Olafur Eliasson is showing us the sun.
The 47-year-old Danish-born installation artist is a visionary — part activist, part auteur. From constructing gigantic waterfalls in New York City’s East River to importing (and melting) 100 tonnes of glacial ice from Greenland to Copenhagen — Eliasson knows how to tell a story.
And now he’s standing in front of around fifty members of UNDP’s innovation community in rainy Copenhagen and he’s talking about the Little Sun — a tiny solar-power LED lamp he designed to benefit communities without electricity around the world.
We came to Copenhagen because we wanted to figure out different ways to captivate our audience. Working in Europe and Central Asia and the Arab States in particular — we wanted to find new ways to reach the growing cohort of young, engaged citizens working to change their world.
This writeshop was an exciting chance to get some fresh perspectives and try and come up with bold ideas to tell our innovation story.
Having the opportunity to discuss all of this with the man who installed a gigantic solar orb in the Tate Modern, seemed like a step in the right direction.
AR: What are some ways to tell a story differently?
JC: And create an experience for our audience that’s different than reading a 100-page report, so is it something they see? Something they feel? Something they… smell?
OE: That’s a great question, (laughing) no I’m serious! I think the tendency with these reports is that they are data and fact oriented. How do you bring data to the people? But, also, how do you generally build confidence in data-driven knowledge?
When we were young, it was all about get the image out there.
So the picture in the 80's of the famine in Ethiopia — that broke that story. It turned into action. That equation worked in that context. Now that doesn’t work anymore.
We have a lot of examples of being surprised that a strikingly violent image doesn’t push any action. So people are in a sense, they have become numb. And it’s not surprising in a way, it just happens.
So now it’s the question: What is the agent that actually triggers action?
And of course there are a few tendencies or trends, and that is the whole idea of activating the end receiver: instead of seeing the end receiver as a consumer or a passive consumer — see them as co-producer, co-author, a reality producer, and so on.
How do we prevent people feeling disconnected, that despair?
I think this is a great challenge. And clearly the picture [of the starving child] is not the solution anymore. Because you just don’t have that jolt. It doesn’t kick you anymore.
AR: Is it a sensory experience? Is it something more visceral?
OE: It is a challenge of disembodiment.
The general tendency about information is that it is highly disembodied. One of the ways to address this is to introduce a physical dimension to it with regards to enabling people to experience it through physical activity.
The experience that will more likely turn into active engagement is the one that has a physical component. This is why taking people to Greenland is a stronger climate argument than through looking at Greenland in a picture.
But of course now the challenge is how to do that?
Maybe we should reconsider the whole methodology in communication to be dialogue-driven and not top-down. When you are in a dialogue suddenly you see: Oh this problem! I can identify with this.
What happens is you suddenly feel not only that people contributed to the dialogue — but maybe, more interestingly, people felt that through the dialogue they realized a part of themselves.
This is the moment where you feel interdependent because you feel that you are belonging to something bigger than yourself.
Dialogues are about decentralization.
Essentially, the whole UN system represents a set of values that are not centralized. That’s the whole point. But that story has to be made explicit because people tend to think in very hierarchical terms even though the data is about the periphery.
JC: That’s the whole thing with our innovation work: We’re trying to reach the periphery. Information and knowledge and ideas are distributed. How can we use different forms of communications to reach out to them and engage more people in the process?
OE: For somebody like me on the outside, what you have and what I don’t have, being from a very elitist world as well (laughing): You have the people on the ground!
How come you seem so disconnected when you’re actually out there?
You have a system that you’ve built for forty or so years and it’s incredible you’re sitting right on the highest asset. Now you just kind of need to engage it in an interesting, positive, productive and inclusive way.
