Art in America - March 2016_

ART IN AMERICA 41

ENVIRONMENTAL ART

Proposals for

a Future World

by Carol Becker

DAAN ROOSEGAARDE—artist, designer and futurist—
opened his 2015 talk at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland, with a film of undulating waterways, vibrating
grasses and a stormy, painterly Dutch Golden Age sky. He talked
about growing up in Nieuwkoop, Netherlands, and how that
memory is still powerfully at the center of his understanding of
nature, beauty, himself and his work. But lest we romanticize
the scenes before us, he quickly made a factual point. Since
one-fourth of the Netherlands is below sea level and 60 percent
is susceptible to flooding, what we were seeing was an aquatic
engineering wonder, made possible by dikes, dams, wind-driven
water pumps (i.e., windmills), canals and floodgates. Technol-
ogy has controlled Holland’s rivers and kept the sea at bay, thus
allowing agriculture and commerce to flourish.
ForWaterlicht, presented at several European locations last
year, Roosegaarde projects blue LED light into urban spaces at
night to create a vaporous layer of “water”—a virtual sea at the

level the ocean would be were it not restrained. Of course the

work is also a cautionary allusion to the height—usually well

over human heads—that the water could reach with climate

change. (In each case, the level of the projection is determined

by the local water board.) Nature, at least in the Netherlands, is

a glorious but highly regulated construct.

Context, place, point of origin and their relationship to

technology are all crucial to the “techno poetics” of design, as

Roosegaarde calls his approach.Dune,an interactive installation,

was the first Roosegaarde piece I encountered live. In a darkened

room off the main hall of the World Economic Forum Conference

Center, various dignitaries waved their arms over a fanciful garden

of flexible plastic reeds with white LED tips. They were dem-

onstrating what they had just learned from Roosegaarde: human

interaction could trigger the reeds to light up the room.

This piece was perfectly suited to such a relatively confined

setting, but most of Roosegaarde’s work is site-specific to large

Daan Roosegaarde’s

Waterlicht, 2015,

LEDs, lenses and

software, projected

in front of the

Rijksmuseum in

Museumplein

Amsterdam.

All images this

article courtesy

Studio Roosegaarde,

Rotterdam.

CURRENTLY

ON VIEW

Daan Roosegaarde’s

outdoor installation

Smog Free Tower,

Rotterdam.

CAROL BECKER

is a professor and

dean of faculty at the

Columbia University

School of the Arts,

New York. See

Contributors page.