Olafur Eliasson: Second Lecture

Life and energy • Collective experience of watching a film • Light pollution and the experience of stars from earth • The incomprehensibility of scale • The impact of human activity • Energy inherent in colour • The role of colour and pigment in the evolutionary development of cyanobacteria • Painting: light, colour, and evolution • Experiment with colour and light: after-image film • Your uncertainty of colour matching experiment • Fundamental co-production of art • Reality not only about evaluating what we see, but also how we see it • The variety of depiction, detection, and perception of colour across language and culture • Goethe’s colour theory • Sight and the world • Gaining and losing confidence through the experience of an artwork • The mediated motion • Encountering others within an artwork • Who is the author in an artwork? • Removing the artist from the artwork • Using glaciers to create a physical relation with the environment • Creating an explicit understanding of temporality • Dynamics and vulnerability of a landscape • Destabilising what we think of as solid • Literal and figurative blindness • Denmark’s political exclusivity and The blind pavilion • Obsidian, black mirrors, and our ability to see ourselves within a context • Disconnection of the artist from the artwork • The artist is responsible for everything • Bruno Latour’s interobjectivity • Compassion and empathy • Artists’ responsibility and the spectators’ share in it

Olafur Eliasson, Danish-Icelandic artist, founded the Institut für Raumexperimente, an educational research project, affiliated with the College of Fine Arts at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). The fundamental trajectory of the Institut für Raumexperimente is Eliasson’s interest in testing models of learning and cultivating experimental formats.