It’s been a little too long – especially given all the great things to write about from the past few weeks. I suppose we’ll have to look back in bullet point form:

-Can’t stop talking about the Olafur Eliasson exhibit that just ended at the Chicago MCA

Other friends who’ve visited commented on the simplicity and accessibility of the experience, but also the surprises to be found there. Those type of comments remind me of the desert experiences that keep coming back to mind in our brainstorming meetings: Is there a way to simplify film (while also making it huge) that clears the mind of digital distraction, opening people to profound experiences of the world around them? That’s why I like the tagline for Eliasson’s exhibit so much: “devices for the experience of reality.” It’s not so much “fantasy” that we’re interested in, but a new way of seeing what’s really there, and imagining what could come next.

In Eliasson’s work, I kept being taken back to the experience of nature. That seems so obvious, in a sense, but it was striking on many levels. As Wittgenstein writes in his collection of aphorisms Culture and Value, “You must say something new and yet it must all be old….You have got to assemble old bits of material, but into a building.”

-Long Now Foundation meetup in Chicago on Rosetta Project and Global Lives Project

I’ve watched the presentation by Global Lives executive director David Evan Harris, and really enjoyed what I saw. If you’re interested in hearing him talk about the project, I’ve embedded the video below. You may find yourself skipping around a bit, but the most Cube-related material comes about 21 minutes into the video. Part of the goal of the Global Lives project is to make an art installation to allow viewers to wander through various 24-hour long films of interesting but non-famous people throughout the world. This is a great idea, in my book anyway – and seems to be something worth celebrating and keeping track of for future viewing (so long as it gets made).

David Evan Harris, Executive Director of Global Lives Project from long now chicago on Vimeo.

It’s been running for the whole summer, but I finally got to the Olafur Eliasson exhibit at Chicago’s MCA earlier today. The first photo below appears in a New York Times article on Eliasson from last year.

What I loved in the Take Your Time exhibit at the MCA was the actively pursued idea that nature itself, seen with new eyes, can provide for us endless supplies of beauty – especially when seen in new juxtapositions, compilations, singular sensory experiences, and the like. The various series of photographs (especially “Horizon series” – 2002) were particularly compelling to me. It was like watching a film, in that scenes were linked together in a logical, proportional way – but unlike a film, in that the scenes were not predictably placed. The mathematical beauty and nature’s patterns are discovered – or re-seen, I suppose. It’s not so much the artist as creative force, but as seeing creature. In any case, it made me so happy to wander around in these pieces today – experiencing light and natural forms in a bright new way.

This makes me wish I could have seen Eliasson’s “Weather project” (part of which is pictured below, as it appeared in the Tate Modern in 2003):