Olafur Eliasson & Timothy Morton | Artist talk

and in the exhibition upstairs there are lots of things that remind us of nature maybe there are even samples of nature it I thought since there will be no moderator but we can all ask questions I will just ask a first question inspired by the title of yours ecology without nature in its there are we living in an era after nature or what is the nature for you hmm maybe you can start with you hmm we spoke too early for a listen and thank you for laughing hello everybody nice to see you I'm very honored to be here and thank you for having us and everything and it's very simple idea actually which is that um it seems to me that like it's becoming more obvious that non-human beings you know bunny rabbits right but also maybe even rivers mountains possibly even spoons right and other assorted items of cutlery are on the inside of social space right they're part of social space you know there isn't actually this difference between me a human being over here and say a polar bear over there that should now be kind of obvious right and this kind of means something interesting actually which is the social space was was never completely fully thoroughly human in the first place it was always kind of permeated with with non-human beings and these non-human beings have all kinds of influences on arson it's one thing that really struck me about the first work actually is that he sort of allows things that aren't you to have a sort of influence on on you we were sort of talking about that a bit well we yes so as you can hear one of the reasons why I've enjoyed listening to and reading Timothy's Bible voice is because it's almost as if you kind of are working on verbalizing something and you're just about to come find that sentence that kind of coin said right and then it's just like well how would so it's so nice do you say this because it's almost like oh so nice I don't have to like you are expressing it on behalf of me so maybe I hear okay no no I think and I do think that's quite important because it's almost as if you know if we you know when we spoke a year or a while ago you you you said you know work of art is almost like a thought that is sent to you from the future right so it is a none thought thought and then when it arrives at you you kind of think it and you as you just suggested don't necessarily do that alone maybe the work of art is the kind of thinking in part of the thought yeah yeah yeah so and and and and now see that this might get very detailed because we can we could go on okay good but I also think it's important to suggest that making art has I think benefits a bit from the kind of re-evaluation of how does one say say things in a meaningful way and this is why your idea of you know not just reversing the subject of the object like the person looking at a work of art but also just letting that concept be altogether and maybe reconsider what is the contract that we actually have between art and the world and the person or a group of people and this is where we were that's where we were just before yeah it's like we're kind of allowing you know non-human beings in general to kind of touch us you know like Taj like all the different senses of that right like actually physically a fact or the world but also obviously kind of psychologically be moved by right and we're in this really interesting kind of art space now where we're sort of allowing ourselves to be a little bit more maybe naive like from the point of view of a kind of sophisticated modern type person who thinks that they're like above the world I could sort of looking down it it's feels maybe naive but it's naive has actually got a lot of wisdom in it it's got this kind of rich quality to it right and somehow we're sort of allowing ourselves to be a little bit more kind of like that you know like not necessarily postmodern naive you know kind of David Byrne kind of like act still kind of like looking at things slightly funny but like literally allowing yourself to be moved you know I'm like when when I looked at all of his work upstairs I was really kind of like struck by this word kept coming up in my mind of movement you know there's something about the work that's about actual sort of motion you know things are kind of moving you know and it's like a it's a pretty deep philosophical issue actually this question of movement you know some some philosophers are like it doesn't really exist and it's just this thing that sort of happens to things right and but I actually feel like movement is a very deep part of our world you know and like things actually move without being pushed right we sort of know this now from like experiments with very very tiny things like quantum mechanical type experiments right like if you get a tiny tiny mirror that's like really small yet like you can still see it right it's it's not atomic size it's actually visible to the naked eye and you put it in a really cold kind of place really isolated it's still moving even though nothing's pushing it and you can tell because it's emitting infrared right and so this mirror without actually being mechanically pushed is sort of shimmering you know and I get this feeling from all of us work like the actual object that I'm looking at it's like for want of a better word it's sort of alive a little bit right like it's got this kind of shine ring kind of quality I love it I am in such good company yes I am know so hold on to this movement for a second because I would like to also say suggest that you said something like to dare to let yourself be moved and I think there's something you know to actually to disarm yourself and be sort of non defense or non offensive it's you kind of allow yourself to be moved does include a degree of trust or self confidence at least and it's also hard work because you come to a museum and if it is a productive productive type of hospitality in the museum you are being put to work meaning they are not here to consume like eat but you're here to produce right and this does require you to take a certain stand and on disarm yourself and allow yourself to be pushed around like that little thing in the killed room right so you are in fact also just like the works of art