[Olafur] I would like to design an experiment with you.
This means that you and I are gonna collaborate and...
for that to happen, it would be great if you could turn off...
any other light than the screen you're looking at.
You could pause the episode here and sort it out,
but think of...
the screen, the TV, as a lamp.
You shouldn't, uh, look at the screen, look at the space around the screen
and pay attention to how you are in that space.
But let's... let's just get started. So, check this out.
First, I'm gonna start by making it yellow.
I like the color yellow,
but see how the room is in fact now yellow.
Enjoy the yellow.
Maybe take a deep breath.
Let's change that color.
Do you see how your room suddenly changed?
Red light makes you more calm, it makes you tired. It relaxes you.
Where, with a certain blue color, you stay awake.
So, every color has a sort of different way of influencing us.
This is what art is about.
You are a co-author with me,
the main protagonist. What you see is quite up to you.
[narrator] Olafur Eliasson:
artist, architect, and design phenom.
[man] In Olafur's work, you first have a "wow,"
and then you have an "aha."
[man 2] Olafur Eliasson is celebrated
for creating immersive spaces and experiences.
[man 3] He's truly an artist who interacts with his environment.
[narrator] Eliasson is an expert in the art of smoke and mirrors.
[woman 1] There is no artist on the planet
operating on a more global scale than Olafur.
[woman 2] To him, changing the world means changing the way we experience the world.
[Olafur] This is my studio in Berlin, and, um...
the studio is really a place where...
I and the team, we work together making art.
I love my studio being exciting and magical
and capable of doing things that otherwise would be hard to do,
because we just play a lot.
It's not rational, it's not pragmatic.
I mean, it's about making art.
So, it's not like walking out of reality into some kind of dream world, right?
You actually walk into the studio
and you see the real world in a microscope.
The mirror is looking to the center at the moment.
Yeah, but that means the mirror is looking to the center
but is on the side of the ball.
-[woman] Yes. -[Olafur] Okay.
I mean, there's so much going on
that you don't really look...
carefully enough.
I think it's maybe more interesting if...
maybe they are connected like this?
Because somehow the baits are taking too much attention.
Okay, great. Let's go on.
Phil? Yeah.
[man] Olafur likes...
different kind of materials,
different way to structure things.
So, that openness lead him to...
a new type of art.
[Olafur] A lot of my work is exploring this notion of...
what we consider truth depends on how you look at it.
We create reality as we go through space.
When you look at a work of art,
it is as if it is looking at you.
You are the one who's being listened to.
My work is completely dependent on the spectator
turning ideas into art.
And that's the same thing with, you know, a Netflix space.
Obviously, we have a situation where somebody's watching, right?
Hello. And then,
I assume there's a kind of a screen.
Maybe it is interesting to explore what these people are actually looking at.
I mean, what's actually going on.
The thing is, this is a constructed situation.
Let me just show you.
See this? This is you... This is you and the camera, right?
Look, it's like I'm surrounded with all these people here.
I mean, what we take for granted...
"Oh, he's talking to the camera," is actually...
I wouldn't say it's manipulated, but, you know,
it's... for sure it's constructed, right?
A little bit like this episode.
[man chuckles]
[woman] Okay, here. Why don't you talk to Mark? Here, hold on a second.
[Olafur] So, when I started, I was really interested in...
what was between the walls.
I mean, that invisible thing, which is, I guess...
I guess it's just air, but how can I just show the nothingness?
So, one of my very first works was an attempt to make a rainbow.
I thought about how is a rainbow made.
But the truth is, there's not much to it.
It's about the angle of the eye, the drop, and the light.
And if there is no eye,
then that angle is not there and then there is no rainbow.
The person next to you doesn't see your rainbow,
because that eye is somewhere else.
This is a space totally dependent on you being there.
When you leave the exhibition, there's nobody in the room.
There's also no art.
It's not about a rainbow, really. It's really about...
"Do I trust my own eyes and my own capacity to...
engage in the world?"
So, why do I make what I make, right?
I grew up in Denmark, and I spent a lot of time...
with my father in Iceland.
And using water, or mist, or light just came natural to me.
And I like referencing the nature in my work.
See if I can film people looking at it.
[woman] Sorry, there's no photography allowed in here.
