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Time has released more than 5,000 covers since our founding almost a century ago. The new issue’s is the first one where the viewer’s eyes create the image.
In the run-up to the COP27 climate conference—the U.N. meeting at which global leaders will negotiate the next steps toward managing that crisis—we sought a cover image for our issue led by an essay from Justin Worland that could speak to the intensity of the current climate situation. So we turned the cover (or rather, covers) over to one of the world’s most prominent contemporary artists, Olafur Eliasson.
Eliasson creates sculptures and large-scale installations that employ elemental materials such as light, water, and air to enhance the viewer’s experience of the ordinary. To accomplish the effect on TIME’s cover, the Icelandic-Danish artist used a technique called afterimaging. Following the instructions on the page—staring at the green heart for 12 seconds and then flipping to the next page—allows your eye to “re-imagine” our overheated planet in the greens and blues that are the colors of a healthy earth.
“An afterimage is basically created within your own perceptual apparatus—by your eyes and brain, that is—whenever you look at something. You don’t generally see or notice them unless you look at something for a long time and then turn away to look at a blank surface,” he says. “The colors that you then see—the colors that are produced on your retinas—are, generally speaking, the complements of the colors printed in the image: blue for orange, red for green, and so on.”
Eliasson applied that optical illusion to an image of the globe, which has been tilted to show a face of the earth that is different from the view most readers will be familiar with, to “heighten the strangeness of the image.” Looking twice, after all, is what Eliasson’s cover asks us all to do. And it’s no coincidence that the visual anchor at the center of it all is a heart. “This image is not actually there on the page, but inside you,” he says. “You create it. You make the world.”
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