Olafur Eliasson - excerpt from Your Gravitational Now
I make my day by sensing it. Measuring by moving, my body is my brain. My senses are my experiential guides – they generate my innermost awareness of time while generously giving depth to my surroundings. Constantly and critically invested in the world of today, they receive, evaluate, and produce my reality. When I walk or drive through the Icelandic landscape, I sense the surroundings and sense myself searching for sense. This vast landscape is like a test site that nurtures ideas and helps me process them into felt feelings – maybe even into art. Exercising physical and perceptual means of charting out space, of becoming, is for me a way of speaking to the world. This method or ‘technique’ raises questions that might just as easily be asked at different times in different situations, removed from their art context. Depth, time, psychological and physical engagement, perception – topics abound for which the landscape welcomingly offers experimental conditions and material. In Iceland and elsewhere, I continuously exchange my private being for a shared reality. I – sensorium, feelings, memories, convictions, values, thoughts, uncertainties – only am in relation to the collective.