Olafur Eliasson: Your view matter

About

Commissioned by MetaKovan and produced in collaboration with Acute Art, the artwork is available on yourviewmatter.art to experience free of charge in VR, and it is an NFT. Your view matter will form an integral part of the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: Nel tuo tempo (In your time), at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, and is set to be exhibited at further locations internationally, including in India.

Throughout his career, Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has created works that explore the exchange between viewers, artwork, and the context that surrounds them. Working from an idea of experience as an active probing of the world, Eliasson presents viewers with objects and environments that inspire engagement. It is the viewer’s presence that activates the art, and their visual experience that completes the work. For Your view matter, 2022, Eliasson invites audiences to journey in virtual reality through a series of six forms, accompanied by a minimalist soundtrack created by the artist.

“To make virtual spaces into spaces of embodied exploration is a long-held interest of mine. Your view matter invites you to physically grasp how technologies intertwine with our capacity to see and to co-produce what we see. It’s a process of unlearning and relearning how vision works, involving not only vision but also the movement of your head, body, and brain. In this way, I hope the artwork acts as a host for your self-awareness, inviting you to ‘listen’ and ‘speak’ with your eyes.” – Olafur Eliasson

In the artwork, users move through a progression of ever larger geometric spaces and finally reach a sphere. The architecture of these virtual spaces is based on the Platonic solids – the tetrahedron, octahedron, icosahedron, dodecahedron, and cube. These three-dimensional forms are each made of a set of identical and recognisable shapes – triangles, pentagons, and squares – that result in simple yet surprisingly complex spaces.  

The walls and ceilings of each form scintillate with ever-changing moiré patterns, distortions that arise wherever similar patterns are overlaid. In Your view matter these patterns – some quite colourful and others in stark black and white – change dramatically in response to the viewer’s movements and active engagement.

“When you look at a moiré, you are in fact seeing how you see – and you see yourself moving. Without your motion, there would be no moiré. I have long been preoccupied with ephemeral and atmospheric spaces in my work. Art allows us to see reality as negotiable, bringing with it a freedom to reinterpret our own past, present and future.” – Olafur Eliasson

From 5 September 2022, Your view matter can be explored free of charge online at yourviewmatter.art using any VR headset. An augmented reality (AR) version of the work is also available via the Acute Art app. The work will be exhibited to the public for the first time at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, as part of the exhibition Olafur Eliasson: Nel tuo tempo (In your time), opening 22 September.

Your view matter was commissioned by MetaKovan and created in collaboration with Acute Art, who provides the world’s leading artists access to cutting-edge technologies that allow them to translate their creative visions into new digital mediums – including virtual, augmented and mixed realities.