Experiencing light

Domus visits Daan Roosegaarde's studio, where artists, designers, programmers, engineers and artists work hand in glove to create intuitive and responsive installations in the hope of filling the void that still exists between technology and society, innovation and tradition, global and local.

Daan Roosegaarde is a man with a dream or, in his own words, an obsession – with reinventing public spaces, creating stories and designing fresh interactions between public and private, between visitor (or, often, mere passers-by) and their context.

This is how installations such as Dune, a jungle of luminous fibres that react to presence and sound, and Flow, a wall of ventilators previously exhibited at Ars Electronica in 2010, become part of the urban fabric in their host cities. Whether this fabric be a tunnel beneath the River Maas in Rotterdam or the entrance to The Hague’s city hall, the intention is always the same: to create a dialogue.

Many things inspire Roosegaarde, as he tells us during an interview in his studio in Waddinxveen, southern Holland, but the prerequisites remain the same: to interrogate the surrounding reality and forge a new dynamism in otherwise static places, using technology to trigger social dynamics.

Imitating nature is also a recurrent factor in the works produced by Studio Roosegaarde and, judging by some comments made by artist during our conversation, this theme will become more important in some future works which will move in the direction of biomimicry.

The artist’s work features major technological content and in Lotus, for example, the artist employs a special metal sheet that reacts to the visitors’ body-heat, opening and displaying wonderful light compositions when stimulated by the public and closing like a flower at night when left alone. Lotus Dome was recently exhibited in Zedekiah’s Cave, beneath the Old City of Jerusalem where Solomon is said to have erected his first temple, for the Jerusalem Light Festival in Israel.

Roosegaarde talks about his most recent, and in some ways most interesting, works such as Smart Highways, a project in collaboration with Heijmans, a Dutch motorway company. It is intended to improve motorway surfacing with the use of fluorescent paint, which absorbs light during the day and releases it at night, creating lighting with zero consumption. Another innovative solution will be a paint that becomes visible only below (or above) a certain temperature. This could, for instance, reveal snowflake compositions on the motorway surface in an invitation to travellers to drive carefully. A first trial stretch of motorway will be installed in the Brabant area, southern Holland, at the end of the year.

Roosegaarde claims that, more than all else, it is roads that impact on our rural scenery but nothing has been done to improve them in recent decades. With this in mind, the Smart Highways initiative strives to make them and motorways, in particular, simpler and more intuitive – for greater safety and respect of the surrounding environment.

Another recent creation is Crystal, an induction-based light installation in which an electrified carpet conducts electricity by electromagnetic induction to crystals placed on it. If a crystal is removed, the light emanated goes off, only to come on again if it is placed back in contact with the carpet. The crystals, Daan tells us, are quite simply LEDs linked to a copper coil that induces an electromagnetic field if placed close to the electric carpet, switching the diode on. LEDs in different colours, around which special natural-salt crystals have been grown, produce fascinating effects, with light fluctuations (caused by tension changes in the magnetic field) similar to those of stars. The installation interacts with the public via sensors in the carpet on which visitors can walk and the light from the crystals reacts to the information recorded by the sensors.

The work invites and challenges observers to take responsibility for the installation. Anyone can “steal” a crystal but this will make the installation disappear. While talking about this dualism between work and user, Daan addresses the subject of intellectual property and open sourcing, now the order of the day in the creative community. Roosegaarde admits that some of his future works will embrace the Open Design ideology to draw closer to communities that use them. Next autumn, for instance, after an official inauguration at Strjp-S, (a former industrial zone in Eindhoven that is undergoing urban regeneration), the technical details of Crystal will be made public so that anyone can create new ones to add to the installation, filling the void left by those removed by other visitors and shifting the responsibility for keeping the installation alive to the surrounding community.

After a long chat on the future of his studio and his desire to produce large-scale projects to reach and support a broader public, Daan gives us a tour of his workplace, showing us the fibreglass models for his forthcoming installation in Stockholm where he will occupy 50 metres of public ground with a reinterpretation of Marbles (an urban lighting work recently created in Almere). In this space, a few hundred metres in size, we observe all his different production phases. From sketches and models to 1:1 scale prototypes.

The artist develops nearly every step of the process internally, passing through the different phases in which prototyping and design go hand in hand. Here, designers, programmers, engineers and artists work hand in glove to create intuitive and responsive installations in the hope of filling the void that still exists between technology and society, innovation and tradition, global and local.

Experiencing light

Domus visits Daan Roosegaarde's studio, where artists, designers, programmers, engineers and artists work hand in glove to create intuitive and responsive installations in the hope of filling the void that still exists between technology and society, innovation and tradition, global and local.

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