could be you are also in there but let me come with an example so one example could be to suggest that you come into a room with some light which in my case happens and then you see your own shadow maybe on the wall and maybe the shadow is of a certain quality that you that's kind of captivates you maybe it has some colors and it's sort of lovely to look at so and then you go like oh that's actually me so first you see the shadow and then the shadow sort of moves and then you you just check it selects you really meet you just do like this with your arm and you see oh yeah it is actually but let's almost that was actually interesting right and then it starts to do other things because you couldn't not to do that there's a number of trust generated things that one has to go through is anybody looking am I alone that only maybe that person is also doing its ok you know if I was a child mmm if I was infantile it was okay it's easy and so on but now what happens I think is excited that suddenly the shadow is what makes you move you know suddenly that you are moving from the perspective of the wall and the wall is moving you it's pushing you right so you have a situation and I still have explained this where the subject is still a quite dominating idea because it started out but we know I think that that if one can expand a little bit on this idea I I think it's very important to suggest that there is a moment in which you are engaging in something in a work of art where you feel that the work of art and it could also be anything else right but I work about is also engaging in you in a way that it is verbalizing on your behalf they thought the unthought thought right what it is some of bringing structure to a feeling that has not yet it has not yet arrived at your consciousness so you feel like oh I know this feeling you say right this is me this is how I feel now I know I just I was working on the feeling ourself fumbling but now because of this I know what I feel so one could say I was reflected by the and I don't know if intentionality or you know the kind of the will of the object the hard work it reflected you and I like this idea of reflection because it it is as if it hosted your feeling and this is such a wonderful experience because you feel well somebody or something and in your case I think this is the thing saw me and I felt seen which means I felt included mm and being included of course makes me feel worthwhile because suddenly you have cause and effect if I do this in any consequences if you disconnected and excluded you can do anything doesn't matter and you feel so now I'm back in the subject and feelings a lot but I'm just saying that the kind of exchange that you have your address term it's something I think a lot about yeah Olaf was talking about playing right he's talking about our you know we allow these beings called children to play right and one of the things we allow them to do is to imagine that like non-human beings are animated you know like they can talk like bunny rabbits can can talk and bears can like walk up and down staircases and stuff and you know like somehow we kind of need more of that in our world and I also believe that that's actually more kind of like correct actually it's more logical to think that way funnily enough but if you don't have five hours for me to kind of prove this kind of thing if you've got five hours I will um just kind of just trust me for a minute you know that I have a PhD just sorta trust me over here for a minute let's say that and thank you for laughing really sorry it's good for you good for my ego and you know play like play animals playwright human beings don't just play animals play and I'm talking about this little mirror is also kind of playing right but like when your cat gives you what is called a nip right it's like a kind of playful bite right the car is sort of saying something weird the cat is saying this is a bite and this is not a bite at the same time right so like playing involves allowing yourself to be contradictory a little bit right like it's like how an object isn't necessarily just this lump right it's already got some kind of mojo to it and we've been in this kind of philosophical social kind of ecologically destructive space for a while where we've been thinking to ourselves that we the fantastic humans get to format things just how we like right and out of us pointing out that actually like before you have that kind of format kind of fantasy there is this thing already kind of and it's not just this kind of pre-formatted lump of blair you know it's it's a yellow rum it's yellow it's a room it's it's a big you know it has the a size right and you go in this run and you are flooded with yellow you know and and urine or you're in the world of yellow you know you're in that kind of gravitational field of that color right um and from there you start to think and act and all that stuff it seems so obvious doesn't it like but it's somehow we've kind of convinced ourselves that that's not correct you know but the trouble is that believing believing believing really strongly that that's not correct is carnival actually goes against reality and is in fact part of being ecologically very destructive you know so kind of how do we restart what was quite obvious to people in the kind of Paleolithic kind of dream time space how do we restart that because I think it's perfectly possible to restart it because I think we never really left I think we've just been kind of telling ourselves that we're not that for a while right and now you're all thinking oh my god he's a primitive esteem on --ts us to go back to the sort of Stone Age and Club each other with crudely fashioned bits of wood and all that and stuff and iPhones should be thrown away and no no no no wrong right like you can have like LED lighting you know in this in this world right it's perfectly possible so in that yellow room I was with Tim in there and you went all buttery hmm and there was this other chap with like I was actually a photographer and he he was closer to death so you wouldn't know at the beginning of things mm-hmm he was like no moto at the end mmm but I went with - I went opted for Tim's version but the point I guess is that it was still