very happy I had some relationship with him while he was still on the ocean. You talked about a powerful memory in your childhood in the late 1970s. There was a rationing of electricity in the town where your grandparents lived.

15:11And I read that at a certain hour in the evening, all the lights would go off and you'd all move to the windows and watch how the colors of the twilight sky would take on a new quality. Why do you think that memory is so resonant in you? I think it was the social aspect that sort of stamped it into the back of my mind. In 72 and 73, the oil was rationalized because it was the oil crisis. But I remember my grandparents, they had a small house on top of a sort of a hill called Holtid in this small suburban town to Reykjavik called Hapnofjördl. And the house was facing, the windows facing north. So in Hapnofjördl, when you face north, you're looking up to the part of Iceland, the other arm, so to speak, called Snejfelsnes.

16:00The end of Snejfelsnes, there's something called Snejfelsjörgul or the glacier of Snejfels. Snyfeld means snow mountain. So on a clear day, we could stand in the window of the living room of my grandparents, and we would look across the ocean to that other peninsula called Snyfeld's Higel, and we could see in the summer the sun would set in north. The sun would go down, and it would just go under the horizon and come up again. I mean, if you're at the north pole, the sun doesn't go down at all, as we know, right? So the glacier would be lit from behind. sometimes. This is such a spectacular phenomenon where you have this chunk of ice, like about one kilometer high and three or four kilometers wide, this glacial chunk, right?

16:49Of course, now it's almost gone. It's much, much smaller, right? So at a certain time of day, I believe just after dinner in order to save money, because Iceland had not yet fully harvested its geothermal power that it has today. So it was relying on oil. So Iceland was just in the process of getting up onto its feet. So oil actually was an important thing to make everything run in Iceland, still in the 70s. So there was a bell, a huge bell in the city. And it was like an alarm bell. And it was always fascinating to stand up in the window, look over the small city of Habnafjordur. The bell would sound and all the lights would go out, like all the street lights, all the house lights, everything.

17:30Instantly. Yeah. And they're fascinating, right? And then my grandma would come with a candle, and let's all sit by the window, she said, because there's only place there's a bit of light. So sitting by the window with the family and doing what we were doing, right? Reading and just sitting and talking and so on. Or like rolling around on the floor if we wanted to. That was very special because the light outside was really blue, very intensely sort of twilight blue. The glacier, if the weather was good, the glacier would be spectacular. Like, it was fantastic. And then there was this one candle, this burning little piece of fire, right?

18:06So you had the ice, and you had the fire, and you had this blue color, and you had the warm color in everybody's faces in the skin. It's like a little bit of a campfire. So it's a little bit like you had this sort of red and warmth coming together. I did not really have much of rituals, routines. I didn't have a childhood where everything was ceremonialized. I always envy the people who had a very clear pattern of Christmas and this ceremony and that ceremony because there's something very beautiful in the repetition of things. There's something really unique about falling into the rhythm of life, the respiratory rhythm of how to live.

18:46I had a bit of this and that. My mother got married, then divorced and married again. My father then was here and there and then he died. This was one of the times where there was a routine. you just knew at what was it, 8 o 'clock there would be this bell and we'd all run to the candle and when you're 5 years old it's so nice to know what was about to happen and that's an interesting thing to think about these sort of expectations and then the happening and then memories how you anticipate and then you have the moment of presence and then you have the kind of warmth of a memory that you carry with you into life.

19:27Oliver, you had your first art show, your first solo art show of drawings when you were 15 years old. What kind of work were you showing in that exhibit? Yeah, there was where I lived on the countryside in Denmark with my mother. There was a small artist group and artist associations of all kinds of artists. It's more like kind of a gathering. And they had shows in libraries or in shopping malls or, you know, here and there. I was the youngest member there the first time I ever kissed one was one of the kids of one of the other artists in that group, isn't that funny but in a shopping mall at night on the opening where I just drifted into the mall somewhere with this wonderful young woman looking back at it today, what it was it was nice because it was nothing in particular it was just me having fun so what must have been the case is that there was not a lot of pressure to perform I think I can remember roughly.

