Moreso in relation to Eliasson's art practice he begins his talk with an experiment in the nature of perception directing our attention to the experiences of the after image illusions. He asks;
"What does it mean to be in a picture and what does it mean to be in a space? And what's the difference? The difference between thinking and doing."
His art is about linking thinking and doing, through provoking "us", the audience to experience something other than what we would otherwise take for granted. In the spectacular large-scale projects he's famous for (such as "Waterfalls" in New York harbor), Olafur Eliasson is altering us to our conscious perceptions of time and space and how we focus our experiences of distance.
He manipulates Architectural constructs as a means to exploit the mass market of altering perceptions of the near and far, perhaps usurping our understanding of things, as what we "once thought about it" to what we "now think about it". Such as it would be interesting to know what people think about the green dyed city waterways artworks seen in the above image !
