Questions to answer in introductory Manifesto

1. What is the general purpose of this publication: 
   1. Showcase the various work that have come out the communication pathway 
2. how many artists
   1. A interdisciplinary group of six art artists and designers 
3. What is the overall concept 
   1. Shift. Transformation- process, pace, tone, mood, color, tensions between digital and craft
4. What brought the group of artists together
   1. RCA graduate diploma in communications specialism 

Research about publication creative layout in the library .

Order from left to right:

1, Use different size / colour /material as separation.

2, Spread image cross two page creats a large scale strong visual experience.

3, Can be used when having too many samilar theme/color images need to be in the same page.

4, Can be used as separation for different artist and interesting layout.

Order from upper to bottom:

1, Use colour as a house theme to separat artists.

2, Creative inner page hollow / fold the paper.

Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist who has risen to fame for his often epic-scale installations that primarily use natural elements as their core features or as catalyzing devices. 

I first experienced Eliasson’s work when encountering the piece Your sound galaxy at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, and instantly noticed how the natural element in this piece, light, acted as the work’s paint, processed through the mediums of mirrors and geometry before reaching its canvas.  

“Your sound galaxy”

This light also transforms the rigid geometric shapes of the piece into dynamic entities, like stars on the brink of imploding, the uncontainable light within them seeping out of every crevice. I instantly felt that the use of light and geometry resonated with techniques and ideas that I explore in my practice. For me, the minimal stark lines of geometric shapes are a means of delivering an impactful experience and, when paired with light, an ambiguity is created — an experience that blurs the lines between mathematical perfection and the allure of light’s mystical potential. It is this merging of the artificial and natural, and the way in which light, space and natural elements can be used to invoke an awareness in the audience of their own physicality, promoting a sense of social and cultural connection, while creating an ambiguity that invites critical intervention, that I seek to explore in my own work, and this is what led to my decision to write about Olafur Eliasson. 

I witnessed further evidence of this methodology in many of the projects and experiments on display at the In Real Life exhibition at the Tate Modern, where natural elements were manipulated or emulated to create an experience for the audience, and the more I investigated Eliasson’s work, the more I found myself asking “Are Eliasson’s most notable works created primarily for the purpose of creating immersive interactive experiences, or can deeper meaning be derived from them?”, also raising the question of, when perceiving art to be a medium through which self-expression and meaning are conveyed, as many do, can Eliasson’s works in fact be considered as meaningful works of art, or are they merely engaging scientific experiments?

Eliasson’s work delves into the fields of philosophy, the natural sciences, mathematics, and psychology, among other disciplines. He established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin in 1995, a laboratory comprised of over a hundred architects, archivists, craftsmen, technicians, film makers, art historians, and more, all working to push art and design forward through projects, exhibitions, experimentation, and research. The structuring of his work base in this organized and almost business-like manner, as well as Eliasson’s work processes, themes, and the impact he seeks to effect, can be seen as evocative and impersonal, and far-removed from the introspective works of other artists and art forms, instead opting for clinical, scientific and detached offerings that demonstrate the technical capabilities and achievements of his research and practice.

As I began fully exploring Eliasson’s projects, I was reminded of the work of James Turrell, whose Gathered Sky installation I had also experienced in Beijing.  

“Gathered Sky”

For decades, Turrell has been playing with the perception of his audience, using light and space to create immersive, otherworldly forms and experiences. Influenced by Turrell, Eliasson also uses these elements, additionally integrating nature and technology into his work. According to Eliasson, this affinity with nature can be traced back to his childhood in Iceland. The connection to nature reflected in Eliasson’s work mirrors the varied environments that formed the landscape of his childhood. In his work, Eliasson explores the idea of nature as a construction and as a tool, manipulating and replicating natural phenomena in a manner that often positions him as “The Grand Designer”, with supreme power over nature. However, it can be argued that these costly projects, such as the $15 million New York City Waterfalls,  

“New York City Waterfalls”

30-40 m high structures created using scaffolding, pumps, and hoses, exhibit no deeper meaning or self-expression, and are simply tributes to Eliasson’s technical prowess and ability to create spectacles to be marveled at by the public. In fact, the New York City Waterfalls resulted ingreenery along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade becoming damaged due to the saltwater blown into the parks, and local small businesses were also impacted by a loss of customers and the damage to flora, although the project was in fact predicted to generate up to $55 million for the local economy.