20:26There was a cat and there was a puffin, the Icelandic puffin, right? And stuff like that. And there wasn't really the best drawings of a cat or a puffin or something like that. But it was okay to just be like that. And then because one of the people in this artist group had a little gallery where they normally showed ceramics. And then I had a show there. And that was kind of funny because I was not so old. I was just turning 15. Well, I was just turning 14 or whatever. And I was like, oh, I have a show. My God, if I'm going to$40,$30,$60 for the drawings, right? So I was like, oh, my God, if I said everything, I have like$300.

21:05It's going to be so wild. But what I think now looking back, it was not like my mother looked over my shoulder and said, this drawing is not good enough. Do it again. Tiger mom is here. So what was beautiful is that I had a good time. And I said, oh, my God, this is great. I love having an exhibition. And I did. I think I did. I don't really remember. I think I did sell a few of them, probably to my family members or something. But, you know, these drawings, they must be around, or maybe not. Now, despite having your first solo exhibition at such a young age, I actually read that your first passion was breakdancing, and you even won a Scandinavian championship as part of a trio you named the Harlem Gun Crew.

21:56Yeah, it's funny, right? Tell us. Maybe it's not funny, actually. No, I saw some wonderful videos of you breakdancing on YouTube. This is actually around the same time of the show. So I went to Copenhagen to see my granddad. I was 14. And in the window, and this is now 81. Can you imagine? 81. I'm in Copenhagen on the pedestrian show, and there's a clothing store. And in the window of this clothing store, there's like three or four human mannequins. I'm looking at them. I say, my God, they're real people, but they're standing very still. And suddenly they move like robots. Like, the hands, you know, like the hands.

22:40And then one of them, out of nowhere, just made a wave from one hand through the elbow, shoulder, over to the other arm, and to the other hand. And I was shocked. And I realized my life in that moment had changed. I'm not being overly dramatic. So I went home. And from that moment on, I started moving around my house as a robot or as some kind of moving. See, now, there was nothing called internet. there was barely something called video like a vhs didn't exist there was a person called beta max i think or what so i had no idea until a little later i actually met one of the people in copenhagen i said what i said what were you doing because he was standing on the street where is this one yeah i was in high school in america he said there it was quite normal to do it but what are you doing yeah it's called electric boogie or breakdance and and and i said my god It's amazing.

23:38So I was then 15, and I hit puberty. Finally, it was like the last one in the class that hit puberty. And then I said, okay, I need to acknowledge that I have a body. And how better to acknowledge embodiment by disembodying and becoming a robot? So I felt very comfortable in being present and being unpresent at the same time, as you could say. And of course, as things went on and music videos then came and then the Rocksteady crew and then there was suddenly a whole handful of, and then suddenly there was like rap music. So I just completely by coincidence happened to be on the front end of that movement also when it took place in America.

24:22So now one important anecdote is that, and I'm sorry for being so granular, my father grew up close to the American base in Iceland, Keflavik, right? He grew up in Habnerfjord, which we talked about. And he worked in the kitchen. That's why he became a cook later. He was in the canteen of the American base. In the canteen, they had a jukebox. That jukebox, of course, the kitchen personnel had the key to that because every week there would be new records from America. And the new records they would put in, and then the old records from the week before they would take out. Then the kitchen staff would take the records for themselves and take them home.

24:59But my father, he was like the dishwasher probably, So he only got, let's say, jazz music and he got like black music because a lot of the army personnel were black people. And so there was a lot of black music. So I actually had the records from my father when I grew up with Coltrane and Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. And so when everybody was listening to Abba, I was listening to Miles Davis. So I somehow realized who's Curtis Blow, who's Johnny Guitar Watson, and who's African Bambaataa, who's the soul Sonic Force, George Clinton. My God. So when I was 15, I loved, you know, what is it called, The Space Dog by George Clinton.

25:45It's like the best song in my life. So hip-hop totally hit me because I completely got it. so I very quickly became obsessed with breakdance and I met a few like-minded people and one and a half or two years later it became mainstream fashion then of course we became the champion because I was like just like doing it for a while already but trust me it was nothing compared to I mean first of all we are not as good as as people were in other places in America of course but it It is only about four months ago or five months ago that I made a music video for the great artist Peggy Gu. And she asked me to make a music video because she had seen me dance.

