44 MARCH 2016 ENVIRONMENTAL ART
to such a degree that the air in the surrounding area becomes
measurably cleaner and healthier to breathe. Roosegaard’s
machine, theSmog Free Tower,which uses as much energy as a
household vacuum cleaner, is dramatic, playful and somewhat
extravagant. It is clearly not, in itself, a solution to the world’s
pollution problems, but it is an emissary of hope, allowing us
to imagine that we could someday remedy the global crisis
through an audacious and confident use of technology.
Many of Roosegaarde’s supporters were in attendance at the
opening of the “Smog Free Project”: the mayor ofRotterdam,
officials from the Port of Rotterdam, art- and business-world
collaborators, and personal friends—all interested in environmental
concerns; the intersection of art, design and technology; and the
future of the city as a center for innovation. Present, too, was a
Studio Roosegaarde jewelry artist who was turning the black soot
we breathe every day into rings and cufflinks—another component
of Roosegaarde’s innovative project. The pollutants sucked into
theSmog Free Towerare harvested and then compressed to form
miniature cubes, which are placed in a setting, trapped in clean
air and sealed in acrylic. The sale of these objects (at around $285
each) has allowed Roosegaarde to fund the concept without relying
on big business branding. With each purchase, customers buy the
world 35,000 cubic feet of clean air. Crowdsourcing launched and
now sustains theSmog Free Project, and Roosegaarde hopes it will
also help to create a movement in support of cleaner air. TheSmog
Free Towerwill travel around the world.
Roosegaarde is an “infiltrator,” he says, “a hippie with a busi-
ness plan.”^7 His goal is to bring the potential of the future to the
present. As Smithson once wrote, “What the artist seeks is coher-ence and order—not ‘truth,’ correct statements, or proofs. He seeks
the fiction that reality will sooner or later imitate.”^8
Roosegaarde’s “Smog Free Project”encourages us to ask:
How do we become aware of the dirt we are inhaling every
day? How can we clean the air and make it breathable? What is to
be learned from nature? Can we turn dross into gold, coal into dia-
monds, soot into something elegant and crystalline? The questions
are both literal and metaphoric, and they demand our engagement.
Quoting Marshall McLuhan, Roosegaarde reminds us, “There are
no passengers on the Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.”^9
For change to occur, humans need to desire what does not yet
exist. There could scarcely be a better strategy to achieve this than
enabling us to breathe clean air—something simple and primal
that reminds us everyday what has been lost, what might be done
to reclaim it, and how the imaginative use of technology in concert
with the making of art could be central to such a transformation.- Robert Smithson,Robert Smithson: he Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, Berkeley,
University of California Press, 1996, p. 154. - Ibid., p. 165.
- Ibid., p. 49.
- Quoted in Diane Mehta, “Designer Daan Roosegaarde on Highways, Jellyish, and
Clients Who Say ‘Yes, But,’” forbes.com, May 16, 2013. - “Sustainable Dance Floor,” project description, studioroosegaarde.net.
- Daan Roosegaarde in conversation with the author, Studio Roosegaarde, Rotterdam,
Netherlands, Sept. 3, 2015. - Quoted in Mehta.
- Smithson, p. 91.
- Daan Roosegaarde in conversation with the author. McLuhan made this remark
in 1964 in response to a somewhat similar statement by Buckminster Fuller one year
earlier. SeeEncyclopedia of World Environmental History, ed. S. Krech III, J.R. McNeill
and C. Merchant, New York and London, Routledge, 2004, vol. 1, p. 356.
Rainbow Station,
2014-15, custom
light source and
liquid crystal lenses
projected onto
Amsterdam Central
Station.