Critics of such grandiose works fear that Eliasson’s projects could mark a paradigm shift of art becoming indistinguishable from experiences designed purely for commercial gain, driven by the artist’s desire for reputation and the potential benefits available to investors in such projects. When describing the New York City Waterfall project, Eliasson explained that the scale of this undertaking was intended to empower the audience with a sense of scale and understanding of their own physicality and their place in the world by comparison.

This fascination with exploring and understanding space began in Eliasson’s teenage years, where he would contemplate physicality through performance. He later expanded this phenomenological approach to his understanding of the human experience after studying the work of the phenomenologist philosophers, especially Edmund Husserl who emphasised the individual’s experience of reality, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who espoused the idea of the body being the primary medium for perceiving and comprehending the world around us. 

These formative experiences each had a major impact on Eliasson’s work, as nature, space and motion, and perception are constant themes of his work, and can be seen working in unison in 2014’s Big Bang Fountain. 

“Big Bang Fountain”

The project consisted of dyed-blue water being pumped upwards in short bursts and illuminated by a strobe light while midair. The strobe light presents a snapshot  of the water at the peak of its trajectory, imprinting the image on the viewer’s mind, while the pitch-black backdrop creates a sense of immeasurable space and an environment for the flashing images to achieve maximum impact. The process employed by this seemingly meaningless spectacle in fact reflects Eliasson’s youth as a dancer, where he would consider how the use of light could alter the way in which the audience would perceive his movements and measure space in relation to the stage and his actions.  Although the origin of this concept is not visible in the work itself, it represents the autobiographical nature seen in Eliasson’s offerings, and can be said to hold meaning by subtly charting his evolution as an artist.

Eliasson further explores space in his publication, Your House. Eliasson’s book presents us with a laser-cut impression of his Copenhagen residence, using negative space to guide readers on a tour through his home. This experience creates a physical and mental narrative without the use of text or images, where space and time are placed into the hands of the audience. A similar experience can be explored in J. Meejin Yoon’s Absence, 

“Your House”

“Absence”

where the reader leafs through the cardboard pages of a book, observing shapes that slowly form what is revealed only at the end of the book to be the site of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Yoon uses this form to create an experience with a powerful emotional impact that leads to continued thought and discussion long after the final page has been turned, turning a major world event into a tangible object that facilitates a personal journey of discovery. The stark contrast between this work and Eliasson’s Your House raises an important question regarding Eliasson’s works: When possessing such technical ability and creativity, should one not endeavor to utilize it in order to inspire discourse and deeper thought? One might flick through Your House and appreciate the instant gratitude of its masterful design, but this quickly-consumed experience ends and is forgotten after the reader reaches the end, whereas an experience such as Absence exhibits similar technical prowess, but with a weight that taps into deeper emotions we can all relate to.

On the topic of meaning, Eliasson has said “I don’t have the normal sculptural problems – wrestling with expression and so on. I find myself essentially uninteresting. I don’t have anything to say, either.” From this comment, it becomes apparent that Eliasson tends to distance himself from the school of artists who associate their art with wider issues, however, glimpses of deeper meaning can be found in some of his pieces.

For example, a project of his where space and physicality meet to reflect deeper meaning in a historical content is the project Din blind passage,  

     “Din blind passage”

where visitors are blinded by brightly illuminated fog, and must rely on other senses to navigate through a long passage of changing hues. Eliasson commented that the initial inspiration for this piece came from seeing footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, spurring a desire to use sensory deprivation through a combination of light and fog to emulate the journey into an unknown future.

