Becoming Olafur eliasson
The starting point for Becoming is research of an artist. From a “lucky dip” draw, we were given an artist to go and research in groups of three. After drawing, we set to Google the name of Olafur Eliasson, an artist of Icelandic origin who deals with very large installations. With the information, we delivered a presentation to the class, which has been adapted to display better in this booklet.
Presentation growing up
personality
Eliasson was born to Icelandic parents and grew up on a farm in Denmark. The unique terrain in Denmark, and Iceland even more so, informed his interest in nature as artistic material. During the mid 1980’s, he took great pride in break-dancing, becoming the champion of Scandinavia and now considers it his first artworks.
These phrases best describe what we found out about Eliasson as a person. For a high profile artist, he’s the opposite of egotistical, caring only about taking part in exciting experimentations and showing people something new.
He went on to study at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art in Copenhagen between 1989 and 1995, and now teaches there in-between projects.
- Christopher bagley “Mild-mannered” “Finds even success, let alone Celebrity, embarrassing” “He keeps his biography private. He finds writers overemphasise writings on artist’s work”
-Madeleine Grynsztejn “In this increasingly technological era, art often separates us from our bodies and senses. Here is somebody who constantly refuses that, and who constantly returns us to a visceral, present-tense experience.”
WORK
THE WEATHER PROJECT
The Weather project is Eliasson’s most wellknown installation, held in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Museum in London during the summer in 2003. It’s comprised of a semi-circle of 200 micro-filament bulbs, like the ones used in street lamps, reflected in a mirrored ceiling to look like a sun. Fog was also used to make the space feel more “tangible” and human scale. When the exhibition was opened to the public, Eliasson found “the way that people usually interact socially was challenged under these new conditions.” As you can see in these images, people interacted in this space, coming together and making shapes on the floor and watching their movements in the mirrored ceiling above. This is the kind of different social interaction Eliasson is talking about, “People were in the same space, with a feeling of connectivity and community.” After attracting over 1 million visitors, The Tate asked Eliasson if they could extend the exhibition. Surprisingly, he said no as he didn’t want the work to serve as a “horrible” advert for the museum or himself, letting it retain its dignity.
People interacted with each other differently because of the space they were in, removing the “stranger barrier” for a lot of people.
Little sun
Little Sun is a derivative of the Weather Project, which aims to help the 1.6 billion people that have no access to the electric grid. It’s a very low cost, highly efficient source of light when compared to the petrol powered lamps it replaces - 10 times more light, for 1/10th of the price. It also has a solar panel on the back, with 5 hours of sunlight giving 5 hours of power.
eye see you
This project was a collaboration between Eliasson and Louis Vuitton, which served as a bold new way of raising money for charity. Rather than having new products in their 350 store’s windows at Christmas, Louis Vuitton put in Eliasson’s Eye See You lamps. They resemble the pupil of an eye, and reflect whoever is in front of it whilst producing light. After the Christmas period, the lamps were sold and the proceeds went to 121ETHIOPIA.ORG.
“The level cooperation and, somehow, risk, is pretty high because we won’t have any products in our Christmas windows at all.”
The light has been deployed most recently in Ethiopia, where an infrastructure is being built up within the market to sell the light and make it available to as many people as possible. To us, it’s a very simple device - something we have in the back of our phones. But to people who rely on the most basic means to survive, this light is a very valuable tool.
- Yves Carcelle Louis vuitton president
It was also featured in the Tate as a sort of side exhibition - a portion of the museum’s lights were turned off and the visitors looked at the art work with Little Sun as their light source.
Waterfalls
12 1ethiopia.org Not a project, but an initiative. 121ETHIOPIA.ORG is a charity set up by Eliasson and his wife to improve living conditions for orphans in Ethiopia. It’s evident in Little Sun and Eye See You Eliasson cares about community and giving back, that he understands his responsibility to the world around him,“It’s a way to show people that even small things can make a change.”Eliasson and his wife adopted two Ethiopian children, a boy and a girl, who now live with them in Copenhagen.
“It is my hope that 121Ethiopia may encourage people to find their own way of helping to solve the problems that are so real and immediate.” - olafur eliasson
status quo: excerpt from website “According to the UNAIDS report of 2008, the number of Ethiopian children having lost either one or both parents to AIDS is estimated at five million. Due to this illness and the weakening of the traditional family care system caused by general poverty, the growing population of orphans in need of care has drastically increased the number of orphanages, state–run and private, to more than 250 throughout the country. Although supportive and close child–caregiver relationships would meet the orphans’ basic needs for safety, affection, attachment and stimulation, children are only offered food and shelter, while the role of the caregivers is limited to overall supervision, focusing solely on children requiring urgent medical attention. These conditions generate life–long, irremediable damage to the children’s emotional, linguistic, cognitive and physical development.”