a success the discrepancy between the two of you mm-hmm including myself was hosted with some success the yellow room fell Varrick felt very comfortable having you in it you could say and it somehow did not seem to bother that you were not in sync on how and what and why you were seeing things yeah and that I thought was interesting because maybe that is also what I think forms a societal platform you don't have to be the same and agree in order to share me of course we think that our society and democracy and the Parliament for instance here in town on the league stein is about that right you don't agree but you share space until great extent in delta t also work right don't but you have a lot of populism where people say well if you don't agree I don't think you're really welcome here you should probably if you're also not the same and don't agree then you're definitely not working you should just leave like this is also very sort of agreeing and like coming the environment in which we're sitting here and you know how they listen the strength to hold discrepancy is a lovely I think muscle of the cultural institution and one could say that it's an aspect of what I why I call the reality they show reality machines the insights machine because I think that's reality production it's not the me you know it's not the day it's not the disagreeing it's the sharing without agreeing mmm just being together without being the same which I find fascinating of course I was curious to see you you know all butter with the butter it's a lovely it's lovely very liberating and I'm all for that for somebody but maybe the movement part I mean we do if you don't mind me jumping back and shut it down it's a movement right so I think it's lovely when you went and I use that when I work often I think of movement as a kind of co-creator of how we see things in which we tend to lend all the sort of legal what's driving rough stuff to the way we see things so cognition is overrated so now that was a nice area mmm yeah but so so so anyway the point being that you know when we walk we actually shape the perspective on the scene things so a good example is especially if you walk in in nature such as in Sweden you have a bit of nature and in it and of course in Iceland this I always talk about Iceland but the point is so you have a landscape in front of you and being away and you call it nature cultures so then there's two mountains and and and you look at the mountains you go like I wonder whether this is now a two hours or two days two weeks away so that's not a that's not a green land where you say like two weeks you can you know in Greenland you can't really see any go that my god it's that rock a big rock or small rock you know but once you start to move you realize oh the rock is not moving at all that's going to take me like the whole day to go there and you thought it was just what he just didn't have this case so it was the walking that allowed for scale to would you say guru you know sort of come mmm and it's funny because you feel that in your body you walk or the two mountains right so one month nicely comes quietly comes closer the other one stays in the horizon which means oh it's actually a small mountain and a big one the big mountain is very far away this small mountain and so on and so forth right and the walking it is as if the mountain or the landscape is in fact giving you your body back so that is a you know so it is it is through the movement that we know that we are there with man I think one of the works is probably called something like we only see things when we move buzzing oh it's maybe more you see I only see things when I don't know it I think it's we probably yeah so it is the one with all the glasses and and and how do we know that we are there if we don't move because everything becomes sort of two-dimensional this was actually the sound so abstract but I'm quite serious because it's not you know I love that I love the labyrinth mmm the kind of color of maze being lost losing yourself do I exist finding yourself recalibrating your navigational composites and that feeling it was that now the labyrinth pushing you do not I mean and and it's an interesting argument out of that also in Denmark in Aarhus cos tan sitting order their leaders they are there's the rainbow panorama on the top of the Argos Museum this experience around glass corridor with colors if you don't move the color doesn't change to see it with your feet and you know you kind of don't think about this is sort of difficult element but if you walk you can feel oh I see now it gets blue I had you not walked and so so I'm just saying the cognitive and the physical all you see the somatic knowledge our Muslim memory or however we call it this is really a intrinsic part of this yeah there's no doubt right like and it's also a good job that Olaf would give the titles and not me right because if instead of like you can only see things by moving it would be something like you can only think in the tree section of the supermarket or something like that like it try-try having an idea in in the void right I'd like this whole idea that we're disembodied minds like kind of floating in some kind of void space right that's actually like the worst way to actually have an idea what is this telling us this is telling us the thinking like everything else is kind of physical right like thoughts are almost like physical beings like people who have schizophrenia have a point in a way that kind of thoughts are like aliens almost like living in your head you know we've now got this idea of memes right and sort of tweets and all that kind of kind of give that away yeah and you know how to think right like speaking is really based on listening right like music is really kind of listening like thinking is really kind of attuning like before you have an idea you need to tune to something right and in order to tune to something something has to be tuning to you right so I feel like Olaf is helping us to have a very kind of free kind of democratic freedom type of a space right in many different ways because the point is what kind of tune what kind of tuning do you want right like we you don't have to accept one particular one size fits all