26:28And this is not so long time ago. And she said, the only thing I have to promise is that you are dancing in the media. And I was very happy. So I made a music video. And it's on YouTube. If you search my name and Peggy Gu. I made a music video where I'm dancing Electric Boogie in the age of 50-something. And it's still the same old school moves. And she said to me afterwards, that's really great because my inspiration is sort of a retro vibe. And I said to her, do you think I'm that retro? Yeah, it's very retro looking. And she said, so it's very funny. So that bit of dancing, I stopped again when I was 18 and I got more serious about art.

27:02But that embodiment, that realization of space and time took what I learned from nature as a child. the idea of process the idea of you know temporality the change of things over time the seasonals the thing I learned as a dancer as a street dancer a street performer I learned that I could if I would do slow motion maybe even levitating sort of moonwalking slow motion everything else relatively to that would speed up so I could with my body holding the attention span of the ones looking at me, I could control the speed of the space. So now that became important for my art later on. When did you feel that you first became an artist?

27:55And how did that realization make you feel? I think I chose to be an artist when I was four because then I could make my father like me, right? And that's not the right reason I know that. But that's actually... Did it work? Yeah, yeah. but you know we developed a huge interest together and it worked in that way very well but I don't want to have to earn my parents love I just want to have it and I did so I'm not God forbid he can hear what I'm saying but it wasn't that funny God forbid so so the thing is when I went to art school I was 18 I had done a lot of break dancing on the street I loved street dancing.

28:34But when I went to art school, I thought I was kind of stepping out of society, liberating myself of the burden of structuralism, the structure of the world. I thought it was a kind of mildly escapistic thing. I was kind of liberating. Thank God I'm going to go into art school. I'm not going to be another cockwheel in the machinery of the modern economy. But little did I know that, you know, of course, becoming an artist is actually stepping closer to the world. It's actually like taking a magnifying glass or a microscope, a binocular, and get even more close or even more involved, which was liberating as well in a certain way.

29:17So going to art school was a sort of crucial moment for me because I sort of stopped dancing from one day to the next. I learned a lot in dancing also about being competitive. I was not necessarily the most sociable person because I was very interested in getting a great education, getting out of here, move on. I was like not going to be an art student for the rest of my life. So one or two years into art school, I already went to New York right away. I said, okay, this is enough. I just, I have no patience for learning. I went to New York twice actually. And it's funny, I'll be completely honest.

29:52I was very, very, very naive. And I remember the first time I got here was like 90 and we were living in a cheap hotel just on 42nd street off timesquare early in the morning and it was like you know jet lagged coming from europe and i only had about i think 180 dollars for nine days and then there was this kind of four or five people standing on timesquare and with a little box with three cups on it oh no and i was like what the fuck what is that and i I like stuff like that street I'm a street performer I was like that's sweet and then there was this girl she put$20 she was so dumb she put$20 on the wrong cup and she said I was like my god why are you putting I know where it is you're silly I know where it is so put some money they said and then I only had that 100 bill so I put the I'll put only a 20 I said and they said no no you put 100 I said anyway I knew what the thing was and then he lifted I lifted it myself and then there wasn't there fucking hell And then I lost$100.

30:52That was my first time. I have been in New York for like six hours or something. So walking jet lagged up to Times Square. So isn't it funny now that I'm doing actually all the screens on Times Square? Yes. You always wonder who the fuck makes them make money, these sort of crooks on the street, right? With this trick. Well, I lost$100. I can openly and honestly say that. And I had never seen it before. And how can you be so naive now? Oh, of course, I know that you have to live on the moon to never have seen this before, but live in a bubble like I did. So nevertheless, now I'm back on Times Square with my project, right, with the life world on all the screens around.

31:31So I'm sort of, this is me kind of revenging that$100 that I lost back then. But anyway, you can get along in New York for a little money, or you could back then. Oh, you only had$80 left. Yeah, yeah, but that was about$10 a day for food. Right, I was actually thinking about that$10 a day book. Toast bread and cornichons. I just interviewed the magician David Kwong, and he came out with a book called 25 Magic Tricks to Fool Your Parents. And that trick is in the book, in case you're interested in understanding the machinations. No, I'm traumatized. I'm traumatized. In addition to studying art, you also became really intrigued by Gestalt psychology, phenomenology.

