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C a t a l o g

Olafur Eliasson: Surroundings Surrounded
Essays on Space and Science
Edited by Peter Weibel

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In this publication, the Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson forgoes a documentation and interpretation of his oeuvre, but discloses the sources of his artistic work.
From brainstorming sessions with Peter Weibel, director of the ZKM_Center for Art and Media, a list with potential authors developed. Thirty of the sixty-five academic texts from the fields of science and the humanities, as well as from architecture and art theory, are published for the first time.
Scientists speak for the arts. That is what renders this book unique. Color plates of the artist's works subdivide the volume comprising 704 pages into single chapters.

By excluding art theory and art history, a new discourse between art and science is enabled. With this concept, Eliasson and Weibel aim at an interlocking of art and science which is already inherent in the artist's oeuvre, since Eliasson's starting point is not the experience of nature but the science of nature. His art can be understood as a form of metascience reflecting results of the natural sciences and transforming them into aesthetic experiences.

This alliance between art and science prepares new grounds for the arts in the 21st century. Eliasson and Weibel present a book that, in an almost encyclopedic way, offers an insight into the current issues of natural sciences, revealing simultaneously strategies of contemporary art. What is to become visible is the artistic universe of Olafur Eliasson. And also in this sense, the title of the exhibition and of the book is to be understood: the intellectual context of the artist's work [the surrounding] is surrounded.

The book comprises 704 pages and is published in English with 96 color plates and 108 illustrations in black and white. On the occasion of the opening of the exhibition, the book is published as a special edition, available only at the ZKM until December 2001.
Subsequently, the book is going to be published by MIT Press [Cambridge, Mass.] and will be available in bookstores in January 2002.

With texts by:
Hans Christian von Baeyer, Per Bak, Cecil Balmond, Jonathan Crary, Diller + Scofidio, Thorleifur Einarsson, Norman Foster, Yona Friedman, Ursula Frohne, Brian Greene, Elizabeth Grosz, Marianne Krogh Jensen, Rem Koolhaas, Manuel de Landa, Henry Lefebvre, Hans Ulrich Obrist| Ralph Erskine, Robert Ossermann, Andrzej Przywara und Adam Szymczyk , Otto E. Rössler, Peter Weibel, Kurt Schilcher, Richard Sennett, Michael Speaks, Anthony Vidler, Manfred Wolff-Plottegg and others.

Olafur Eliasson: »Surroundings Surrounded«. Essays on Space and Science
Edited by Peter Weibel
A publication of the Neue Galerie Graz and ZKM_Center for Art and Media on the occasion of the exhibition:
Olafur Eliasson. Surroundings Surrounded, Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz, Austria, March 30 - May 21, 2000; ZKM_Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, May 31 - August 26, 2001.
ISBN 3-928201-26-3
[Prospective price: DM 58,-]

[ZKM_Publications, Ursula Frohne]



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