Lifeworld — A new, global, public artwork by Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson sees the world through light and color. Connecting on a video call in the final embers of summer, he notices that the sun is hitting my camera as it begins its descent from the sky’s apex. “There’s a sort of red lens flare falling across your face,” he observes serenely. Suddenly, and excitedly, Eliasson pulls out a filter that attaches to his own camera—a new toy. As it clips on to the lens, the 57-year-old’s video refracts into a kaleidoscope of overlapping perspectives of the room he sits in in his Berlin home, in soft, translucent colors. When he removes it, and falls back into focus, an artwork to his left is revealed. It’s half out of frame,but I can see that it’s constructed from a series of oval panels of rainbow glass.

Eliasson’s fascination with these elements, and how they interact with the natural world, played some role in bringing the Icelandic-Danish artist to prominence in the 1990s and early aughts. In 2003, after founding his own studio and representing Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale, Eliasson installed “The weather project” at the Tate Modern—a gigantic, blazing tangerine sun made up of light, mirrors and fog in the building’s empty Turbine Hall. More than two million people pilgrimaged to marvel in its hazy orange aura, which became such a cultural touchstone that even the most casual British art-goer would still exclaim, upon seeing it two decades on: “ah yes, the SUN thing!”

While “The weather project” may have been striking and literal, comprising of a single, clear and universally-recognisable symbol, Eliasson has experimented more with ambiguity and strangeness over the years, allowing architecture, science and technology to bleed into his art, always eschewing genre. Some have described him more as an inventor, or a jack-of-all-trades “renaissance man” than straightforwardly an artist.

His new work, “Lifeworld”, which will take over the giant mosaic of curved billboards that encircle London’s Piccadilly Circus, epitomizes this embrace of spectra: the artwork is—and I mean this quite literally—a blur. The video piece, which will take to other billboards in city centers across the world in October, films and reflects back footage of its own surroundings: commuters, taxis, the speed of city life. But it refracts them through a sort of fogged-up filter, rendering them into an indecipherable, out-of-focus haze of light color.

“Maybe the disruption lies in blurring things,” Eliasson tells me, as we discuss the meaning of the project. His affect is curious, playful, a little provocative, sometimes gently questioning my wording of choice. I’m slightly taken off-guard by the length and rigor with which he approaches each question—evoking the feeling of a university seminar more than your average transactional press junket.

For the artist, the consumerist crossroads of Piccadilly Circus encapsulate the direct, explicit demands that are placed on citizens, particularly through advertising. “In the ‘not-blurred’ world, we are being told, to a large extent, what to think: buy this car, live like those people, subscribe to those values, then you're happy.” By contrast, the misty glow of whites, reds and purples against black represent something that is harder to extract, package up and sell.

Eliasson is frustrated by the way that things are done to us in public space, from the way that we are forcibly advertised to on our commutes, to the state surveillance and hostile architecture that dictate how we move through the world. The blur of Lifeworld doesn’t tell us to do anything at all; instead, offers up some subjectivity and agency to viewers.

“I want to trust that people know what to do with something soft,” he tells me, explaining that there are prompts for viewers to make sense of the work themselves. “It unblurs a little bit, then it blurs again,” he says, comparing it to J. M. W. Turner’s landscapes, whose hues Eliasson meticulously studied as part of a 2014 color experiment. “The fog goes away a little bit, and then the fog comes back in. I particularly like this idea of a moment of hesitation.”

I imagine what this moment of hesitation might actually feel like—walking through the sharpness and hardness of the city center rush, to suddenly be confronted with vast, frosted leaks of color. What on earth is going on here? Is this a glitch? What am I looking at? For Eliasson, this is exactly the point. 

“I think we maybe tend to underestimate people's potential for making up a narrative themselves about what they think is right and wrong. But 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 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?” As an artist, Eliasson tells me that this means relinquishing control in favor of welcoming in interpretation. “I have to trust people to be capable of it, when people are often talked down to and told ‘you are not smart enough’.”

“Lifeworld” relies on technology, but Eliasson is equally skeptical about how emerging technologies may reduce opportunities for ambiguity. Take the video call we are speaking on right now, he says, keen to break the interview’s fourth wall once again. “We are constantly seeing optimisation of the functionality of every pixel on these screens. [But] every pixel actually holds opportunities.” For Eliasson, there is a kind of symbolic potential opened up by blocky pixelation, blur. “If we can make space more ephemeral, we can feel our way through.”

Somewhat of a public intellectual and philosopher, Eliasson is resistant to discuss “Lifeworld” through the lens of binaries. He keeps pushing against that, each time I describe it as a “disruption” or “provocation”. For Eliasson, “Lifeworld” is not straightforwardly oppositional to the values of capitalism and neoliberalism, because it is softer, slower and stranger than that—existing on a different plane entirely. “I'm very much in the work of not being didactic,” he says. “Blurred is not necessarily the opposite of ‘not blurred’.”

Simultaneously, no, he’s not disavowing clarity, reactivity, measurability, activism, climate science. “Of course, we need hard discourse. We need academia, science and so on. But I'm not sure that science, the economy and politics are actually offering the degree of tenderness we always need.”

Eliasson has long been outspoken on global politics—we briefly wash over the state of democracy, Harris, Trump. But he is also increasingly interested in mental health, feeling that the hardness of contemporary life qualitatively impacts our psychic experience of the world. “In public spaces, we are attacked from every side, and so it’s no wonder that we become defensive. Our social mask—our armor has become so thick that we have become numb.”

He tells me about a DIY social experiment he conducted in a local park in Berlin, in which, in his characteristically provocative spirit, he decided to walk around in slow motion. Just to see how people might respond, what his performance art might reveal. Not many people know that Eliasson is also, inexplicably, a dancer—and so he is interested in physically embodying the slowness that he espouses.

As he was slow-motion walking across the lawn and gravel, one passerby instinctively clutched her purse. “This is not me judging her,” Eliasson says. “The point is, this is what public space has become. It takes very little for us to feel unsafe, even though this is the space that we own together.” He means this very much in the literal sense: “We pay tax. It's our space. So I want it to represent my values.”

Growing up in Iceland, Eliasson spent a lot of time in nature; his summers were backdropped by rain, greenery, glaciers and volcanoes. “I grew up with an understanding of the fragility of nature. In Iceland, it's an arctic landscape, meaning that there’s very little temperature change.” The conditions for life are precise. “So, if you drive a Jeep across moss, it takes 30 years for it to grow back. The little trees are basically bonsais.” He sees this environment as providing him with the foundations to understand the climate crisis—how ephemeral our environment is, how easily we can leave an imprint on the world around us.

Perhaps this is also why Eliasson has always gravitated towards soft things, often juxtaposed against the concrete and steel of city life. “My first artwork was a rainbow,” he says. “My second one was a moss wall.” For Eliasson, it is in this impressionable, fuzzy matter that imagination lies, where we might make the biggest imprint as people, as active participants in art and politics and life.

“To claim back your imagination is also about claiming back your agency,” Eliasson says. “It is our own personal ability to suggest that the world is actually tangible and tactile. Tactility is also something that happens with your eyes. Softness. To look at something and to imagine: ‘I could touch this’. The dematerialisation of objecthood and fetishism in our societies.” He doesn’t mean to romanticize or overly-philosophize here, he’s talking about touching the material world with your hands, making something happen.

“The way we touch it is how we’re actually going to change it. That is how I learned about the world, and that is how I work with my art.”