Stealing Like an Artist: Olafur Eliasson

Last week in class Professor Cardinal introduced me to a pretty extraordinary light sculptor. The grandeur of Olafur Eliasson’s work is pretty stunning considering how minimal it is from a technical standpoint. He seems to understand how to distil fascinating images down to their fundamentals, leaving us wondering how something so simple can be so (SO) transfixing.

So naturally I wanted to steal that.

First I thought, “wait no.” because for heaven's sake, how. But then I did some distilling myself and realized the reason Olafur Elison's work is so fascinating is the color and light movement, and I was interested in the movement. I thought, okay, let's just isolate that light movement and not worry about anything else.

I grabbed an LED and eyelash-glued the lens to a string, then took apart a cheap VR helmet to mine it for its plano-convex lens, and let my janky contraption sway in the wind. And the light really was fascinating!

But the contraption itself was… less than ideal, not to mention very hard to set up on a pedestal in a gallery. So I decided to add lying to my stealing and just record the movement of light from that swaying lens in a photo studio and project it onto a surface.