32:14At that time, did learning about these disciplines influence the kind of art that you were making or would ultimately make? Well, because I had this relationship with nature that I had, and I don't want to overemphasize it, but it was something that was significant for me. And I had this relationship with dance. I had a very strong sense of what does experience mean. And, you know, why did I, when I looked at a certain painting, not experience anything? And why would that not be a problem? And of course I realized if I made an effort, I could experience something. But this idea of the relativity of experiencing being actually in my own hands, that I could, if I looked harder, I could see more.

32:57It just struck me. My God, if I actually had a closer look, I could see structures. I could see interest. I can see intentionality. I could see power structures. I could see economical structures. if I just looked close enough and if I specialized my way of seeing. So Gestalt psychology was one of the ways where I started to somehow decipher or break down what does seeing the world actually mean? What does taking in the world actually mean? And of course, phenomenology was a thing that was very much focused on that. And I gradually realized that the experience of the world was more important to me than the world, for the time being at least.

33:40So I went into Gestalt psychology, perception theory or perception psychology, into media theory a little bit, like understanding why is this ad so convincing that I actually feel like buying those shoes. So I studied that. But all in all, everything was about what is the space between me and the world. And I thought, why don't I just make that the artwork? So I said to myself, I'm just going to call what I do a machine that creates a phenomena. So I made a rainbow machine. It's like a hose with some holes in it. And, you know, it's just connected to the tap and have a drain in the floor. And then a bulb, a light, a lamp.

34:21Didn't really make a rainbow. So I went to the theater and borrowed a theater projector. Then it made a rainbow. So it's fantastic. I've done a work of art. But the nice thing about a rainbow is, of course, it's not there when you don't look. because the drop and the light and your eye has to have 45 degrees or 47, I don't know. There is a certain angle of the sun and then it creates the rainbow. But if you're not looking at it, then there is no angle anymore. Then there is, you could argue this and that, of course, I get that. But the point was suddenly the person looking actually became constitutional.

34:56Without the person, there would be no rainbow. And funny enough, if there was another person standing over like two meters away from me, that person would see another rainbow because it's a different angle to the light. So suddenly I had something that I felt comfortable with, namely that there was a very high degree of relativity in reality. Reality is relative to how you actually see it or where you are seeing it from or what does me seeing it first mean and so on. and this opened up for the dematerialization of the objecthood in art for my part where I started to take away the focus on the solid the non-negotiable the idea that something can be purchased because you know a rainbow the experience of a rainbow you can't really buy that you can buy the machine and then everybody else you can become a rainbow producer of experiences but in that sense I was very much inspired also at the time by the Leitens.

35:53This is now late 80s, early 90s, 91, 2003. I went back to art school after being in New York. It was so hard. I had so much debt. I had to go home and pay my credit card off. And I started studying this sort of Robert Irving, James Turrell, John McCracken, the Leitens-based people, Marian Nordman. And I was very interested. They were all into psychology also. Very interesting. All into Buddhism and into all kinds of contemplative stuff. So I studied that a bit as well. But also structuralism, the way that the world gradually became accessible through deconstructing it. That meant that you could be aware of your seeing at the same time as seeing.

36:39You could say that would be like seeing yourself seeing. You could start to deconstruct the vision you're having while having it. So I said, okay, I'm just going to do a moss. You know, the smelling, the humidity, the sound change in the gallery when you put a moss wall. So is it the moss wall or is it the way the sound and smell and everything changed, the humidity in the room changed? It's everything. Everything is the artwork. The world is not necessarily what it appears to be by the first glance. and to hand over the responsibility to what is it then to the viewer meant that you have a lot of confidence in the viewer that means that you grant the person looking at the artwork a lot of space a lot of well love you could say you grant the person the confidence in that the person is good enough just like my parents didn't make me draw the bloody cat perfectly they just granted me this is good enough.