Eliasson is also known for raising awareness on environmental issues. His Ice Watch project involved transporting 12 icebergs from a fjord outside Nuuk in Greenland to prominent public locations, where they were arranged in a clock-like formation and slowly left to melt, in order to demonstrate the effects of climate change. The third version of Ice Watch consisted of 24 icebergs being placed in front of the Tate Modern from 11 December 2018 to 2 January 2019, with another 6 being placed outside Bloomberg’s European headquarters. The project was criticized by some for its financial cost and the impact it had on the Nuuk region, however, environmental NGO Julie’s Bicycle has stated that the impact was similar to that of two London classes taking a school trip to Greenland, but with farther-reaching potential to raise awareness to this issue. 

       “Ice Watch”

In summary, although it is clear the work of Olafur Eliasson is rarely personal, instead centering on the audience’s experience and participation, it cannot be said that his offerings are devoid of wider social implications. As a prominent member of the Social Practice movement, Eliasson’s work engages his audience on political, environmental, and cultural fronts, perhaps not as works of an individual’s self-expression, but as the self-expression of an entire generation, social group, or ideology — a concept I seek to develop in my own work. In my practice, I aim to channel my sense of self into a broader form of social expression capable of tapping into what it is about the human experience that truly connects us to one another, such as in my recent project, Navigators, which presents the audience with contrasting images that prompt questions related to the concepts of nature versus nurture, systems of oppression, and dehumanization, while reserving enough ambiguity to stimulate debate on further topics.   

“Navigators”

With regards to the question of whether Eliasson’s works can in fact be considered as meaningful works of art or merely engaging scientific experiments, I believe that his art both holds meaning, and generates meaning, inspiring new perspectives, original points of discussion and promoting creative thinking with the power to change the way we perceive and experience the constructed social systems and the natural environment around us.

One way to understand the meaning to be derived from work of this nature is through Arnold Berleant’s concept of aesthetic engagement. Berleant espoused that “aesthetic appreciation is active perceptual engagement… always with a perceptual focus.” Eliasson presents his audience with art that requires active participation, through which unique meaning can be derived. By becoming an integral part of Eliasson’s artwork, the audience develops their own appreciation and understanding of it that is “perceptually active, direct, and intimate,” conveying a meaning that is not innate in the artwork itself, nor in the pre-existing experiences or perceptions or the audience, but one that is created through the audience’s process of interaction with it. It is this interactive, intimate aspect, capable of transcending external social constraints that inspires my own direction and resonates with my own voice as an artist.

Bibliography

Bedford, Christopher. 2008. ‘Olafur Eliasson. San Francisco, New York and Dallas’, The Burlington Magazine, 150.1260: 214–15

Berleant, Arnold. 2016. Aesthetics beyond the Arts: New and Recent Essays (London: Taylor & Francis)

Fernandez, Manny. 2008. ‘Waterfalls Exit, but with Unintended Impact’, The New York Times [accessed 6 January 2020]

Godfrey, Mark, Ólafur Elíasson, Tate Modern (Gallery), and Museo Guggenheim Bilbao. 2019. Olafur Eliasson : In Real Life (London: Tate Publishing)

‘Ice Watch London – Julie’s Bicycle’. 2019. Julie’s Bicycle <https://juliesbicycle.com/resource_hub/ice-watch-london-2018&gt; [accessed 6 January 2020]

Kuntzman, Gersh. 2008. ‘Victory! Taps Tightened on Tree-Killing “Waterfalls” – Brooklyn Paper’, Brooklyn Paper <https://www.brooklynpaper.com/victory-taps-tightened-on-tree-killing-waterfalls-2&gt; [accessed 6 January 2020]

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2013. Phenomenology of Perception (London: Taylor & Francis)

Bessing, Joachim. ‘OLAFUR ELIASSON: Experiencing Space – 032c’. [n.d.]. 032C.Com <https://032c.com/experiencing-space-olafur-eliasson/&gt; [accessed 6 January 2020]

‘Studio Olafur Eliasson’. [n.d.]. Olafureliasson.Net <https://olafureliasson.net/studio&gt; [accessed 6 January 2020]

