Daan Roosegaarde: Interactive Landscapes

FROM THE BOOK

"Roosegaarde's work requires no instructions for use or signage. There is no interface that mediates between hand, eye or body and complex technology. In fact, the work itself is usually the interface. Roosegaarde’s art is first and foremost about the users, just like real products and their design in the primary sense of the word. Remarkably, the modern-day quest to identify the difference between design and art, or even eliminate that difference, seems irrelevant to his work. Art critic Camiel van Winkel and design critic Max Bruinsma both claim to have coined the idea that design is evolving into art while all art has become design. That inversion is within the same universe. In its new habitat of galleries and museums, design has adopted the codes of art in order to focus attention on the designer’s intentions. There are no users interfering with the designer: the white space allows the unique design object to shine while protecting it from obtrusive interpretations from the 'real world'. Art has established itself as a one-dimensional representation in a world where reference, source and meaning are obscured. These processes are barely discernible in Daan Roosegaarde’s interactive installations: the works of art can be used here, but they are products without a function."

Timo de Rijk, excerpted from Daan Roosegaarde: Interactive Landscapes.