right that's another issue with this concept of nature right is this kind of one-size-fits-all umbrella space that we've all accepted as real right but like let's have a different umbrella why not let's have 20 umbrellas right let's have a yellow room and a purple roman all right um and in in those rooms that all kinds of things can happen right like I can become all soft and and gooey because I kind of enjoy that sensation of being of being flooded you know but if you got out on the wrong side of the bed you might also feel really overwhelmed like you're being crushed or depressed or literally depressed right and I have depression so I understand that right um so the point is some thoughts and sensations and feelings are enabled by other beings right and it's it's so lucky that we've got arms and legs and like eyes and stuff otherwise would be totally song no it's so I am I'm so the physicality of it is interesting it's also I think when we are when because what I said before one where you feel that you have been seen oh yeah do you see there is a difference between being seen on the on behalf of something and being seen on the expense of something right and I don't know I think I mentioned it the other day too but you know so so I mean I think culture generally speaking a succeeds so high extent you know reflecting people's emotional need we could see now this is generalizing as a little unfair but you know without doing it on the expense of things on anybody and very interesting whereas we could consider that maybe what we call a market economy that I'm still not against but we maybe fail to fully understand that very often been afraid reflect our let's say social like so emotional need and it does how much like my juicer is exactly what I desperately need this jacket right but it very often happens on the expense if not somebody than something right so there's a different conspicuous sort of contract where there's an element of exclusion because are you got that then the other person did not get it he's also not this in any way right so he's not welcome right so so whereas culture and I just think that as a reality machine and the gooeyness of it and how you you know are being pushed and how you push you know the kind of inclusive prospect of I should say well you feel that it you were reflected at no cost it's very interesting it's very it's very exhaustive I to say the work that was existential right but he was that whole thing about not having free will Tim oh sure yeah get it oh yeah this is Ken lay it on me baby um you know like my friend Graham in a Graham Holman and said this phrase once and it really stuck in my head for some reason freewill is overrated you know this idea that we kind of acting in some kind of void again it's kind of overrated like in order to do that there have to be all these other things going on you know you have to have a world right you have to have an arm bone that's connected to the leg bone and the leg bones connected to the foot bone and the foot bones connected to the floor bone and the floor bones connected to the city bone and the city bones connected to the toxic waste dump bone and the toxic waste dump bones connected to the geopolitical problem bone right and I'm in a hell of a mess right and like kind of you know now that we know that right what do we want like what do we want to make right like that's kind of like the inspiration like it that I get from AFER's work right it's sort of like becoming more conscious of the fact that we don't just kind of make decisions in a void or meters we don't get to push stuff around exactly how we want right stuff kind of a little bit pushes us right like this is a scary thing I'm going to say okay I'm going to say that ready I'm going to say that like there are some ecological chemicals in consumerism that sounds really heretical doesn't it cause most ecological people like Oh consumerism bad right but the thing about consumerism is like for a start that the Pope isn't telling you to drink the coke rather than the Pepsi right like otherwise they're going to kill you right that's like a futile thing right like you should only drink coke otherwise the you're an evil person I'm going to chop your head off you know that's not so great right and furthermore is it you who's deciding to drink the coke or is the coke kind of like we all kind of know because of advertising but it's not just because of that right like anybody who's ever drunk something with alcohol in it possibly lately like how to drink a glass of wine kind of depends on the wine right they we all can't know secretly that there's a right way to take the drug right like there's a correct way to put it together and like inject smoke drink like this is how you hold the glass this is how you should pour the thing you should let it breathe all that kind of stuff and it's almost like the substance itself is telling you how to use it like an Alice in Wonderland where there are these little bottles going to drink me eat me that kind of thing so like there's something about that like where you are at least relating to one thing that isn't you in the way of kind of listening to it right and of course you know we have this kind of very kind of like toxic aspect of consumer culture with it which is that we can do anything to anything right like just do it you know other kind of Microsoft kind of where do you want to go today kind of thing right but then like the flip side of it is you know kind of allowing things to effect right like this is how you hold the coke bottle right this is how you hold the door this is how you play a violin so it doesn't sound like a cat being torn you know like that right like so kind of wheat into things and we let things toon us and kind of freewill is overrated actually and it's something that we've learned funnily enough through I would argue very provocatively please don't shoot me I am really am a little bit left-wing honest something like consumerism actually and so like when we're totally anti product anti-consumerist aunty that kind of stuff we might also be throwing away the ecological awareness baby with the kind of commodity culture bathwater you know that's a bit weird I know I've shot up now so we can also