“Le French May 2015”, a Hong Kong Arts Festival staged an art show with water on the LED screen called “Water Light Graffiti” this last May. In the same period far in Amsterdam, a dream landscape “Waterlicht” was built with LED technology to reflect beautiful waves in the dark sky and cover National Museum Plaza like an underwater city. It is amazing how Art can be presented with same elements but different forms.

“Waterlicht” was designed by Studio Roosegaarde from Netherlands who is famous with designs which can connect and interact between people, art, public area and technology. The founder Daan Roosegaarde is always talent with its unrestrained creativity.. Except “Waterlicht”, Daan’s design also include a Starry Night bicycle path “Van Gogh Path” and smart highway “Glowing Lines” in Netherlands. Now Daan and his team has contribute in industrial design to build the world’s largest smog vacuum cleaner called “The Smog Free Tower” which aims to clean away PM2.5 haze/ smog, one of the Beijing’s nightmares. Compared to his previous purely artistic or commercial designs, Daan is now more dedicated himself to the society and nature with innovation ideas, just like how he named his studio- “City of Tomorrow”.

Waterlicht
It is not only a public art but also a landscape design called “Techno-poetry” by Daan with characteristical of both Netherlands and Roosegaarde. Netherlands is well known of its sea dike design if not most of the lowland will be submerged under the sea level. The studio created a virtual flood and wavy lines of light made with the latest LED technology, software and lenses shown how high the water could reach without human intervention recalling the Dutch’s memory. Although the artwork was temporarily ended, its journey will be continued to create more water awareness.

Smart Highway: Van Gogh Path
Roads should have new looks or changes from time to time. Roosegaarde selected a bicycle path in the town of Eindhoven where Van Gogh lived in 1883 to design an intelligent highway with “Van Gogh – Roosegaarde Path, where history and future meet…” as its slogan. Van Gogh, the famous Dutch painter, was commemorated the 125th anniversary of his death. The path is made of thousands twinkling stones inspired by “Starry Night” with eco-design concept, gravelling to absorb solar energy during the day and shine at the night.

Smart Highway: Glowing Lines
With the same principle of “Van Gogh Path”, the cool luminous intelligent highway “Glowing Lines” in Netherlands coated the pipeline along the road with luminous paint, successfully created a road with sustainable lighting for 8 hours a night by the use of interactive light , solar and traffic information. It saves energy and has been awarded Accenture Innovation Award from the INDEX Award 2013 and is planning to apply in major cities. It may feel like through the time to the future while driving along this road.

The Smog Free Project
The latest technology design projects of Roosegaarde is planned to implement in Beijing this September. Setting up a 7 meter high smoke absorber in Beijing Park, using energy saving and patented ionic technology to absorb and clear Beijing haze, refresh the air for Beijing citizen. Is the idea too good to be true? Its effectiveness is not yet proven but let’s keep our eyes open for this historical technology.

Source from: Studio Roosegaarde, VanGoghVillageNuenen