Eliasson, Olafur. Unspoken Spaces: Studio Olafur Eliasson. 2016. (London: Thames & Hudson)

Vogel, Carol. 2008. ‘Waterfalls for New York City’s Waterfront’, The New York Times [accessed 6 January 2020]

Berleant, Arnold. ‘What Is Aesthetic Engagement?’ [n.d.]. Contempaesthetics.Org <https://contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/pages/article.php?articleID=684&gt; [accessed 6 January 2020]

Zarin, Cynthia. 2006. ‘Seeing Things’, The New Yorker (The New Yorker) [accessed 6 January 2020]

Zeldes, Jason. 2017. Abstract: The Art of Design, Olafur Eliasson: The Design of Art (US: Netflix)

The inspiration of this project is the idea of “Domestication”, “Domestication” refers to a biological gradually by another organism utilization and control of the process. The purpose of domestication of animals and plants has gradually transitioned from food sources to entertainment, viewing and companionship. 

In this project I aim to explore the companionship between human and plant.

I created a device that allows plants to be humanised and communicate with people via social networking and sound technology according to their water needs. The language used in the messages can be personalized to suit the type of plant, and each plant had a ‘voice’ to match the plant type, such as Scottish Moss, which had a Scottish accent.

The device is made of soil-moisture sensors that are connected to a circuit board, sound devices, and Arduino Yun. They measure the level of moisture in the plant’s soil and transmit a signal to Arduino Yun and the sound device according to a specific threshold. This results in a 140-character text message expressing the plant’s needs which can be shared  to their network of friends on Twitter. 

This project is a performance of me in Tate Modern respond to artist Roelof Louw’s work “ Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) 1967 ”. The artist passed away in 2017, but his work continue exhibiting in the form of fresh, alive object. In this project I’m both the audience and the artist, I aim to respond as a reverse of time through change the form of the existing work and question about the “interactive” relationship between artist and viewer.

In order to respond I brought oranges on last day of the exhibition when there was no oranges left but an empty groundsheet, placed the oranges in a micro version of “ pyramid of orange ” and invite each viewers to take one of them till they are all gone.

I went to visit the exhibition: Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) in Tate modern, The work is initially made up of about 5,800 oranges but as viewers are invited, if they so choose, to take one orange from the stack, the structure gradually dwindles and changes form. 

Although there is one artist’s exhibition copy, this cannot be sold to or acquired by any other collection, so Tate’s work is in effect unique. The work was first exhibited for two weeks in the exhibition The Orange Pyramid Show at the Arts Lab in London in October 1967, following an open submission for exhibition proposals from artists.

The pyramidal form adopted by Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) is the manner in which oranges might usually be stacked in a greengrocer’s display. At five foot six inches square, the dimensions of the pyramid’s square base evoke human proportions. The final structure is both rationally arrived at and ordered, and yet evokes a sense of collapse or dynamic change. Left untouched, the material of the sculpture – the oranges – would, over time, putrefy and disintegrate even without the intervention of visitors helping themselves to the fruit. However, the stack of oranges is also an open invitation that encourages another form of organic disruption, as viewers remove one orange at a time. 

This piece also reminds me of a recent fruit related art work:  “Comedian“, by artist Maurizio Cattelan.

“A banana duct-taped to a wall” and “5800 oranges” are both using similar form as questioning through a none skillful way and using fruit as media.

Fruit as one of the most common element in art I would like to do a further research about the relationship between contemporary art and fruit.

Olafur Eliasson is a Danish-Icelandic artist who has risen to fame for his often epic-scale installations that primarily use natural elements as their core features or as catalyzing devices. 