see that the cultural institutions in which I was working on I've been working in but also for so so many years now and I've been fortunate to work with several people here at the museum also before and so on at some point they were pretty repetitive nature of what are the institutions do in society also becomes a bit predictable so obviously it's very excited to have kind of a new sort of River venue it's a kind of a different voice a tool a new tool in the toolbox to not to lose you to it I'm happy to be a tool and it's all official oxygen because I guess the issue here is like that that there is commodification and you know kind of consumerism everywhere like inside and then you go out and then you're not in it anymore it's like everywhere and and the question is how to make that transparent into to what extent do we expect that thinking about it will do the job does that type of inspiration is really not the right word but that type of discussion come from the works and the shoulders and the institutional skeletons the bones and I sometimes I had a little punchline seeping up to me but I had to do with the confidence or trust I lost the punchline I'm sorry yeah what kind of like how you know thinking is thinking about stuff is not the only option right like the like like thinking also is a little overrated said the guy who taught at a university for a job oh dear do you we're going to cut this bit out you know don't play it to my job they'll like fire me or something but you know thinking about an idea and like handling a bottle or walking into a room right allowing yourself to be touched right all these things are kind of much more similar to each other than we think right it's not that there's this hierarchy right like we've been trained because of like Western philosophy to think that there's this hierarchy and obviously like I'm fascinated by this shadow thing that Olaf is talking about at the beginning right the sort of seeing your shadow and Dancing with it because clearly that's what was going on in all of those caves with those cave paintings right and clearly that's also what's going on in the very famous philosophy cave which is Plato's cave right and the whole idea of Plato's cave is you're stuck in this horrible matrix illusion and the whole point is you have to unplug from the cave and leave and then you'll see the truth see see see right instead of like being this kind of warm dark physical kinda kinesthetic that's the right word sort of space right and some but even Plato is actually saying when you leave that cave and you see the truth it you go blind right you can't even see that right and in order to see you have to get up from your seat where you're kind of locked in right because it's kind of like a cinema where you have to watch this movie kind of thing and to do that you have to kind of turn right so there's a lot of physical movement that has actually has to happen in order to even see the truth even for the guy who's dissing the shadows right that's the point put that in your pipe and smoke it that's great we can we can continue like this we have been having a lovely few days hanging out here at the Museum with Tim so my desire is really to see to what extent does this success of reinventing itself come from within the cultural institution you know with the artists with the systems and so on because as I as I see it the potential obviously lays in suggesting that the world would be worse off without the cultural institutions but now we just need the world to know or agree with that concept because as I as I suggest that an exhibition like this can be called reality machines it's because I think there is more reality verbalise able or not quantifiable or not going on in a you know a sort of exchange with art than there is in many other exchanges and in that sense there is a lovely I think you know this sort of the agency of public space formative 'ti of public space there's just so much generosity in the way that we share and we go in and we see all the people there there and there there's like a kind of a person with a stroller here in stock owns all the lists every room has a person with a caddy with a stroll in the room and so so there's that whole you know it's like so incredibly it has so much potential and now of course I always have standing to go answer that with me away I just asked him to answer so how and what do we do to kind of push it further and obviously the artists I would say also I think the artist always has to the answer to everything but the other point is that it and it's actually not the artist is the art let me just give it a small example again and as you start least you two spoke about an idea and I love the idea that an idea does not come from you know hand it down from somewhere like this it comes out of friction I said come on I've got it oh that was really exhausting oh I got an idea mm-hmm that's that's how you get ideas you don't actually just sit and wait and there is no there's sadly I mean I wish there was instead it means that they're hard work to get an idea but sometimes the idea is like really lovely and has taken the shape of into it intuitive or yourself none it's not really verbalizing it's very hard to draw this is like a feeling maybe and then you know the first step is to how to take that idea and turn it into action that's an import maybe this can be a topic sort of turning thinking to doing a type of before we maybe take a question mm-hmm but so you have an idea and we all know this feeling and we also all know that we live in a society when you say you have an idea everybody thinks that this person has almost done it or has kind of done and he spoke about it that's probably what is it Twitter you know I tweeted my idea that's like already done right so so so in a museum that's not how it works you can't really sort of you have to work you have to kind of look at the bloody broker painting for a while before you see all the kids in the snow do you know mm-hmm so the thing here is you have an idea and to move it ahead giver it can be quite comfortable to it ask that whether they come from right that means so so where is the idea actually sitting in me right it's in my arm so I said oh why is it in my house