Rhythms of Nature: The Art and Design of DRIFT
The 2022 Collab Design Excellence Award honors DRIFT, the Amsterdam-based studio co-founded in 2007 by Lonneke Gordijn (b. 1980) and Ralph Nauta (b. 1978). DRIFT is a multidisciplinary practice that freely bridges the categories of art and design. The studio has grown over fifteen years from its founding duo into a team of more than sixty members, producing sculptures, environments, and performances that offer striking commentaries and speculative imaginings about humanity’s relationships with nature and technology.
Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta. Photo by Teska Overbeek. Courtesy of DRIFT.
DRIFT’s immersive artworks draw on the iterative, collaborative, and problem-solving dimensions of design practice, but they often play out at the architectural and urban scale in the studio’s interactive installations. Gordijn and Nauta both graduated from the prestigious Design Academy Eindhoven, one of Europe’s foremost centers for innovative design, and the studio has exhibited in numerous art and design fairs, biennales, and museums, garnering accolades for a body of work that seeks to reconnect people with the rhythms and structures of the natural world.
Gordijn and Nauta’s work points out both parallels and tensions between the artificial and the organic, turning a critical eye on our digital age while aiming to foster hope for the future through moments of contemplation, emotion, and beauty. Reframing technology as a natural part of human existence rather than something foreign to it, Gordijn and Nauta also see nature itself as a kind of technology worthy of study and emulation by artists and designers.
Fragile Future (detail), 2007, by DRIFT, Amsterdam. Photo by Henning Rogge. Courtesy of DRIFT.
Accompanying the Design Excellence Award, the exhibition Rhythms of Nature: The Art and Design of DRIFT (on view in the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Collab Gallery) presents present an immersive sampling of the studio’s cross-disciplinary creativity. It also explores how the studio’s immersive artworks come to life through the complementary practices of design and engineering. DRIFT draws on many types of knowledge and skill in a collaborative process that mirrors the interdependent, evolutionary qualities of the natural systems that inspire them.
Fragile Future, 2007; phosphor bronze, dandelion seeds, LEDs. Shown as installed at The Shed, New York, 2021. Courtesy of DRIFT.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a site-specific iteration of Fragile Future, one of DRIFT’s most recognizable and influential works. Many of us can recall the delight of blowing dandelion seeds into the air, propagating the next generation of flowers—a common playful gesture that suggests how the human and natural worlds are deeply entangled. This evocative installation embodies DRIFT’s longstanding interest in such interconnections, with real dandelion seeds painstakingly glued onto LEDs to mimic the natural shape of the flowerheads. These replicated blossoms are caught within a matrix of delicate bronze circuitry, which allude to the technological webs we have woven at massive scales in the digital age. But the organic presence of the flowers—and the skilled labor of the work’s fabrication—offer the hope of reconciliation between the natural and the human-made. In Fragile Future, as the artists have written, “two seemingly opposite evolutions have made a pact to survive together.”
Fragile Future originated as Gordijn’s graduation project at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Its current form came about through a considered process of research and engineering, balancing the contrasting needs and properties of organic and inorganic materials through a combination of hand craftsmanship and machine production. Made up from many individual circuit modules, the work can grow—much like an organism—to occupy different types of spaces and create different kinds of experiences.
Another key pillar of the exhibition is the Ghost Collection. Initially debuted at the 2008 Salone del Mobile fair in Milan, this series of furniture works represented a key moment of arrival on the international scene for the studio.
Ghost Collection; 2008; laser-etched acrylic. Shown as installed at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2018. Courtesy of DRIFT.
At first glance, the transparent furniture works have straightforward geometric forms, referring to the rigid geometry familiar to modernist design. But a closer look—and the right lighting—reveals organic shapes floating inside the hard-edged silhouettes. For the artists, these ghostly forms suggest how designed things might possess their own “inner selves” separate from human intentions. Reinforcing this sense of personality, the different chairs of the collection refer to historic hierarchies of furniture in aristocratic settings, where larger and more elaborate seats were reserved for those of higher social status.
