The huge digital billboards that encircle Piccadilly Circus are some of the most sought-after advertising real estate in Europe, beaming thousands of crystal-clear messages in the direction of tourists and Londoners every year.
But in early October the Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s latest work will take over the screens and attempt to slow things down, swapping high-definition adverts for a blurry, reflective video piece called Lifeworld.
“Unlike what is on the screen normally, which is a highly unblurred, exceptionally optimised use of every pixel to capitalise on the money you pay for this exposure,” Eliasson says from his Berlin base, “here we are letting the pixels drift, there’s uncertainty at hand.”
Eliasson has built an international reputation as an artistic innovator since his breakthrough work Weather Project, which featured a giant “sun” installed at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall. Two million visitors went to see the installation, which covered the space in an orange haze.
The Guardian said the Weather Project created an environment where “barriers are melting, frosty politeness traded at the door for cockeyed mysticism”, and Eliasson hopes Lifeworld can have a similar effect, this time outside the confines of a gallery.
“The issue for me is the public space … it’s not about banning the screens but the blur is an attempt to reach out and say, ‘Here’s something beautiful,’” he said. “It’s about slowing down. It’s about tenderness. It’s about abstraction.”
Lifeworld is going to be shown in four separate locations: London’s Piccadilly Lights, K-pop Square in Seoul, Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and Times Square in New York City, in collaboration with Circa – the organisation that has previously beamed Frank Bowling’s abstract paintings across Piccadilly.
Each version of Lifeworld will feature footage of the public space in which it is shown, beamed back and blurred, creating a meta moment where onlookers will be invited to reflect on the space they are in while looking at it from a different perspective.
Lifeworld is typical of Eliasson’s approach to interacting with viewers of his art: he doesn’t call them “consumers” but instead “co-producers”.
Combining cutting-edge science, architecture and artistic invention Eliasson’s pieces have ranged from towering waterfalls and aerial photographs of Icelandic volcanoes to foggy rooms, moss walls, and his Ice Watch piece, which features mini glaciers from Greenland that slowly melted outside Tate Modern.
The Icelandic-Danish artist has just returned from Los Angeles where he installed his piece Open, which is composed of several “monumental kaleidoscopes” at the Museum of Contemporary Art.
Lifeworld will be shown in Times Square to coincide with the US election and, while in the country, Eliasson said he was shocked by the polarisation of the political debate.
“I come from a belief system where sitting down with people that you don’t agree with around the table and listening to each other. That’s just never gonna happen [in the US]. And whose interest does that serve?” he asks.
Eliasson says he hopes Lifeworld can – by blurring the usually clear images of advertising screens – force people to look again at their surroundings and create a communal place within public space.
“Times Square is brutal,” Eliasson says. “It’s full of people at midnight. It’s a very interesting space. It certainly stimulates, but it’s bombarding as well. The question is: is it sensitising, or is it numbing?”
“I think my blurry film is a closer depiction of reality than the one normally seen on screens, because it’s hospitable. It holds space for you,” he adds. “I think that is a kind of fierce tenderness.”
Last year, it was announced that Eliasson’s first permanent outdoor piece in the UK – a huge 30-metre steel elliptical basin made in collaboration with the nature writer Robert Macfarlane called Your Daylight Destination – will be installed along the west Cumbrian coastline.
The planned work is part of a programme called Deep Time, which will also feature smaller permanent artworks along the Lake District coast.
Eliasson, who was a breakdancer in his youth, recently collaborated with the electronic producer and DJ Peggy Gou appearing in the music video to her song “1+1=11” where he danced behind a screen in his Berlin studio.