[Olafur] Okay. Uh, I am, uh, the artist. I'm sure it's okay. Thank you.
Nature became a kind of a way for me
to create a language
which people could relate to.
Because everybody knows a rainbow.
It's a natural phenomena and something very easily accessible.
And because the water is kind of falling, you're suddenly conscious
about time is passing somehow.
That's why I like this waterfall a lot
because it's great to just get a sense of the scale
simply by looking at the speed of the water as it falls.
That's why I took this waterfall and I made it under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Because looking at that
from Manhattan, for instance, you realize,
"Oh, my God. The Brooklyn Bridge is so big...
and the distance across the East River is very long."
And once you know the size of the waterfall,
you also know the size of your own body.
And this is where it gets interesting, right?
It's not so much about the mountain or the landscape and nature and so on,
it's about us.
[woman] Who has the courage
to do something of this scale?
It's enormous.
You have to be so sure in your idea
that you're willing to take that big risk.
And you don't find that that often in artists.
So, the way I always work
is that, obviously, things start with an idea, right?
So, an idea is like... like here, right?
And then, immediately, you have a problem that the idea doesn't have any words.
And there's that lovely, interesting space before you verbalize your idea.
On top of that, the idea comes from somewhere, right?
So, there's something before the idea.
That's an interesting space too, right? Because where do we get ideas from?
I get ideas when I work hard.
Collaboration is very much at the heart of my work.
[woman] This is the work we talked about,
and these are the colors that we ordered.
[Olafur] I need to give the idea language,
and the answer to what language is
is to maybe analyze a little bit,
"Why on earth did I get that idea? Why am I interested in that?"
So, this is the space where I make drawings
because I don't know how to put words on it.
The next step is in the language, right?
I'm very happy to have an amazing team who take the language
and the drawing,
and then we start making models.
I'll just write here, "model."
Oh, it's great.
And these models, they... they kind of give the idea
and the drawing dimensionality. Suddenly, it becomes about space.
And this is actually a work I'm doing for an exhibition in Los Angeles
at, um...
at a... a gallery,
here now, in two months,
which is about smaller works,
things that you can put in your own house.
It needs to be a bit more...
-Like in a lighter... -Right. Yeah, brighter.
-You're right. -Yeah.
[Olafur] My role is to make sure that it's a work of art, and...
what drives every decision is
not how, but why.
The team is trying to come up with a "how,"
so my role is like the...
the "why" person.
Should we bend it back a bit?
Yeah. Take it back a bit.
That's too much.
[man] I remember early on,
Olafur, I visited him in the studio, and he'd installed a light
that I perceived as yellow,
and I only understood gradually
that I didn't see any other colors.
All of a sudden, everything was black and white and gray.
[Olafur] I came across a lamp that takes away all the colors.
And I thought, "Oh, it's a miracle."
So, this is monochromatic light. So, it looks like there is no colors.
I mean, there is in fact no colors here,
because there is no white light to bounce it back onto us.
But have a look at this.
It's the prismatic colors, it's the rainbow.
All the colors are actually there.
One of my very first exhibitions
had a huge yellow room
for people to look at their hands and go like,
"The color's gone."
It turned out that the absence of color
kind of makes you more attentive to everything else.
We kind of see more.
But the museum director said,
"You are not just gonna make an empty, yellow room."
He was, like, on his knees,
"Can't we put just one small red rose on the floor,
so that when you look at it, it's not red anymore?"
And I said, "No,
because then the show is about a red rose."
Though sometimes you get obsessed with "how"
and then you sort of lose sight of why we're doing it.
I kept using the yellow light.
I did a few works with it, which were very minimal.
And when I was working very close with a great curator at the Tate...
I thought of, um...
the weather.
This is now 2003,
and for me, personally, it was where consciousness about the climate started.
But the Weather Project,
to do it was a long process.
Where I actually ended up building a huge model of the space
that I could walk in.
It was very much about, "How can I make
the air, or the void, or the atmosphere
visible?"
And that's how I got to think of fog.
Once you look up,
I wanted to block out the skylight.
And then I decided to have mirrors to make the space appear even bigger.
