The Attention of Time, 2022 – Olafur Eliasson

The attention of time is Olafur Eliasson's 2022 work made of partially silvered glass spheres, painted in cyan and black on a stainless-steel structure. Each sphere works as a small lens. Light entering it refracts at the front and back and concentrates on the back surface, and from certain angles a viewer sees only the painted part of that surface, so the sphere seems to change colour as the viewer moves past it. Across an array of spheres, that single effect becomes a field of shifting colour that depends entirely on where you stand.

Research:
The piece applies research from the Advanced Geometries Department at Studio Olafur Eliasson, set out in Phillip C. Reiner's 2021 paper Dynamic Color Transformation in Spherical Glass Arrays, developed from prototyping at the studio between 2019 and 2021. The optics are governed by refraction through the sphere: the viewing cone within which the colour reads is 2*arcsin(1/n), so for soda-lime glass at n = 1.52 the focal point sits at 1.46 times the radius and the cone opens to about 82.5 degrees. Rather than one uniform change from a single viewpoint, parametric guide curves map colour to positions along a path, choreographing a sequence across hundreds of spheres that runs from black through emergence and full saturation and back to black.