because this is that right so you could take that therapeutic approach to see if you go maybe it's a kind of more contemplative a problem making a rule using oath is in my belly and then I can move it around a bit mmm not to be non contemplative but certain anyway ideas they come from places that was my point and then you can maybe make a sketch and maybe make many sketches this is so liberating equally oh bloody hell it's a you know the ideas actually then you make a drawing a promontory and you sort of feel you call people you called that Hart Daniel I'm doing this crazy drawing here how are you one then you make a little model then the model actually you try it out in would you make it bigger you have half scale oh it's already big enough it's actually full scale so kind of negotiate so gradually the idea is it sort of takes on the action jacket it becomes it's not like action at the end it's saying it is action already then the idea was actually already a trajectory from the brush like a movement right so now of course the old historians who is still not of course but we argue with this idea they think the whole creativity is we is within that little exchange of of kind of in this little as hands to say in this little noodling of a conundrum that no but I would then suggest to to follow your school their thinking or not but but you know that the creativity lays in the consequences this work has onto the world some funnily enough what makes it creative is what it does to the surroundings right now that is where I think the potential of a museum probably will be that the success of a let's call it a museological muscle display ideology the reach action is obviously not within Museum alone I would like to think there's something in the museum as well but it is in the way it is in the success of what the museum does to society and one society does to the museum and the kind of and and and of course then the next mistake is that we think the work is done once it's done and then I sent it to younger and exhibited but let's just still on a journey because really the work itself is just stuff yeah right and then it goes on by itself doing things to people pushing them as you explain yeah well you know what you're talking about there is how you know we we think to ourselves you know or at least we tell ourselves quite a lot you know that art is kind of decoration right and in university world you actually feel like if you do humanistic stuff like I do or art right your job for some reason is to provide nice tasting or looking candy on top of these really boring dull cupcakes of reality that have been made by some kind of scientistic I didn't say scientific I said scientistic factoid type person right and you know and so you apply for a grant and I so please give me some money to decorate with my pathetic little human candy this little cupcake that we all know doesn't really need these decorations please don't hurt me I really should be fired and give me a thousand dollars for turning you that English literature is actually shared you know that kind of cynical reason approach right is gone right it's impossible it's not logical and it's certainly not ecological right and what Olaf is talking about is that when you do art actually what's actually happening is you're directly tampering with cause and effect which is why some philosophers hate it because they're like oh my god I was affected by something without me intending to be that must be evil I must be experiencing evil now all should be bound it's evil because it does something to me that I don't think I need you know that kind of thing right and so you know they're they're kind of telling the truth right which is that art is kind of like a shamanic magical thing and actually that's because causality is a kind of Manek magical thing and a reality machine is a is a device that helps you to see that and that actually does that right and I have the good or bad make of it what you will fortune of living in the good old US of a right and in 2005 was like one of the worst points of my life when there was this press conference and a bush administration official at the height of the Iraq war said we create realities that's our job and your job is to study them he was talking to the journalist but you might as well be talking to like the art critics or the English literature professors or the Philosopher's or whatever right or the all or indeed the artists you know your job is to study them and you'll study them in your way but you know by the time you finished we would have created a new reality for you to study and it's like wow what what an oppressive thing that was to here that was terrifying right and what Olaf is pointing out is that that's not correct we're all doing that right now and not only are we doing it but like cameras are doing it chairs are doing it LED displays are doing it everything's kind of like acting right and our job is to kind of allow more and more and more awareness of that fact because more and more awareness of that fact equals more non-violence and less Iraq war it's fantastic that's so amazing yeah now maybe one last thing so talking about that type of home you know the policy sector openness of that sector so I'm currently working on a work of art a closer to ecology than I love the other well not really but so two days ago we got now yesterday I got an email from a coupie Kleist in Greenland who was actually a former prime minister now out of job he runs a little fishing industry where he fish eyes are phone ecologically friendly English so I called him said listen Kubek we need like you know 100 maybe 200 tons of inland eyes Finland maybe from the Ilia south glacier that famous glacier this or selphie glacier mm-hmm everybody says of the famous one quick you know the way it breaks off every time breaks off is like the size of Manhattan yeah was really amazing so nevertheless a Kubrick says okay I'll send you the ice so we're working on a protein it's been a bit complex actually Anna who says here is the kind of the sort of the the person heading this incredible undertaking so so on plastic a typo please should you be in Paris in the sort of you and cop21 gathering in a few months but the beginning of