Then I thought, "Why don't I do just half a sphere, and the other half will be
in the mirror,
which also then somehow
suggests that it is actually twice the height,
because the eye and the brain is actually easily fooled.
And luckily, it looked like the model.
The monochromatic yellow light
gives you this otherworldly sense of, you know, a kind of artificial sky.
That's why I called it the Weather Project.
And it was clear that people were having very different experiences.
Some said, "Oh, my God. This is doom and gloom.
It's about apocalypse."
And some people said, "Oh, it's about, you know, contemplative spirituality
and I need to do some yoga."
And interestingly, these two versions of it
could still be together.
You don't have to be the same in order to share a space.
And the yellow light, I think, was a key driver
in that whole thing.
[Klaus] The Weather Project marked a certain paradigm change
in how people perceive contemporary art.
It's something that's relevant to the way how you see the world.
And it made him much more known in a much wider audience.
[male director] We got it. Thank you so much.
Cheers.
Good.
What do you say, "It's a wrap?" How do you say that?
-[director] Not yet. -[Olafur] Oh, not yet. I see, okay.
-[water rushing] -[birds squawking]
[Olafur] So, now we're on the southern coast...
of Iceland, and here, this is actually not too far from where my father lived.
My father was an artist.
I actually think my father's first painting
is sort of a black beach.
Maybe this is here.
-Do we have my father's films? -[man] Yeah, we do.
[Olafur] He was a very playful artist who did many different things,
and I guess maybe that's why he was not...
successful as an artist. He couldn't live from it.
That's my father.
As a child, I was kind of scared that he had a cast of his own head.
So, always in my father's studio, there was this...
his head,
sitting on a pedestal.
My father was a little bit crazy.
My parents were divorced,
and probably because I was living with my mother,
I thought that everything my father did was, like, amazing.
Of course I wanted him
to like me so much,
so when I stayed with my mother, I always would send my father drawings.
And my father would tell me to send him new drawings.
All in all, I had pretty good support.
But what more influenced me was maybe the fact that...
what I did did not necessarily have to, um...
I don't know how to say it exactly.
It... It didn't have to be successful in order to be quality.
So, now that I'm a parent...
I try to not push...
my kids.
It was...
It sounds... It sort of sounds wrong today, right?
But my parent actually did not...
ask me to do something seriously.
That's interesting.
[elevator dings]
-Is this going to LA as well? -It is.
Okay, we have to work on the lights, uh, on these ones here.
[man] Yeah, okay. So, we got this one.
[Olafur] Oh, this looks really bad. It doesn't work at all.
Okay.
So, this one, it's really strong and really white...
-[Olafur] Yes. -...to create some structure on the wall.
[Olafur] That's a lot nicer now.
-This is much better. -[man] Yeah?
-Brita, can you turn it on? -[Brita] Sure.
I like that the purple got so dark that it looks black.
But then, when you look closer, it's actually very, very deep purple.
It's almost a pity, uh...
to send it away.
[Brita laughs]
It's... It's not the one I'm keeping, is it?
[Brita] No, no. It's for the LA show.
Oh, horrible.
[Olafur] What makes a space tolerable, more inclusive?
The body is a good indicator.
Who knows about the body?
Dancers.
I believe it was '83,
maybe '82, actually, so it was very early.
In a store window, there was these people mimicking a mannequin,
and then they would move like a robot.
It really totally and utterly blew my mind.
And it was as if I had seen the light.
[laughs]
Just like a whole new world just opened for me.
And I could not stop moving like a robot.
So, because I had started so early,
by the time it became more mainstream fashion,
me and a few other guys,
we had become quite good at what we're doing.
We danced in shopping malls,
clubs, and discotheques.
But at the end of the day, it gave me a lot of self-confidence
and it taught me a lot about physicality and space.
Dancing totally had a significant impact on me.
I've become very interested in movements and geometry.
I'm just... I'm just working with this mirror here.
And it's so nice. It's a round mirror and it looks like a tunnel, right?
So...
So, check this out. So, when I do...
Do you see? And now I'll show you. It's a slow mirror. I'm just going to...
Hang on. Hang on.
Do you see? So, the... the time sequence...
can be off.
Here's on.
And here's off.
So, I like... I like the fact that...
Oh, let me try again.
