To question our notions of nature and culture, artist Olafur Eliasson recreates artificial environments within enclosed spaces. He thus shakes up the mysteries of the origins and temporality, and blurs the boundaries of reality in such a way that leaves viewers wondering whether mist, earth, rocks, and water are involved as sculptural elements or as agents and co-authors of the artworks themselves.
Published for the first time on our site, this portfolio was proposed by Oliafur Eliasson in Stream 04 The Paradowes of the Living.
He raises here a crucial question: the artistic manipulation of the living cannot be done without considering of the living.
Designed in collaboration with the landscaper Günther Vogt, Mediated Motion dialogues with the architecture of Pether Zumthor through sequences of interior landscapes that have been reconstituted on the four floors of the museum, disturbing the geometrical and formal rigor of the building.
The spectator is plunged into a journey that transforms the museum into a “vision machine” and challenges one’s senses and thinking through a variety of atmospheres and sensorial experiences; the vital odors, colors, and textures are constantly evolving, calling upon perceptive memory and our perception of the real and the artificial.
Your disappearing garden involves notions of time, landscape, and movement through the piles of obsidian rocks in the space of a room, recreating a section of the volcanic landscape, that of the obsidian fields of the high plateaus of Iceland that are so familiar to the artist. The perception of space is affected by the spectator’s involvement, their movements participate in the reflections that move across the dark and brilliant black of the volcanic rock. These complex visual stimuli, associated with the telluric visual force of the artwork, blur the boundaries between reality and representation, exploring the contradiction between knowledge of, and experience of, the visible.
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A symbol of the industrial revolution, the rise of metal in construction accompanied the renewal of Paris under Haussmann. Its origins in blast furnaces is associated with a high carbon footprint. Yet it is still widely used in facades, and seems promising for circular economy, as it is easy to dismantle. But is this enough of an advantage? As part of the City Metabolism Chair supported by the Université Paris Sciences & Lettres.
France has the 4th largest forest area in Europe, yet 40% of its timber is imported. At a time when Google’s London headquarters, designed in 2016 with a solid wood structure, has still not been delivered, and when the tallest wooden tower is due to be built in Tokyo in 2028, reaching a height of 100 metres, where does France stand in relation to wood? The RE2020, through the dynamic life cycle analysis, encourages the use of bio-sourced materials to promote the storage of biogenic carbon in buildings. The SNBC is explicitly banking on this sector to achieve its 2050 targets. However, the Paris Fire Brigade doctrine published in 2021 greatly complicates its use in architecture. How can these contradictions be overcome?
In this round-table discussion, the four researchers look at the issue of transition through the prism of the different notions of maintenance, transformation, repair and restoration. These concepts are reminiscent of the issues of destruction, reconstruction and rehabilitation in architecture.
The French underground and aerial landscape is made up of approximately 910,000 km of drinking water distribution pipes, and over 1.4 million km of power lines. Indispensable in our daily lives, they are nonetheless invisible and increasingly questioned in the light of ecological and technological challenges that are transforming our territories. But can’t these infrastructures be seen as a heritage to be maintained and cared for?
Aurélie Mossé is a designer, researcher and head of the Soft Matters research group at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs. Using micro-organisms, she is experimenting with the manufacture of innovative materials that are less costly in terms of fossil fuels or non-renewable resources. By producing calcite, bacteria could become allies in the creation of solid building materials.
Although soil is used as a building material in many parts of the world, it has often been regarded as a waste product in France in recent decades, with little use being made of excavated soil. However, its thermal and hygrometric properties, its extremely low carbon footprint when used raw, its abundance and the natural variations in colour that it offers in every region make it a rich and inspiring material for today’s architects and designers. How can we adapt our building techniques to bring this material into line with contemporary requirements, and get rid of the vision of primitive housing that it still evokes for many people?
Collective intelligence has become key to understanding and acting upon the complexity of the contemporary world. But how can the conditions for its advent be brought about? Originating in PSL, the “Life in the Making” collective, which brings together researchers in natural sciences, in the humanities, as well as artists, has been exploring this dialogue between intelligences around the theme of the living since 2014. By operating through a flexible framework, the collective has developed a praxis of interdisciplinary collective intelligence—all the while establishing new insights on life, in particular through experimentations between art and science.
AI is a new form of intelligence whose development is stirring up concerns and dystopian fables. Far from replacing human intelligence, AIs are emerging as new tools to be trained, controlled and shaped to achieve the desired result. For the artist, photographer, architect, film-maker, musician or illustrator, AIs become an agent with which to collaborate, resulting in co-creation. Inaugural lecture of the “AI and Creation” series at the Stream Innovation Center.