37:41That's fun. That's nice. It's generous. It's hospitable in its own way. Well, there's also a bit of good parenting in that. Yeah, well, also a lack of resources, you could say. You know how we are with our parents. We're always a little grumpy when it comes to it. So what I'm trying to get at is that idea that people are actually worth trusting when it comes to looking at art because they're not stupid. and now if you looked at the way museology was going the way you had in museums you had interpretation versus chronology and display ideology you had the Pompidou the Tate and Moe Manure they were sort of competing in display ideology in different ways, there was theory on that do you put a label do you have an explanation, do you have a headset all these things that's a part of the experience of course you cannot just say oh here's the painting that's the label, it has nothing to do with the painting What about the space between the two paintings?

38:43It takes like four seconds to go from this painting to that painting. What does it mean to go from Morris Lewis strip stripes into Ed Reinhardt? What's the gap between the two? That's the deeper reasoning behind the weather project. Because I said, why don't we just declare this a public space? At the time, I was very much into the urban planner, Jan Geel, who did the famous book Life Between Buildings. He romanticized a little bit, one could say, the history of the Italian piazza and how the policemen met the priest or met the school kids, met the teenager, met the old people during the day. You know, there was the hurly-burly of life.

39:22It was the living of the city. What was unique was we pay taxes and we have for that something in return called the public space. And what is public about it is because we own it together, and this is where we have the capacity to sort of negotiate our sense of reality. So now if you call it public space, but it actually is a privatized space, and it's just presenting itself as a public space, but it actually is a consumer space. It's a big shopping mall full of advertisements. Then there is a conflict in the degree to which you are allowed to design your own life space, living what the sense of public is and what the space actually does because it actually is more manipulative.

40:07It's power structures and economical structures. It's a capitalist structures and so on. So this was now a very fast and huge jump, generalizing a lot. But this is where I said to the Tate, and at the time, the weather project, 2003, I want to make the Tate into a public square. It's a public space. It already was free of charge to get in. And I thought it was so interesting that you were kind of not in the museum yet, but you were also not completely on the street. You were in that weird buffer. Why don't you just lean towards the city instead of leaning towards the, instead of making it a primer for the museum, make it a primer for the city going out again.

40:48These ideas of holding space for my own inner potential, holding that space for myself and that inner space that allows for that, That actually was very much my interest at the time. There's so many projects I want to talk to you about, but I do want to make sure we spend enough time talking about your current project. The only thing that this conversation was reminding me a little about was the project that you did. I believe it was the same year that the Weather Project came out. It was in the Venice Biennale when people went into a room, you had installed a drum and people pressed it and were startled several seconds later by an intense flash of light that then produced them seeing the word.

41:34An after image of utopia. Yeah. And. It was two years after actually. Yeah. So it's basically like a bucket on the wall with a little red dot. And, you know, we are all children. If there is a red dot next to a bucket with a screen on it, of course, everyone presses their dot. But that's why humans are, that's why I have some hope, right? And then it flashes in strong, bright light, Utopia, right into your face. And, of course, it's like, you know, being taken a photo of or something. It just flashes right into your face. But if you look then onto the next artwork, in the complementary color, I mean, in gray letters, it would read Utopia on top of the next few things you look.

42:16So it's just funny you look at this work that says Utopia, Utopia. And I guess the point I was maybe in the context of this conversation particularly happy about is that I do believe that we, who goes to see a museum or an artwork or a situation or a theater or into a gallery or something, that we are producers of our own realities. I don't think we are without, you know, pressure from our surroundings. Of course, we are victimized in all kinds of ways and all of that. But still, as to what is actually looking at culture, what does it mean to read a book, right, to look at a work of art? You look at a painting or look at a work of art and you go like, wow, I know that feeling.

43:03That sky, those stars, that is exactly how I... Actually, I have a feeling. No, I have a yet not articulated something like a feeling in me that had I to articulate it, I would do it like this. It is as if this star in night by William Semyon, it is giving language to something I wanted to say for so long. An after effect. It is so interesting. It's as if I am speaking. It's as if the painting or the drawing or the situation, this book, it is as if it's listening to me. So I put the book down. I go home from the museum and I say, my God, I feel listened to. I feel seen, met, heard. I feel acknowledged.