Queen Chair from the Ghost Collection, 2008. Courtesy of DRIFT.
The Ghost Collection also illustrates DRIFT’s boundary-pushing experiments in digital fabrication. The studio developed a unique laser-etching technique where two intersecting laser beams create tiny air bubbles inside the acrylic body of the work, gradually building up the intertwined forms. The artists characterize the result as “the ghost of the future … trapped in the realities of earlier forms and styles.”
DRIFT process materials exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2018. Courtesy of DRIFT.
DRIFT’s immersive, visually dynamic artworks begin life at a smaller scale in the studio, evolving through an intensive, hands-on design process. The models, drawings, prototypes on view in the exhibition form an archive of the studio’s experiments that lead to finished works, each of which strikes a balance between aesthetics and engineering. The different skills and forms of knowledge behind these materials and technologies highlight the multidisciplinary nature of the studio and illustrate DRIFT’s exploratory approach to creation.
Inspired by the flocking behavior of birds, the shifting illumination patterns of Flylight point to the essential tensions between collective and individual existence. At what point does “safety in numbers” limit freedom—and at what point does individual liberty jeopardize the group? Prototypes and sketches for Flylight on view in the Collab Gallery reveal how DRIFT gradually refined the forms of the glass tubes, the engineering of the lighting components, and the spatial arrangement of the hanging artwork’s various interations. The studio also developed custom interactive software that allows Flylight to respond to the movement of people around it, further reinforcing its bird-like behavior.
The kinetic quality of the natural world, where even the simplest organisms can adapt to their environments, is a recurring theme in DRIFT’s work. Shylight, for example, is inspired by the subtle movements of flowers throughout the day. The studio’s material research resulted in a soft, robotic canopy that can rise and descend, expand or retreat, with irregular movements full of life-like personality. Shylight’s seemingly effortless motion, though, is carefully designed from start to finish, enabled by precision hardware and custom software that generates its choreography.
Building on the same platform as Shylight and deepening its floral associations, Meadow adopts an expressive palette of color in both its lighting and fabric elements. DRIFT also incorporated sensors and software that allow the work to respond with varying “moods” in the presence of viewers. The artists have written that artificial objects “tend to have a static form, while everything natural in this world, including people, is subject to constant metamorphosis and adaptation to its surroundings.” Evoking DRIFT’s central inspiration of the natural world, Shylight and Meadow both explore a question the artists ask of their own work: “How can an inanimate object mimic those changes that express character and emotions?”
Tree of Ténéré turns a more historical eye on human-nature relations. The Tree of Ténéré was the name given to an acacia tree that stood alone in the central Sahara Desert in Niger, a sole survivor of a greener period in the region’s past. The tree was a landmark for caravans and nomadic communities, while its poignant isolation fascinated officers and missionaries of the French colonial presence there from the late 1800s into the 1950s. The tree was destroyed in 1973 by a truck, but DRIFT revived its spirit—and its function as a gathering space—with this sculpture, which debuted at the 2017 Burning Man festival in the northern Nevada desert and was revisited in a Dallas installation in 2021. The large artificial tree, with its ever-changing illumination, was realized through the same combination of computational design and hand craftsmanship that characterizes much of DRIFT’s work.
Over its fifteen-year history, DRIFT has moved from creation of isolated objects into a more environmental and experiential approach to art, design, and performance, pushing the envelope of aesthetic expression in the digital age. Layering evocative conceptual prompts with a love of clever technical solutions, Gordijn and Nauta offer visitors to the Collab Gallery a set of timely—and beautiful—reflections on the ways we police the boundary between natural and artificial. And with the studio’s selection for the 2022 Design Excellence Award, Collab opens itself up to important conversations on the blurring of disciplinary categories, the poetics of technology, and the role of art and design in shaping our own fragile futures.