December right last time should you be in Paris compile as develop oblique where the sort of next step after the reality machines in good old stock on will be then in Paris's and also also a reality machine and just want to say because what it's about it's obviously that we have a lovely data bundle called a scientific report and this is actually not so bad because with that we have come to learn a lot and so on it's very difficult to understand because it's very much about the brain right when I spoke about walking we spoke about the body and the muscle memory of the the and the relationship between the world and and the muscle so what is exciting I think if you see this eyes that is just so incredibly beautiful also it's also glacier is like so amazing and then if you put your hand on it it really tells you a lot but it's cold it it is cooling you I think it's the right way to say it right and it is also a wet it makes you wet and your hand makes that wet if it's not right already so there's lots of things and it actually is relatively noisy because it goes with all these amazing sounds because it's kind of ooh what am i doing in Paris why is it so different yeah it was nothing like this yesterday and so the ice is like all over the place in a circle like a clock it's called ice watch it's like a little bit of doom and gloom but still is he's beautiful like right and and plaster that I proclick is that what is called is being touched by things when the water runs into well yes eventually into the sin and from the sin into the ocean again and obviously the point being one of the points being well should you have sure you have a hard time getting the data connected from your brain to your body you can hold hands with nice the eyes will tell you a thing or two not unlike the oh I hope not unlike the quality of what happens in some of the spaces upstairs yeah there should be a kind of a iced version of months in a lifetime that should make a kind of video like with it and I found then I find myself behind the wheel of one of those assistance drugs and I ask myself how did I get here you know this is not my beautiful gray blazer you know because ice made the ice has angst as well I don't know I'm not a chunk of ice right but like I think you know there at least there's something like not so different between me being did you hear that incredible sub-base I'm like completely gap mind because of that you know just resolved hi of that there you go maybe that maybe that's just the right way to leave it actually the sound kind of stopped in my mind is this a type of situation where one actually takes questions wait we should do that now yes thank you neuroscientists and the philosopher are currently arguing whether it itself actually exists or not so my question to both of you is what is your relationship to the self or selflessness of the lacquers up I'll do it on revisiting um okay so there's various ways of like thinking that through right and one way is a little bit too familiar to me it's called reductionism right in other words Tim doesn't really exist tim is just a bunch of atoms or tim is just a bunch of associations right or tim is just an effect of some kind of political Tim discourse of some kind right I think that's kind of like whack I also think it's like a little bit violent actually and I don't think that's necessarily what you can learn about what selflessness could be I think it's much more interesting that kind of there is Tim you know like you know trivially like the his time right but he's not your granddaddy's Tim right because like he doesn't have Tim all the way through him have you ever seen this English thing called Brighton Rock it's like this pink peppermint stick right and inside is a word and it says Brighton you know and you suck it and all the way down it says this word right over to the seaside tanner now you can get like swear word right and write it so off drains it man but like that that doesn't happen like night every bit of me doesn't go hey I'm Tim actually it goes hey I'm a bit of a fish and all that kind of stuff right and so actually Tim is kind of like not Tim at the same time so like Tim is kind of open right like the yellow room like how come the yellow room can make one person like dying and another person feel like they're being smeared with a very pleasant substance right like that's because the yellow room isn't completely like solidly I can point to it and hold it in like it's not that kind of it's not your granddaddy's yellow room you know you see me a granddaddy had a yellow room or something like that it's it's it's open right it's open reality is open right so I would prefer to use this would open right like we use a lot of Buddhist terminology in the West now we talk about mindfulness and we talk about self no self when we talk about emptiness and we've got on the wrong end of the stick a lot about that and I think that much better word would be open so you're open self yeah I think I have a when when I started making out I was very interested in dematerializing the object hood assad's and I came out of a trajectory not where where the object was you know the evil thing and the relationship was the good thing and you know not Jeff was just to cater for the market and the relationship was essentially public institutions like this one was we were hoping that they would save it and none cave into the market and all of that right so that's that's how it's tower started luckily there was a financial crisis so it market didn't really have a very strong grip like now so that means I was free to unfold a bit and so but this also introduced this idea well suddenly the self becomes incredibly important because there is no object right so the subject was it was all about the subject I got very excited about phenomenology because then you had this big description of what the subject does and how the subject works and so on thanks to Daniel assess you might know done it in his speciality exercises a degree of phenomenological gymnastics so suddenly having so much subjectivity all over the place it became very important for me to also argue that essentialism and universalism and Toto sort of totalitarian types of ideas of herself would be