I first experienced Eliasson’s work when encountering the piece Your sound galaxy at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing, and instantly noticed how the natural element in this piece, light, acted as the paint, and was processed through the mediums of mirrors and geometry before reaching its canvas. This light also transforms the rigid geometric shapes of the piece into dynamic entities, almost like stars on the brink of imploding, the uncontainable light within them seeping out of every crevice. I instantly felt that the use of light and geometry resonated with techniques and ideas that I had been exploring in my practice. For me, the minimal stark lines of geometric shapes serve as a means of delivering an impactful experience and, when paired with light, an ambiguity is created — an experience that blurs the lines between mathematical perfection and the allure of light’s mystical potential. It is this merging of the artificial and natural I seek to explore in my own work that led to my decision to write about Olafur Eliasson. 

I witnessed further evidence of this methodology in many of the projects and experiments on display at the In Real Life exhibition at the Tate Modern, where natural elements are manipulated or emulated to create an experience for the audience, and the more I investigated into Eliasson’s work, the more I found myself asking “Are Eliasson’s most notable works created primarily for the purpose of creating immersive interactive experiences, or can deeper meaning be derived from them?” This also raises the question of, when perceiving art to be a medium through which self-expression and meaning are conveyed, as many do, can the bulk of Eliasson’s works in fact be considered as meaningful works of art, or are they merely engaging scientific experiments?

Eliasson’s work delves into the fields of philosophy, the natural sciences, mathematics, and psychology, among other disciplines, and he established Studio Olafur Eliasson in Berlin in 1995, a laboratory comprised of over a hundred architects, archivists, craftsmen, specialised technicians, film makers, art historians, and more, all working to push art and design forward through projects, exhibitions, experimentation, and research. The structuring of his work base in this comprehensive, organized and almost business-like manner, as well as Eliasson’s work processes, themes, and the impact he seeks to effect, can be seen as purely evocative and impersonal, and far-removed from the introspective works of other artists and art forms, instead opting for clinical, scientific and detached offerings that demonstrate the technical capabilities and achievements of his research and practice.

That being said, in order to truly determine whether or not Eliasson’s work can be seen as self-expression, we must first take a look at his background and the experiences that have shaped his craft and outlook.

Eliasson grew up in Denmark with his mother and step-father, but would spend summers and holidays in Iceland, visiting his father. The close affinity to nature reflected in Eliasson’s work mirrors the environments of his parents’ native land. In his work, Eliasson explores the idea of nature as a construction and as a tool, manipulating and replicating natural phenomena in a manner that often positions him as “The Grand Designer”, with supreme power over nature. However, it can be argued that these costly projects, such as the $15 million New York City Waterfalls, 30-40 m high structures, created using scaffolding, pumps, and hoses, exhibit no deeper meaning or self-expression, and are simply tributes to Eliasson’s technical prowess and ability to create spectacles to be marveled at by the public. In fact, the New York City Waterfalls resulted intrees and shrubs along the Brooklyn Heights Promenade becoming damaged due to the saltwater blown into the parks, and local small businesses were also impacted by a loss of customers and the damage to flora, although the project was in fact predicted to generate up to $55 million for the local economy.

Critics of such grandiose works fear that Eliasson’s projects could mark a paradigm shift of art becoming indistinguishable from experiences designed purely for commercial gain, driven by the artist’s desire for reputation and the potential benefits available to investors in such projects. When describing the New York City Waterfall project, Eliasson explained that the scale of this undertaking was intended to empower the audience with a sense of scale and understanding of their own physicality and place in the world by comparison.

This concept of exploring and understanding space can be traced back to Eliasson’s teenage years as part of a breakdancing squad, exploring space and physicality through performance. He later expanded this phenomenological approach to his understanding of the human experience after studying the work of the phenomenologist philosophers, especially Edmund Husserl who emphasised the individual’s experience of reality, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who espoused the idea of the body being the primary medium for perceiving and comprehending the world around us. 

