From Unspoken Spaces - Timothy Morton

Eliasson likes to make a thing that puts its environment into a loop: loops that feed the grass and the tress, the streets and the squares, back into themselves. Loops are not nice and neat. A mirrored structure glitters, shattering its surround into a hundred facets. A volcano of bronze beams splashes upwards in a park, remarking on the rhythm of the trees. Cold grey steel pours silently down in tubular parabolas at Waiblingen, movement summing to stillness, as if time had become honey.

To put a thing in a loop makes it weird. Weird comes from the old Norse "urth", which means 'in a loop', like the Norns, who twist the fabric of time. Eliasson's art is weird and, as a consequence, funny and experimental. This cluster of qualities is congruent with ecological awareness, which is necessarily weird.

Timothy Morton
Nothingness is not nothing at all, so it is physical, but not in the sense of constant presence. Nothingness is disturbing. It is there, in a mind- independent sense; it is part of what is given. But I cannot see it directly. There is a weird crack in my world. Perhaps there is only one crack—the one between subject and non-subject: this is how Kantians (and others including Heidegger) police the gap, by putting some kind of copyright control on it. Or perhaps there are as many gaps as there are things, and relations between things. This is what object-oriented ontology has begun to think about the phenomenon–thing gap.

Read more on his blog

I met Doreen at a lecture on walking by the artist Hamish Fulton, while I was preparing The weather project, which was later installed in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. This marked a turning point for me. I had for some time been interested in duration, temporality, and how our experience of time co-produces space – topics that are at the core of my artworks. Where phenomenology, which had been decisive in my early work, addresses temporality from the singular perspective of a subject, Doreen insisted on thinking of the subject contextually. Imagine a person boarding a train in Manchester, going to Liverpool, and disembarking at the station:

Your arrival in Lime Street, when you step off the train, begin to get into the things you came here to do, is a meeting-up of trajectories as you entangle yourself in stories that began before you arrived. This is not the arrival of an active voyager upon an awaiting passive destination but an intertwining of ongoing trajectories from which something new may emerge. Movement, encounter and the making of relationships take time.

Later we would talk more about the subject in relation to its social surroundings, the performative collectives in which it participates. For me, sensitivity to the mutable social context became a topic I developed while occasionally crossing paths with Doreen. I benefitted from her belief in making explicit the changing conditions under which exchanges take place and movements are made, conditions that always co-produce internal and external performances.

Doreen has changed my way of seeing my work in the world and the world in my work.