Perhaps Eliasson’s biggest installation is Waterfalls, spanning four locations along the East River. It’s an example of Eliasson drawing inspiration from walking through the mountains of Iceland, and using that experience to make work that focuses on our perception of space and distance. He speaks about this project in a TED talk, how cities like Manhattan or New York seem so big to us because that is how they’re portrayed. But when you put a feature like a waterfall there, it suddenly makes the space feel much smaller because water always falls at a constant speed and your body can understand that, and it’s a fantastic way to judge distances.
class activity
Eliasson’s work relies heavily on making the audience becoming a participator. In that vein, we wanted to do the same thing for our presentation by taking an exercise of Eliassons’ and making the class do it. We tweaked his method slightly, to simply draw what they saw in their heads there and then, and not connecting it to a particular person. We also let them use any medium they wanted - Photoshop, drawing, charcoal, paper, pens etc. We got some interesting pieces of work back from that exercise, but unfortunately no pictures of them to show here.
the activity
“Choose a person, older than yourself, you see frequently — not too often by approx once a week or once a month. Maybe one of your grandparents if they are still alive. Every time you meet the chosen person you press your 2 pointing-fingers firmly against your eyes for 10 to 20 seconds until various colours and patterns arise. Try to note or memorize the patterns and colors in connection with the context and repeat the practice every time you meet the chosen person for a as long as possible, minimum 6 months. After minimum 6 months of this practice you can recall the person, virtually by pressing your eyes for a while. In the midst of the colors and pattern a sense of presence of the chosen person arrives even after the chosen person has died.”
research to practice Now it was time to make something of our research. Our new “mini-brief” was to create three ideas for posters that show the values of our researched artist, as well as where we might want to go when it comes to making our own artefact for Becoming. This concept (Fig.1) is an assortment of circles revolving around a sun, like the one in the Weather Project. Around the sun is water, community, and the city keeping out the rest of the natural world. I chose to do it this way because Eliasson brings nature back to domesticated life in the cities. The first digital incarnation (Fig.1) of this got the main idea down, Fig 1. Elements but it just didn’t feel right - the way I had put elements in the circles was wrong as they didn’t fit properly.
summary
Eliasson, from what we can gather, is a very mellow person who loves nature and bringing it to the masses in a way that’s engaging and involving. I particularly like his use of natural substances like light and water as a medium, to me that’s surely the simplest medium to use. As I said before, he doesn’t have the ego of a high profile artist, being very modest and not drawing too much attention to himself and knowing when to know when enough is enough so his work keeps its dignity where others might sell out. I also commend him for his philanthropic initiatives, helping other people less fortunate now that he’s in a position to help. These are the values I found most interesting about Eliasson, and I’m looking forward to bringing some of those into my own work.
With tweaking and re-working, I finished with this design, which feels a lot more self-contained, the elements within the circles are positioned to fit in a way that doesn’t feel forced, and the overall colour scheme is a lot more relaxing.
fig 2. mountains This second idea (Fig.2) didn’t develop from any sketch, I just thought it would be nice composition to show Eliasson walking through the mountains of Iceland and spotting certain things that inspire him - these are represented with glinting sparks on the peaks of some of the mountain tops. In this poster, I wanted to show how Eliasson again draws inspiration from nature, brings it into the domesticated world for the community to enjoy, bringing a feeling of connectivity but also singularity. At the bottom of this though, I left a space for whatever it was I thought I would make for my artifact. In essence then, this design encompasses everything I need it to, it just needed development.
fig 3. nature to city The final poster (Fig.3) finishes off this poster series, combining elements from the previous posters to show everything I need to. Sat at the bottom is a mobile phone, as I think I want to do something involved with mobile for my artifact. Not something generic, but rather to do with the way we use phones and all the things they allow us to do. A lot of the time, we see not just our phones but other devices and material objects, as the be all end all to our happiness and well-being. We spend so much time with our devices thinking that we’re connected, when we could use that time much more effectively for more substantial things. In doing so we block out each other and the world around us. I want to produce an artifact that expresses these thoughts, but I’m not sure what form it will take yet.