That I can slow things down in the mirror.
But obviously, the truth is that...
it's actually not a round mirror.
It's an ellipse mirror, and it's an experiment, like,
with anamorphic shapes.
Like, if you look at an ellipse...
like this,
from a certain angle,
it appears to be circular.
This has been used very often, and I'm very interested.
This is what I've been experimenting with.
I'm very much interested in ideas about space and structure.
There's always a mix between nature and design.
I got interested in people like Buckminster Fuller.
[man] His geodesic dome has proved the most efficient means
of enclosing space yet devised.
[Olafur] And I came across, in Iceland,
a guy who actually had known Buckminster Fuller.
His name was Einar Thorsteinn.
And I wanted to do a sculpture that was inspired by Buckminster Fuller.
And Einar said, "Oh, I know the mathematical formula for it."
He came and worked here for 15 years in the studio.
So, that's how I got started working
with scientists and architects.
And in that way, it just grew very gradually,
a little bit like my career.
Just like with the natural phenomena,
my interest in geometry was also about experiencing the world.
So, in the studio...
we work so much with geometry and...
a number of spatial systems derived from nature.
This is one of them, for instance. This is basalt columns.
This... This basalt rock actually comes
from having a volcano underneath a glacier,
so the rapid cooling sort of crystallizes the rock.
When I was first invited to participate
in designing or shaping Harpa,
which is the conference and concert hall in... in Reykjavík...
the people involved wanted a reference to Iceland.
We in the studio were working with geometry and nature and packing.
And obviously, these basalt rocks and how they crystallize
is a very great way of showing how nature organizes space.
Einar Thorsteinn did some amazing research on five-fold symmetry.
But more importantly, we also then developed it
into an architectural structural shape.
We built a space frame.
They're very stiff, they're very strong.
And essentially, we used very little material
to create a very strong facade,
which holds up the roof, for instance.
The shaping of the building was actually
to kind of amplify the ephemeral qualities.
The reason why tilting the facade,
just like... over,
is because when the winter light comes,
it... it works like a mirror and it just...
brings the sun onto this area here in the front, just a little bit.
And the ceiling brings light into the space,
bounces the light back onto the floor.
And the idea was that you could sort of activate
the view from the outside and make the building seem more alive.
We used something which started in mathematics,
became about nature, which then became about engineering,
which then became about a skin for a concert and conference house.
So, it was an amazing process.
So, after Harpa, I said, "Let's make an architectural company."
-Is this also steel? -[man] Yes. And everything is open,
everything is exposed to rain and water,
so it's actually like parts of ships.
[Olafur] That's so cool. I love it.
There's actually the studio in the studio.
So, architecture has become a part of what we do.
And the building we just recently opened in Denmark
is called Fjordenhus,
because it's a... it's a hus, it's a house,
that stands in the fjord.
It's a building that looks complex,
but, actually, how it's built up is very simple.
So, this model here,
the skin is actually penetrated by this negative volume here.
So, you see, this one fits in here...
and on this side here.
And that organizes, then,
these kind of parabolic openings,
and these kind of spaces are then used
whether as balconies, as open spaces, or as offices.
[Olafur] If you take a picture of a curved wall,
it kind of becomes flat.
But if you move, the curved wall changes perspective a lot,
and everything becomes explicit.
I think the overlap between art and architecture can make both better.
These are the technical drawings for the LA gallery show.
So, we don't mind having a mirror here on the wall,
and then, it ends with the--
Yeah, but maybe we just move it... Now we just move it over a little bit.
Yeah. So, let's put the work...
in the middle.
Let's try it. This one we might not need,
because it's just much nicer, the compass in this space alone,
and then this and this.
Okay, great. So, that's it then.
I'll just grab my pen.
I was always interested in perception.
There's plenty of examples, like, historically speaking,
of how we choose to use our eyes.
The first mirrors in the world
were made of black obsidian.
Then people would go through the parks,
and in the mirror, they would see the back.
You have the future in front of you, but if you hold up a little mirror,
you can see where you came from, you can see the past.
When I was a younger artist,
I'm still relatively young, right?
But when I was a younger artist,
I moved from Denmark to Germany.
And I wouldn't say I was easygoing, because I literally gave up everything...
to pursue what I wanted to do.