counterproductive to this idea of the the potential of the search so i I my bro I use this the self as the kind of onion now is that lekanoff ooh cool William brought the onion into the self and it's a onion all these rings so every ring you add range and then you experience a great museum like this with a somewhat successful show for at least the second day and then you have another layer on Union it's the comic museum with the show in it type of onion ring right but if you peel off all the Rings and that I think is quite essential there is no essence it was just the last ring on the inside of course in the beginning this may be also a little bit of other stuff so I'm not just being totally you know boring but essentially I relationship with itself was has been very much about well there is no in the discourse of essentialism self right there's an a there's no need for essentials and yours owes you also have to see to be an artist very often you know put in the same category as God my divinity spirituality as I have constantly this mythology of the artist and so is that quite God you know so close enough right you are certainly above market economy right as I just said myself I'd say put myself all the time there right so so if I lose my pencil there's nobody who's too fine to pick it up very interesting because I'm an artist as the bookkeeper we would do it for other research because it's the book Cuba needs to do the job and so nice personally we live in an empathic society and a charismatic success society yet I think so so now I need to also push the non essential istic argument for the sake of making art into reality machine I need to live with a parklet ism of suggesting but universality is in solution the things that guided art when God was still around essentially has to be pushed away this was my brief encounter with the self so the discussion of the self so we are excited about having three moments so it's a great pause please eyes recorded hello I was just wondering whether the notion or the word aesthetic means anything to you hmm oh yeah I think it does absolutely I love aesthetics in that sense I would never isolate esthetics into a sort of a sort of closed space you know I think we need to we need to deal with the fact that people they take their bloody phones into my exhibition right so I don't know how to come across with an answer to that you know you can actually buy wallpaper that has a thin layer of lead in it so I thought about for this show to actually bring about another budget constraint to the team here saying why don't we first before we paint everything white put this amazing lead paper so that there will be no ready with no phones it would be a sort of a sort of a social media free zone and not to suggest that aesthetics is really only about that but you see the point I think is that the static is is not something external to our actions aesthetics yeah like the degree of success with which we allow ourselves to revisit our self through the pushing and through the negotiation and it's exchange as an undersized on exchanges so so and and so aesthetics for me is really like the success of the paint versus the palm right so you kind of ping-pong with with show and and this is so where as the teacher I went to ask with like 100 years ago they would suggest that the aesthetics was like in the thing over there in the stone and I can see that's not the same thing that you were talking about because they that was like a kind of vibrant type of modern sense allistic like a nostalgia which may be sometimes liberated by knocking on the stone that was essentialism hmm and so statics for me very much lays in them and I and I don't mean to say relational aesthetics but just sounds right like right now if I got time to say something clever and like okay so like aesthetics is where cause and effect actually lives right like we have been telling ourselves for a while like the DS that is the aesthetic dimension right like color taste smell all those sorts of things is a kind of decorative candy on top of some kind of basic mechanical something like lumps just pushing each other right but as we all know you know and now the sound proves it for me again right that there that causality isn't necessarily about things touching right and in fact from a quantum theoretical point of view sorry to get a little bit technical you can't actually touch stuff right like if you were to actually touch the chair your hand would become the chair right your hand would actually go in that chair right that's what touching really is right and so like the aesthetic dimension has all of the qualities that Einstein was scared of about quantum theory he said it was spooky action at a distance and what did he really mean by that he meant that you guys are talking about telekinesis and that's really paranormal and spooky and like down with the paranormal don't mention it don't mention it just not it never talked about it rightly that's what we've been trying to do to ourselves as for the last couple of hundred years right but actually that's how causality really works it is telekinetic just hear that sound it's not here right but it's having some effect right unlike think of the Mona Lisa right the Mona Lisa isn't in this room right now but you visualize the Mona Lisa the Mona Lisa is affecting you non-locally right in in a sort of funny way it's actually like pushing you even though it isn't here right and so this mechanical idea that we have that cause and effect is like these boring cog wheels underneath appearances is completely wrong and the appearance dimension is exactly where the causality lives which is why when you make a work of art you're messing directly with cause and effect and this is actually just perfectly normal straightforward modern philosophy and science delivered by you know a little bit of a freak but whatever there's kind of normal thank you so much everybody you

Channel: Moderna Museet

Views: 12,341

Rating: 4.9223299 out of 5

Keywords: Ólafur Elíasson (Visual Artist), timothy morton, Moderna Museet (Museum), arkdes, verklighetsmaskiner, reality machines, matilda olof-ors

Id: dYht9r9xdA8

Length: 57min 4sec (3424 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 09 2015