mechanics of practice A second set of posters was set around what our aspirations are for the future. We were told to think of the analogy of the Donkey and the stick - the stick slaps the Donkey’s behind to make it move forward to try and get the carrot hanging in front of it. We had to think of what motivates us to get what we strive for. not what you expected? Burgers never look like they do on the menu, and not in a good way. This was a simple illustration to show what you think you’re going to get, and what you end up getting. I want to be the one to give the best work that is the high quality people come to expect, not a damp squib. Corporate My biggest fear is not making it in design. My Dad made it very clear from his 20 year career in working for corporate companies, that it’s miserable work. Having done work experience with him, I found out for myself that it was the same for me, and that was only a two week period. The thought of having to wear a suit, having bosses upon bosses breathing down my neck, pressuring me to work my hardest to “line their own pockets,” as my Dad used to put it. Repetitive Power Point presentations talking about this month’s numbers. Corporate buzzwords - growth, big data, moving forward - just washes over my head while making me feel slightly nauseous that people speak like that. But most of all, the fact that it solely revolves around making money: what a boring and cold motivator that is. take the long way I’ve always wondered why people take the fast route with everything. We don’t ever slow down to the pace of our own breath to take in what else is going on around us. In doing this, we miss so much - sources of inspiration, beauty, humour, or just merely opportunities to sit and think. I don’t want to be like that in my life, and especially with my work. I don’t want to miss those opportunities and block out things that could in turn enhance what I make or how I feel. It might take me a bit longer to finish what I’m making, but in the end I’ll have work that isn’t rushed, and that has gone through some changes and development. This translates into a motorway and country road analogy in this poster. The motorway is busier, has less to look at and is very linear. The country road, on the other hand, has twists and turns, a river, lush green hilly fields growing food and feeding the animals, a waterfall making a fantastic spot to sit and rest. This is the approach I want to apply to my work and life.
Artifact
“The artifacts you create should be rendered in a style and medium that suits your own practical skills, tastes and ambitions.” - Becoming brief
There’s a lot of freedom in that sentence, and it was hard to pin down just one idea. I started with three ideas that I liked that link everything together that I’ve done so far.
weather viewer app This would run on a phone or tablet while it is docked on the desk. The idea is for it to reflect what the weather is doing outside when you might not be able to experience it for yourself. It would be a live representation, reliant on colours and simple shapes to convey the information.
Technically, it’s enough of a piece to be interesting. But the underlying idea isn’t all that interesting when you consider what Eliasson does with his work. And I don’t just want to make an app - that feels a bit unimaginative. Plus, I want to try and get people away from their devices, not back into them.
Question book This book would have phrases and full bleed images, with exercises to do when people use their phone most - when they’re bored. So while waiting in a queue, for example, rather than pull out your phone and scroll an endless news feed, why not look at what the people around you are doing? Simple questions that induce contemplation and thoughtfulness. work mates
Time wasted clock
No suits here, just a small team of people that love what they do and have fun doing it - these are the kinds of people I want to work with. People that have a wide range of skills and get along with each other, and are happy to come into work everyday to make something exciting.
On each minute interval of this clock would tell what could have been done during the same amount of time you’d spend on your phone. So, if someone is on Instagram for 5 minutes, that’s the same amount of time you could have parachuted out of a plane.
don’t rush Another image to illustrate taking the time to make something great rather than mediocre. Being careful with the little details, because they are the unforgettable qualities of a piece of work and really flesh it out and give it life.
The book is the only medium I can think of that is portable, contains a lot of information and gets people away from their phone. Still, who wants to carry around what could be considered a self-help book? I don’t want to tell people what to do, I just want them to be in the world a bit more.
I like this idea the most, it gives context for what we can really do with the time we waste. But it still feels like a self-help tool, and that I’m trying to tell people what to do again - I don’t want that in my work because I don’t know all the answers to the problem.
back to the earth an ad campaign for Earth It’s easy to be satisfied with domesticated life if it’s all we know. We forget that there’s a whole other world to be discovered. “I’m going back to the earth, I’m going back to the earth...” These words have been running through my mind since listening to a new song by Jason Mraz. It couldn’t have come along at a better time than when trying to find a suitable path to take this project down. The song is about slowing down, removing all the distractions we have going off around us and simply going back to nature for a while when we feel stressed. Having been considering a career in brand identity, why not take this opportunity to test whether I can create a brand from scratch?
breakdown
Make something that suits my own practical skills, tastes and ambitions.
I love digital illustration. These can be the medium I present the ads in. Make Earth into a brand.
Promote it through the ad campaign. Make Earth compete on the same playing field as the synthetic things we make. Send the message
Remind people that the Earth is still essential to everything we do, no matter how much we keep it out of our man-made world. Use lyrics from the song to convey this message verbally, and the image to convey it visually.