43:57I contributed to this museum. I didn't go to consume art. I came to produce art. I am worth something. I am of some value. I'm going to vote. Do you know what I mean? So if I'm good enough, then I'm going to co-produce my own reality. But for that to happen, you have to first grant people to own that and not say to them, if you press there, then it says utopia, and then you have to look over here. Then you see an after image, and that means that you are now seeing your own projection. But fundamentally, I think people are smart enough to make the link between, oh, my God, I'm not a consumer. I'm a producer of my own life.

44:41And that's a great feeling to feel acknowledged for that, to feel seen. Well, then I must be doing something right. And that's where culture, I mean, unlike, this is now again a generalization, unlike capitalism, This is where culture has a function in society. It actually acknowledges people's existence and the value of that contribution to society. Let's talk about Life World. You were recently appointed WeTransfers 2024 guest curator, following in the footsteps of previous curators, including Marina Abramovich, Solange Knowles, Russell Tovey. and you have just debuted Lifeworld, this magnificent public site-specific reflective video installation, which is on billboards that are currently living in London, Seoul, and Berlin.

45:37When this airs, it will also be living in Times Square in New York City. It also lives online in the global digital space of Retransfer. Describe Lifeworld for us. Yeah, it's a good question. I was invited by this organization called Circa. It's a fantastic group of very committed people who believe in art. And that in it as of itself is like so inspiring. And the opportunity is to work in a space that is normally dominated by these giant screens. And of course now these screens are bigger and brighter than ever before. So it's interesting, before I went to art school, I saw that one small billboard on Times Square by, was it Jenny Holzer saying, protect me from what I want?

46:27Yes, yes. And I looked at it and I said, my God, that's a moment for me. That's a moment. Like, yes, exactly. How genius to put that there on Times Square. I hadn't been on Times Square. And then two or three years later, I go to Times Square and then I lose my$100. So protect me from what I want. And so now, in a way, I've been protecting myself. I've become defensive. Why? Because I am protecting myself constantly from the interest of all kinds of, should I say, triggers. I'm triggered by things. I'm triggered by, I don't want to deal with pain. I don't want to deal with things that are difficult.

47:14I don't want to talk about things that are inconvenient or difficult. I just want to not deal with stuff. I'm just tired, you could say, right? So I have become very good at protecting myself. So I just want to acknowledge the importance for that work of art of Janice, protect me from what I want. And now I'm in a situation where I say, unprotect me from what I want. I need to be less defensive. I need to release my honesty. I need to come through with my story. Of course, in a way, that is what she's saying, of course, also protect me and unprotect me. Unprotect me means that in order to somehow sustain myself, I have said, no, no, not this, not this, not this.

48:08I become very defensive, right? I am avoidant of pain. See, now this might be pain, you know, dealing with difficult stuff. That might be trauma, right? It might be talking too much about my, you know, my childhood and so on and so forth. I think we did pretty well today. That has taken a bit of practice to actually say so much that I did. but you know 10-20 years ago that would have been difficult it's not exactly painful but it's not exactly convenient because it was not all easy it was not all easy with my childhood like this but it's not so bad also and now I can talk like this because I worked on it like we all do probably so here I am opening up here I am in the process of relaxing my avoidance of pain.

49:00I'm in the process of being present and compassionate to you and to the world. Present in a way which allows me to be with other people's pain without becoming in pain or without experiencing the pain. I've been very interested in how now my interest in psychology has evolved and my relationship with space, my relationship with other people, with culture, with art. And, you know, some great artworks, they bring us into situations which is inconvenient. Oh, that is pushing the buttons, right? That book is touching the, this is painful. And I think I have come to become better at being present to those types of situations, those types of pains, without freaking out, without being triggered, or now I notice I'm getting triggered.

50:03I go, oh, I'm getting triggered. That's interesting. What's happening? So I studied for some time now within the context of art, what is called IFS, Internal Family Systems, which is very much about your awareness of your awareness. There's a lot of overlap with what I've been talking about earlier. To what extent are you actually capable of having a conversation with a part of you that is having this experience. I say, wow, that's interesting. This painting triggers that part in me. That part, I haven't seen that part for a long time. What's going on here? Hello there. Hi part, so and so. So if you're into internal family system, which is now a well-established therapy, but also almost like a philosophy, you could say that I think allows to a lot of evaluations of a lot of situations.