[firework whistling]
[newscaster] Though the new year began here in the two Germanys
with these remarkable sights, unthinkable such a short time ago.
[Olafur] It was in '89...
[male reporter] The sledge... when it went up.
[Olafur] The Berlin Wall came down.
[reporter] Even the East Germans seemed exhilarated...
[Olafur] Me and a fellow student, we rented a car and we drove to Berlin.
And suddenly, you just see all these people from East coming through.
It was very touching.
I mean, it was difficult to understand...
to be honest, the scope of what we were actually seeing.
How do I make what is abstract tangible?
It's the process of narrowing it down to the bone.
But when I moved to Germany,
I thought I was going out into the world to be an artist like everybody else.
But they were so good,
and I was like, "Oh...
I'm never gonna make it."
I said, "If I'm gonna somehow say something,
I better be myself."
I wanted to hand over the responsibility for experiencing the artwork
to the participant.
A reality projector is a very large space
and has a kind of balcony you enter here.
So, this is a person in the space, right?
And in the space, the ceiling was these enormous,
uh, triangulated trusses.
So, I thought, "Maybe it would be possible
to expose the structure that holds up the ceiling."
We started putting up lamps up here.
And then you would have a shadow,
which essentially is the beam from the ceiling.
And it would move if we move the light.
So that was kind of nice.
And if we'd have two lights that moved in different directions,
the shadows moved... Suddenly, there was kind of a movie.
[Ai] His temptation to integrate the architecture,
I think is a very intelligent approach
and maximizes the possibility.
[Olafur] You see, don't forget this is a person here, right?
[high-pitched voice] Hello. This is a little person.
[normal voice] So, this was enormous.
It was very abstract.
There's something very dreamy to see huge shadows moving.
Something very sort of meditative.
And I thought maybe we should add sound.
[thudding and clattering]
[deep piano chords play]
My artist friend Yanchi recorded the delivery of a piano
and the sound of the construction of a piano.
[thud]
[clattering]
Some people saw...
city cranes, a harbor,
modern systems.
And some people saw abstract paintings, and color films,
and more like psychedelic sort of stuff.
Underneath this idea of empowering the spectator,
there is something which is very fundamental.
Museums make huge explanations to make sure that people get it,
but you sometimes end up with a feeling where,
"I must be really stupid since they have to over-explain everything."
So, when I say the viewer of a work of art
is smart enough to co-produce the narrative,
it gives the viewer the sense of saying, "I'm actually good enough."
When I was small, I very much liked to draw.
And my father would typically just
tell me to do some doodles on the paper, just like kind of...
you know, like, just like swing the pen around on the paper
and then just fill out the fields.
Of course, it'd just be abstract. It's just an abstract drawing.
So, the exercise is actually the imagination,
or the, you know, fantasy,
and to sort of see things that are invisible.
So, let me just show you the cat here. [humming]
There's an eye here.
There's another eye here.
Maybe this is, you know, the cat nose.
Kind of the other way around.
That's fine.
Then we have... I can put in...
Ah, there's an ear here, there's another ear here, yeah?
So, see? So, gradually, my cat...
has a kind of a leonine.
When I talk to kids about, you know, "Can you draw a car or something?”
I really try to emphasize it's not really about the car.
It's more about, "You have...
Do you have the fantasy to actually see the car?"
Let's go on.
Cheers. It's just that I didn't do that since I was a child.
So, as my studio evolved,
I also started working more with advocacy groups.
And the studio today actually is... is a kind of a mix
between the normal artwork,
but we're also involved with the politics somehow.
Turning thinking into doing.
[indistinct conversation]
[Olafur] So, I thought I should see
if what I have learned in art could be applied onto, for instance,
a kind of a more sort of, um...
advocacy project.
And this is how the project Ice Watch came along.
How do we make the climate explicit
and turn thinking into doing?
And the Ice Watch project is very straightforward.
It's glacial ice from Greenland,
from the glacier that is disappearing,
put on the street.
People walk up to it and...
see it, listen to it, touch it.
This is what is melting and disappearing,
and it was melting right then. Then, of course...
this is what we're talking about.
Then they would put their hand on it and they go,
[gasps] "It's cold."
