Olafur Eliasson's Earth Day Project Literally Gives You a New World View
Olafur Eliasson has teamed up with Serpentine to launch a new participatory artwork titled Earth Perspectives. Launching today on Earth Day, the project is a part of Serpentine's 50th anniversary Back to Earth program featuring artworks that address the climate emergency.
Eliasson's Earth Perspectives consists of nine images of the Earth, each pinpointing a different location across the globe. After staring at the dot for roughly ten seconds and then focusing on a blank surface, an afterimage appears in complementary colors, literally giving you a new world view.
"Today, 'the world as we know it' is a phrase of the past,’" said Eliasson. "The current health crisis has brought our societies close to a halt, affecting our economies, our freedoms and even our social ties. We must take the time to empathize with all those struck by the crisis and also seize this opportunity to imagine together the earth that we want to inhabit in the future – in all its wonders and beauty, in the face of all the challenges ahead of us."
"Earth Perspectives envisions the earth we want to live on together by welcoming multiple perspectives – not only human perspectives but also those of plants, animals, and nature," he went on to add. "A glacier’s perspective deviates from that of a human. The same goes for a river. On Earth Day, I want to advocate – as on any other day – that we recognize these various perspectives and, together, celebrate their co-existence."
Earth Perspectives begins with the Earth viewed over the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, before transitioning to areas such as the Ganges River in India, Chernobyl, in Pripyat, Ukraine, and the South Pole, among other locations. The artwork ultimately shows how we are all capable of seeing from different perspectives.
For more on Olafur Eliasson's Earth Day initiative, follow here.