Life
1 Picking elements
Font
After picking out my favourite elements from two logo ideas, I developed it further so they fit together.
show the benefits
Being in nature is the best way to wind down when life is stressful and going to fast. Appreciation
Through spending time in nature and realising how wonderful it is, people will develop more of a respect for it and want to care for it better.
brand elements
2 combination
Font too tall, making the leaf out of proportion. The leaf fill makes it is distracting as it’s the dominant element.
logo experimentation
3 Refinement
Font shorter, leaf is now hollow with a stroke the same width as the surrounding letters.
4 symbol and slogan
The leaf can stand as it’s own symbol, independent from the logotype when need be. For the ads though, this symbol would work nicely with the campaign slogan underneath it to give it identity.
The brand identity
Even though it’d like to find a way of including every element in nature into the brand identity, I think that would just add complication. I’ve decided to focus on just the most prevalent thing that people think of when they think of Earth and nature - green. By designing just a logo with a couple of variations (like the symbol and slogan) the brand is a lot stronger and recognisable because there’s nothing else to remember. With something like a website or a brochure that has a lot of space to fill, I’d possibly use some kind of patterned background, but nothing too complicated. I like this though, rough around the edges but still clean and simple. The Faustina Font typeface reminds me of ancient cave drawings, as if cave men could write this would be their kind of hand writing, bringing with it this theme of stepping away from our high-tech and synthetic world and into a place that is textured and real.
An example of a texture that could be used to add some subtle detail to something like a website or brochure background.
Song by Jason Mraz The song contains a few lines that really lend themselves to visual representation, and these are highlighted in bold in the lyrics below. Whenever my head starts to hurt, Before it goes from bad to feeling worse, I turn off my phone, I get down low, And put my hand into the dirt, I try to stop the world from moving so fast, Try to get a grip on where I’m at, To simplify this dizzy life, And get my feet in the grass, I’m going back to the earth, I’m going back to the earth, I’m going back to work, I’m going back to the earth, I’m going back, The only explanation for a high rise, Must that everybody wants to get high, Move on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky, The higher we go, the taller we grow, We lose sight of our land below, You can have you place, up in outerspace, Cause my home is where my food is grown, Chorus We are animals, We are wild, We started with a motion at the bottom of the ocean, Now its ringing from the tops of the trees, We are animals, We are wild, And to truly be forgiving we must all get back to living With the land in harmony, I’m going back to the earth, I’m going back to the earth, I’m going back, I listen to the whistle in the wind, Its blending in with the song of the birds, The messages remind me who I am, That I’m a child of the earth, It’s where I found spirituality, It’s in everything that surrounds me, I can’t spell God G-O-D, I spell it N-A-T-U-R-E, Chorus
get your feet in the grass Taking things in order of the song, I started with “Get my feet in the grass.” I choose this line as it’s the simplest metaphor for what the ad campaign is pushing for - getting people’s
minds out of the domesticated and synthetic world and back to nature. So, take off your shoes and socks, step off the plastic floor tiles and get your feet in the grass.
“
back to the earth lyrics
“get my feet in the grass
Don’t lose sight
No matter what we make or how high we build, the Earth is still our foundation. It gives us everything we need to make everything we have, and because of that we’ve built an awful lot. The more and the higher we build, it’s easy to forget about those foundations, and think that what we have made is everything there is. But below us and outside our man-made structures is a whole other world to explore - sights, smells and experiences that are not limited by our materials.
composition
The Earth supports us, like this big old, strong tree. I chose to compose this advert this way to make that clear and suggest that we can climb down from where we’ve separated ourselves to get to the forest floor below.
“
“we lose sight
of our land below
“
You can have your place up in outer space.. Standing on the shoulders of the previous ad is this one, taking further the idea of humans living ever further away from the world. This one has a slightly different message in that it’s about food rather than building things, but is even more important. Food is something that we see as a product - we don’t even think about where it comes from most of the time. Food grows in the ground, it goes through so many different stages to reach us, yet all we have to do is pay for it. What I wanted to show in this image is that even though we live in a man-made world, we still need the Earth for our most basic and vital necessity - food. Not the things that we combine with chemicals in vast factories and wrap in plastic to make them taste nicer and preserve longer, but the food that comes from the sprinkling of seeds to make real, natural and healthy food with the nutrients that keep us alive.
art posters
I was trying to think of ways to show everything I wanted for this image on one sheet, until I came across art posters. This seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment, laying out iconic elements from movies in artistic ways and making new posters out of them. A lot of the ones I have seen manage to show all the information by making the posters very tall and narrow. You end up reading it like a book, from top to bottom as it’s a lot of information to take in, but it’s a refreshing take on posters which are usually a standard size.