50:52On top of that, I've been very interested in nonviolent communication. In terms of how do you speak without what you are saying is always introducing a force that is on the expense of something else. It doesn't have to be always on behalf of something. But how do you actually honor the fact that there is a space between you and the other person? And it is not for you to dominate that space to the extent of marginalizing or alienating the other person. how do you actually honor the need for the two of you to actually come together and be together without having then again to agree about everything so these are things that i think are today interesting for me with regards to when looking at the space on time square and i when i say unprotect myself i expose myself to the world i take down my defensiveness and then i see what happens because of course I am opening up for a degree of sensitivity I am opening up for maybe I'm not hypersensitive but I'm opening up for vulnerability this is where I want to get at so for me this project is about I believe that a great public space honors or hold vulnerability in its foreground.

52:14Vulnerability because I can stand here in the space and I can see there is a person in need. Hi there. You need something. Can I help you? Can we possibly work together on sorting something out? I also need something, by the way. We are together. This is our space. We both paid for it or we paid for something like that, right? So is there actually space here to meet each other in a vulnerable space of course I think what I said earlier about culture this is what culture does normally this is what a theater can do this brings us together around our own vulnerability and it allows us to deal with it in a certain way so now of course I first looked at Times Square and of course I've been there I lost$100.

53:07I know Times Square. And it's impressive, right? It's impressive. It is so intense and complex what goes on on these screens. It is shaping our reality. It is literally shaping our reality. And, of course, the advertisements on there is only high profit margin things. This is too expensive. It's way too expensive, right? So what you have there is stuff with big bucks, big money, things where the profit is high. That is cosmetics because they're very cheap to make and they sell for very high prices so you can afford doing these advertisements. Or the kind of, you know, the very aggressive type of TV series on the big networks.

53:49And there's big money in that and then you see that. And then there's a few other things, right? So it is not all kinds of advertisements. Let's take all the screens. And what I did, I filmed all the screens and the buildings and the street with the people from, I think, four different angles. The kind of the main angles from north, south, east, west, basically. I just filmed it 10 minutes of each. Out of focus. But more out of focus on the screens, less out of focus on the pictures. Then I took that film back to my editing board, and then I added time blur. Because otherwise you could just see the ads.

54:37It's like a spatial blur, right? Yeah. I added depth blur. I said, well, now I dig it. If you need a blur, just download a blur. It's so funny. Of course, I thought there was only out of focus. No. So what it is, there's a blur where I can show what was two seconds ago and what is in two seconds, and I can fade in, fade in. So there's a time blur. There's a depth blur. I could also add a blur so that things further away are more blurry, as if it's a fog. Like a foggy room, the furthest away is out of focus, completely in the close by. It's almost not in out of focus. So the people and the cars were the only things I only blurred a little bit.

55:15By the way, so we send it first to test it to the company, right? And then send it back to, oh, there's something wrong. It's out of focus. It's like almost too good to be a real joke, but it's actually true. So anyway, so the idea I hope to achieve is that people look up and they go like, wait a minute. That's a film of what I am looking at. When you look at the screens, you just see what you already see. But of course, it's recorded a month and a half ago. There is almost a sense of a live feed. It is not a live feed. But there's this kind of, my God, this is here. This is the world that I'm looking at.

55:55And it's completely blurred. It looks amazing when it's blurred. It's like so fantastic. We did now, there was the opening in Piccadilly Circus about two and a half weeks or three weeks ago. And when it started, it got completely silent on the square. Yeah, I've seen video. I can't wait for it to go up November 1st in Times Square. Life World will be synchronized every night from 1157 p.m. to 12 a.m. on nearly 100 digital displays from 41st Street to 49th Street in New York City. And you've stated that you think that we may tend to underestimate people's potential for making up narratives themselves about what they think is right and wrong.