And of course everybody knows ice is cold because it's ice, right?
But behavioral change is much more emotional.
[Carol] It's so simple...
but that simplicity is deceptive.
Because it's going to disappear, and you know it's gonna disappear.
That he could create something so beautiful
that would conjure that unthinkable thought
is the mark of a truly great artist.
[Olafur] This is such a great view down here.
[woman] Oh, yeah.
It is.
When I was here half a life ago,
[chuckles] there was, um,
you know, ice coming down,
moving down this water here, as I remember it. Yeah.
-[Olafur] It... It broke off? -[Josefine] Yes, yes, yes.
-It did. But there is still beauty. -Yeah. Yeah.
You know, we look at this, and I think the acknowledgment of that
is important to keep prosperous and hopeful.
[Olafur] Yeah.
That piece of ice...
-Maybe we can grab that. -Yeah.
-Let's try it. Yeah. -Let's see if we can grab that ice.
[Olafur] We saved it.
-So... -[Josefine chuckles]
-Now we just need a freezer. -[Josefine sighs]
[Josefine sniffs]
-[Josefine] Yeah, a big one. -[Olafur] So...
-That's a nice work of art. -It is.
-Or a nice poem, for that matter. -[laughs] Yeah.
[Josefine chuckles]
Yeah.
-[Olafur] So, are these bubbles? -[Josefine] Yeah.
[Olafur] So, the air in the bubble, when it comes out,
it's the air from 5,000 years ago.
I mean, what is beautiful is that as it actually melts...
-Yeah. -...it kind of pops.
[Josefine] Yeah.
So, if we would be very quiet and sit and wait a little bit,
the ice would start speaking to us.
It would pop like popcorn.
So, it's not, like, disappearing, it's actually arriving.
It's about being... being present.
If we want to change something about the climate, it needs to be made explicit,
it needs to be physical.
And this is what culture is, right? Culture is, to a large extent, physical.
It's... It's... It's stuff out in the world.
I have worked so much with light.
Light is so fundamental to everything, right?
As I also started traveling, I realized that...
every eighth person in the world
does not have access to energy. Like, to light.
So, this is actually the little sun.
And there's a solar panel here on the back, so...
when I hold it up like that, I'm actually charging,
then I have light for the whole evening.
Now, I have sustainable energy right here in the palm of my hand,
and I... I call that holding hands with the sun.
It's about the right to have access to light.
No one will ever have to sit in darkness.
We sell this at a higher price, knowing museum stores are online.
And the profit from that is then driving lamps into off-grid areas.
In those areas,
you would normally buy 100 milliliters of kerosene a week.
That is money which was then spent on something else.
It went into the economy. It didn't go out and into the oil industry.
It's important to talk about the climate
in a language that is not always about doom and gloom.
It's very important to design things that has a positive narrative.
You can turn thinking into doing. You can.
The gallery that I work with has opened up a space here in Los Angeles and...
it's exciting for me because this is my first show here in this space
and the first time I show these works.
I love it.
This has turned out amazing.
Somehow, I don't remember it looking like this in the studio.
[mumbles indistinctly]
It's good to make art with mirrors, so I can check my hair.
Art is the world's ability
to investigate and have an intimate relationship with itself.
Gerhard Richter, the German painter, said, "Art is the highest form of hope."
At the bottom of my heart, I love making art.
So, why are you watching this episode?
I mean, I'm very happy you are,
but it's also important that you think about yourself, right?
What is in it for you?
What are you actually doing here?
It's about the ability to see something.
It's incredibly important that we do not take our surroundings for granted.
To realize I can see more, should I make the effort.
For instance,
depending on where you are in the world,
the quality of the daylight is very different.
This is how the light looks in Berlin.
So, this is the amazing light here in Los Angeles.
It's, of course, very famous, just like the traffic is.
-We're standing on the street... -[horn honks]
...in front of the gallery.
This is the color of the daylight here in Iceland,
right... right outside of my studio.
Even what we take for granted, such as,
"Oh, this is just sunlight,"
is actually very different.
Once you see that reality is actually relative...
it is more likely to also change.
So, north is exactly over there.
Berlin, where my studio is...
Right?
...is there.
[laughs]
So, we are not lost after all.