“
outer space
cause my home is where my food is grown.
Credit: Marko Manev, Influences Show - Behance. behance.net/gallery/Influences-Show/15103637
in situe
Earlier on, I said I wanted to make Earth compete on the same playing field as all the things we make, and that’s why I chose to do an ad campaign for Earth. It’s a form of communication that we are more than used to, and to win mind-share and spread the word it’s the place where Earth would have to mold itself into our ways so we can understand what is being advertised. To show this in a more literal way, I took an image of Times Square, which is perhaps the place with the biggest concentration of adverts anywhere, and super-imposed Earth’s ads in the scene. Seeing them in this way and in this place is really the biggest test - can they stand out against the rest of the competition in the image? Visually, I think they do. Being in an illustrated style with bright colour and high contrast - I particularly like Outer Space in situ. The one thing that I’m unsure of is the font. Looking at the other adverts, most of them are quite legible at this distance whereas mine aren’t at all. I wonder whether this hindrance would be the same in real life, and of course then you’d also be able to walk closer to the screen and read it clearer. Aside from that, the adverts can stand against the competition well.
iCLOUD.COM View all the ad images on their own and in situ at the Photostream shared at the link below.
Times Square image credit: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/1_times_ square_night_2013.jpg
https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A155Z2WMKGUTs I can also see these in other prevalent advertising spaces, such as on the back of magazines and news papers. Don’t Lose Sight looks great on the back of this magazine, the fact that it’s illustrated is really eye-catching - it’s made me realise that nothing gets drawn by hand anymore. I can imagine all of the images in other places, too, adapted to which ever space their in - bus stops, train stations, in mobile apps, on websites, the list goes on.
The branding elements and slogans could also get distributed around all manor of spaces in the physical world as it grows in popularity. The words stand well on their own even without the illustration. It seems as though the ads can be disassembled into their individual parts and transfer to many different form factors, while retaining their strength and recognisability. Tote bag image credit: http://www.meluba.com/media/catalog/product/ cache/1/image/5e06319eda06f020e43594a9c230 972d/U/C/UCEP70-EP75NAT.jpg
Hoodie image credit: http://images.linnlive.com/aa711f64754ed6292c07f02 1a9d99815/202b3570-0255-4f81-b5f1-e4f5bdc8daa7. jpg
in review what worked
what didn' t
the mini briefs
Becoming
I’m really happy with the direction I ended up taking the project. All of my other preliminary ideas were to tell people that they were doing something wrong, and I didn’t want to come in and say “change your ways, you bad person.” I thought of making something that gets phone addicts out of their phones and back to nature, but that felt like such a negative brief and I wanted to make something a bit more fun and thoughtful. Instead, I suggested that there is another source of happiness and satisfaction outside of the buildings, shops and cities we live in when we get stressed from living life too fast, and thought of a way to communicate that through metaphorical language and image. Approaching advertising in this way made me realise how in-yourface adverts really are and how unimportant some of the products are in contrast to real-world problems.
I wouldn’t say that anything didn’t work, I think I could have fleshed the set of ads even more though. I could have simply taken more of the song lyrics and made more ads to make a set that’s even more well-rounded, making the existing message stronger whilst saying even more.
The “research to practice” and “mechanics of practice” mini-briefs were more useful than I thought they’d be. Research to practice got me to experiment in ways I don’t usually do, in that I don’t tend to develop three ideas so fully. Having done that has made me realise that i shouldn’t settle on one idea so early on and disregard the rest - it sounds like a simple thing but it’s taken until then for me to truly realise.
At the beginning of this brief, I wasn’t really sure which route I would take after researching Eliasson. Thankfully, I was able to identify with some of Eliasson’s values and points of view and incorporate them into my work, as well as draw inspiration from some other sources, like Jason Mraz’s song lyrics. Having the ability to steer the brief to fit my own skill set and ambitions led to an experiment in brand identity and improved my digital illustration skills. More important than that though, is that I’ve made something that will hopefully make people think about an issue greater than what most other advertising campaigns try to sell. If anything, it’s enhanced my views on the problem that I addressed we live life as fast as we can, thinking that taking the fast route is always the best way. But in doing so we miss out on the little things that can really make us happy because they don’t cost us physically or financially. All it takes is a little bit of attention.
It would have also been interesting to actually make a set of physical products out of the adverts as well as super-imposing on photos and making prints. For example, a set of t-shirts, hoodies and tote bags would have been really great. I’d even settle for them being put on the screens in Times Square...
The Mechanics of Practice brief made me look at myself and think about my own future and make something visual out of it, which was strange for me