56:39But in this sort of slurry, blurry, hurly-burly space, you have to find out for yourself. What do you want to do? You have to lean into this intuition to somehow find out, what do I actually think about this? What is it that I'm seeing? Why is it blurred? What am I unable to see? Olafur, do you think that this means relinquishing some sort of control over the viewing? sometimes my experience is people go like oh my god i was like i'm being put to work again can't i just can't you just tell me what i'm looking at and and that's sad though i would hate for somebody to see it very quickly if it is then compelling people go oh wait hang on a minute that's oh wow that's a funny color i worked with what is called a micro phenomenology interviewer who's sort of out of a more psychological perspective.

57:37Her name is Kathrine Heimann, a German scientist, who interviews people going into like maybe three seconds of what they experienced. And then she interviews for two hours about what happened. So I've been very interested in at what point in a situation does people sort of open up? There is always this challenge of pacing. You know, your attention is very interlocked with pace. When you drive a car, you have a tunnel vision, which is, I believe, it's 60 degrees, right? If you go on a bicycle, you're a bit wider because you're going slower. If you're a pedestrian, you're 130 or 40 degrees. You're like much wider.

58:26You keep track. You can see so much because you're walking so slow. Anyway, it's too dangerous to have 140 on a car. You will miss something for sure, right? So slowing down already opens up for the unforeseeable. The same Kat Heimann in my exhibition in Basel, where I took off the facade and took a pond from the outside to the inside, she interviewed a young 21-year-old person coming to the exhibition, and on the way in the bus, this person had a quarrel with the bus driver. The person was not of Swiss ethnicity, and there was a sort of racist component to it. So the person was kind of already coming into the exhibition with some friends, wasn't really very sure they were going to be open.

59:12It was like not exactly what they needed, a bloody art exhibition right now, because the person was not happy, right? So she talked to the person and asked, well, so that was your state of mind. This is how you then arrived. Then you get in. Let's focus on four seconds here. Then they went into talking about that. It turns out the person had sat down, looked at the water, being grumpy, didn't want to talk to the others, looked into the waters. And in the sort of sliminess of the green color in the water, there was the dog that that person had lost not so long time ago. Oh, my God. And it just sat there, and you can kind of see it's not so complicated that the person misses his dog because he's not happy.

59:59So the person sat there, and in that space, there was enough slowness for the dog to come back in the memory and embrace the sadness. Maybe there had not been room for that sadness. So I was very happy with the fact that, imagine, here's this exhibition. This mad artist takes off the facade with the water and everything like that. And in the many, many different kinds of experiences that goes on, one of the experiences is the person misses his dog by looking into the artwork. This might sound a little anecdotal, but I'm totally serious. This is what I'm talking about. There is room for you to be you in every possible way.

1:00:40And if it's your lost dog, and because you had an unfriendly bus driver who's not exactly, you know, hospitable to your way of seeing things, I can completely see why a space like this can also be a valve for you to express your unmet emotional need. and that I think is one of the things that I mean by when we slow down, when we have the courage to slow down because it does take a little bit of courage because everything else, of course, proportionally gets fast. I might not make it. Whatever people are running for, I'm going to run too, right? So in that sense of slowing down, in that sense of kind of I suddenly see a new opening and that is that I need to look for my dog.

1:01:30I need my dog. Where is my dog? And this is what I mean public space or cultural space. But this is what we want our society to be capable of, to host unmet emotional needs in a way. It doesn't mean that they are going to be met immediately. That's not the thing. What gives it the space? But at least there's room for expressing unmet emotional needs, right? and maybe that's a step closer to it than eventually feeling that it might be met. It's such a gift that you've created this work for our city, especially at this particular time in our trajectory here. Oliver Eliasson, I want to thank you so much for making so much work that matters, for making New York City so much more creative over the decades you've done work here and thank you for joining me today on Design Talks.

1:02:30You're being masterkind. Thank you so much. It's my honor to be here. Thank you so much, dear. Thank you. To see more about Lifeworld, you can go to wetransfer.com and to read more about Olafur's practice and his body of work, you can go to OlafurEliason.net and if you find yourself in New Zealand at the beginning of the year, you can go to the Auckland Art Gallery to view a retrospective highlighting over 30 years of Olafur's installations, sculptures, photographs, and more that explore themes of human perception, experimentation, and environmental awareness. I'd like to thank you for listening.

1:03:08And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I'm Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The Editor-in-Chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.