GROW

Rotterdam, The Netherlands

Inspired by scientific light recipes that improve the growth and resilience of plants, Daan Roosegaarde and his team sought to answer important questions of agricultural innovation: how can cutting-edge light design help plants grow more sustainably; how can we make the farmer the hero?

Most of the time, we scarcely notice the large tracts of land that are responsible for feeding us. We look upon these fields as vacant, empty and uninhabited, and yet they are teeming with the life that sustains us. GROW was designed to bring an awareness of the beauty of agriculture by turning an enormous field into a luminous dreamscape of red and blue waves of light.

The poetic ‘dancing light’ effect of GROW was created using a design-based light ‘recipe’ which shines across 20,000 square metres of farmland growing leek. Light science technology in photobiology has found that certain combinations of blue, red and ultraviolet light can enhance plant growth and reduce the use of pesticides by up to 50%.

The light display was created using four systems of light recipes on solar batteries. Precision lightning was focussed horizontally across a controlled area, which extended the effect of the sunlight for a short time. The installation could only be seen from nearby to avoid light pollution.

GROW was created as part of the artist-in-residence program of Rabobank and is the first in a series of dreamscapes by Studio Roosegaarde, which show the beauty of combining art and science to create a better world. GROW helps us understand how light can benefit plants, but it is also a call for enlightenment during these dark times—to send out a hopeful light when people need it most. By reframing the landscape as a living cultural artwork, GROW also gives a new meaning to the word ‘agri-culture’.

Project Credits

Halo

London, United Kingdom

2018

In a transient moment, when wind, sun, water and technology aligned perfectly, a sculpture of sunlight appeared. This was Halo: a circle of light created by an array of 99 robotic mirrors, which move like sunflowers throughout the day to catch the sun. Each mirror reflected a line of sunlight into the mist of water, with these beams interacting to create Halo.

Halo was presented in the Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court at Somerset House. When the artists, Kimchi and Chips, visited Somerset House, they were struck by the quality and colour of the sunlight in the courtyard, as it reflected from the surrounding building, and the way in which the architecture aligned with the midday sun. This isolated volume of natural light and wind, contained within the architecture of the building, presented itself as a canvas.

Kimchi and Chip’s projects explore the idea of ‘drawing in the air’, often using light as a medium. Halo is the first large-scale project in which the artists have worked solely with natural light and embraced the unpredictability of the weather, collaborating directly with the natural fluctuations of the climate.

To create the sculpture the artists built a heliostat array to draw lines of sunlight into an atomised mist of water. A careful balance between nature and technology had to occur, so that the formation of the circle of light was both a coincidence and an inevitability. The viewer could never know at which exact moment Halo would form, only that it eventually would appear, if they looked for long enough. At the moment that Halo emerged in the air, the transience of life and the eternal nature of the sun briefly superimposed, creating a form that exists at the boundary between the material and immaterial.

Project Credits

Kimchi and Chips

Somerset House

Studio Sungshin

Hurst Peirce + Malcolm LLP

Dynamixel

Rulr

Arts Council Korea

Arts Council England

Gwangju Design Biennale

Somerset House Trust

Korean Cultural Centre UK

Media Credits

Kimchi and Chips (1–6)