Responsible for illuminating the skies over the popular Burning Man Festival with a swarm of drones in 2018, light and technology driven art collective DRIFT collaboratively create installations and performances about the relationship between nature and technology.
Read MoreDRIFT (also known as Studio Drift) was established in 2007 by Ralph Nauta (UK) and Lonneke Gordijn (Netherlands). Gordijn and Nauta met while studying at the Design Academy Eindhoven and soon began to develop a collaborative practice. Their design background comes into play in the awareness of space and architecture, and the blurring of boundaries between design object and art.
Collaborating, over the years with scientists, computer programmers, musicians, and engineers, the founding duo have built up an interdisciplinary team working from their Amsterdam studio.
From kinetic installations to drone-based projects, DRIFT's art has sought to create fusions between the apparent opposites of nature and technology. New technological techniques convey forms and concepts extrapolated from nature in order to inspire a human reconnection to the planet.
An upscaling of the earlier concept of Dandelion Lights, first conceived and produced in 2007, DRIFT's 'Fragile Future' light installations, present floating grids of electric dandelion lights. Produced by attaching real dandelion seeds to perfectly-sized LED light bulbs, these hybrid flowers are arranged in a variety of conductive copper grids arrays.
Marrying nature with electronic light, a universal symbol of life, they present a vision of a hopeful future of natural and technological harmony.
Making its début at Burning Man in 2018, Franchise Freedom comprises a formation of 300 light bearing drones, that move together in a performance guided by a custom-made algorithm based on autonomous movements of natural swarms.
Exploring ideas of freedom through mimicry of the natural group behaviour of swarms of creatures like bees, starlings, and schools of fish, the works interrogate the tension between the human concept of individual freedom and the idea of safety in numbers through social constructs.
Franchise Freedom has also been performed over NASA's Kennedy Space Centre, accompanied by music from Duran Duran, to mark the 50th anniversary of the moon Landings in 2019, and over the River Maas in Rotterdam in 2020 to honour frontline healthcare workers. DRIFT stated of the Rotterdam edition 'In these uncertain times, nature offers support and gives the only direction we can trust.'
Begun in 2018, DRIFT's ongoing 'Materialism' series examines the raw material composition of everyday objects that surround us, from a pencil to a Volkswagen Beetle. Reflecting the geometric abstraction and deconstructive approach of Modernists like Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, the sculptures in this series are the result of analysing and reducing objects to rectangular blocks of the natural elements that comprise them.
With each block representative of the exact quantity of the material from which the subject is made, attention is drawn to humanity's exploitation of the earth's natural resources that occupies our delay lives.
First appearing as a performance activated installation by DRIFT at New York's Armory in 2017, but later expressed in film in 2018, 'Drifters' are impossibly floating monolithic concrete blocks. Divorced from their context as base blocks of construction, they float in space seemingly seeking their origins or their future as part of a greater whole.
Adaptable to large scale environments, DRIFT has produced permanent and temporary installations for public spaces internationally. One of their earliest contributions was The Particle Plan (2014), a collaborative project with four Dutch design studios to create an illumination scheme for Lucerne's historic Chapel bridge.
In 2018 DRIFT created the motion activated installation Meadow, for the Chodov Shopping Centre in Prague. Representing an inverted landscape, flower like forms with a central light 'bloom' and retract to the ceiling in a dance that responds to the movement of people below. Versions have appeared in gallery shows and other public installations since.
An extension of the design principle of the earlier work In 20 steps, presented on a large scale at the Venice Biennial in 2015, DRIFT's Amplitude (2021) designed for the lobby of New York's Rockefellar building marks the artists' first permanent commission in the U.S.
DRIFT has been the subject of solo exhibitions and group exhibitions around the world.
Solo exhibitions include Past, Present, Future, Pace Gallery, New York (2021); Fragile Future, the Shed, New York (2021); Studio Drift, Amos Rex, Helsinki (2019); Studio Drift: Meadow, Newfields, Indianapolis (2019); Studio Drift: Coded Nature, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018).
Group exhibitions include: Second Nature, Lehmann Maupin, Carpenters Workshop Gallery Summer Pop-up, Aspen CO (2021); Dysfunctional, Galleria Giorgio Franchetti alla Ca'd'Oro, Venice, (2019); Dreaming Out Loud—Designing for Tomorrow's Demands, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2016); What is Luxury, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (2015); Lightopia, Design Museum Gent (2014); Curious Minds, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem (2011); In Praise of Shadows, Victoria and Albert Museum (2009); Becoming Dutch/Eindhoven Caucus, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2007).
DRIFT's website can be found here and DRIFT's Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2021