These formative experiences each had a major impact on Eliasson’s work, as nature, space and motion, and perception are constant themes of his work, and can be seen working in unison in 2014’s Big Bang Fountain. The project consisted of dyed-blue water being pumped upwards in short bursts and illuminated by a strobe light while midair. The strobe light presents a snapshot of the water at the peak of its trajectory, imprinting the image on the viewer’s mind, while the pitch-black backdrop creates a sense of immeasurable space and an environment for the flashing images to achieve maximum impact. The process employed by this seemingly meaningless spectacle can actually be traced back to Eliasson’s youth as a dancer, where he would contemplate how the use of light could alter the way in which the audience would perceive his movement and measure space in relation to the stage and his movements.  Although the origin of this concept is not visible in the work itself, it represents the autobiographical nature of Eliasson’s offerings, and can be said to hold meaning by subtly charting his evolution as an artist.

Eliasson further explores space in his publication, Your House. Eliasson’s book presents us with a laser-cut impression of his Copenhagen residence, using negative space to guide readers on a tour through his home. This experience creates a physical and mental narrative without the use of text or images, where space and time are placed into the hands of the audience. A similar experience can be explored in J. Meejin Yoon’s Absence, where the reader leafs through the cardboard pages of a book, observing shapes that slowly form what is revealed only at the end of the book to be the site of the World Trade Center’s twin towers. Yoon uses this form to create an experience with a powerful emotional impact that leads to continued thought and discussion long after the final page has been turned, turning a major world event into a tangible object that facilitates a personal journey of discovery. The stark contrast between this work and Eliasson’s Your House raises an important question regarding Eliasson’s works: When possessing such technical ability and creativity, should one not endeavor to utilize it in order to inspire discourse and deeper thought? One might flick through Your House and appreciate the instant gratitude of its masterful design, but this quickly-consumed experience ends and is forgotten after the reader reaches the end, whereas an experience such as Absence exhibits similar technical prowess, but with a weight that remains with the reader forever.

On the topic of meaning, Eliasson has said “I don’t have the normal sculptural problems – wrestling with expression and so on. I find myself essentially uninteresting. I don’t have anything to say, either.” From this comment, it becomes apparent that Eliasson tends to distance himself from the school of artists who associate their art with wider issues, however, glimpses of deeper meaning can be found in some of his pieces.

For example, a project of his where space and physicality meet to reflect deeper meaning in a historical content is the project Din blind passage, where visitors are blinded by brightly illuminated fog, and must rely on other senses to navigate through a long passage of changing hues. Eliasson commented that the initial inspiration for this piece came from seeing footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, spurring a desire to use sensory deprivation through combination of light and fog to emulate the journey into an unknown future.

Eliasson is also known for raising awareness on environmental issues. His Ice Watch project involved transporting 12 icebergs from a fjord outside Nuuk in Greenland to prominent public locations, where they were arranged in a clock-like formation, where they then slowly melted, in order to demonstrate the effects of climate change. The third version of Ice Watch consisted of 24 icebergs being placed in front of the Tate Modern from 11 December 2018 to 2 January 2019, with another 6 being placed outside Bloomberg’s European headquarters. The project was criticized by some for its financial cost and the impact it had on the Nuuk region, however, environmental NGO Julie’s Bicycle has stated that the impact was similar to that of two London classes taking a school trip to Greenland, but with farther-reaching potential to raise awareness to this issue.

In summary, although it is clear the work of Olafur Eliasson is rarely personal to the artist, instead centering on the audience’s experience and participation, it cannot be said that his offerings are completely devoid of wider social implications. But perhaps the best way to understand the true meaning to be derived from Eliasson’s work is best explained by Arnold Berleant’s concept of aesthetic engagement. Berleant espoused that “aesthetic appreciation is active perceptual engagement… always with a perceptual focus.” Eliasson presents his audience with art that requires active participation, through which individual, unique meaning can be derived. By becoming an integral part of Eliasson’s artwork, the audience develops their own appreciation and understanding of it that is “perceptually active, direct, and intimate,” conveying a meaning that is not innate in the artwork itself, nor in the pre-existing experiences or perceptions or the audience, but one that is created through the audience’s process of interaction with Eliasson’s art. 

Synth making with integrated circuit, B470K potentiometer, speaker, lasercut acrylic sheet and cardboard, allow to control the frequency of sound.

Basic synth

progress of making.

Console synth

 Dub siren synth