Studio Drift - Coded Nature

The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents the debut museum solo of Studio Drift from April 25–August 26, 2018. In addition to early designs, the exhibition features new, previously unseen work by the Dutch duo Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta—the founders of Studio Drift. Specially for the presentation at the Stedelijk, Studio Drift will create the largest-ever installation of Fragile Future. At the core of the installation will be Fragile Future Chandelier 3.5 (2012) acquired by the museum in 2015. Another highlight is Drifter, a floating concrete monolith measuring four by two by two meters. After making its world première at New York’s Armory Show in 2017, this magical installation will be on display in the IMC Gallery at the Stedelijk. The film Drifters (2016) and the installation Elementism (2018) go on view for the first time. In total, the presentation comprises eight of Studio Drift’s room-filling installations, together with a selection of films.

The work of Studio Drift occupies a unique place at the interface between tech art, performance, and biodesign. As a museum that has always placed great importance on both art and design, and performance, the Stedelijk Museum is the perfect venue to display this transdisciplinary work. Gordijn and Nauta engage with contemporary topics such as sustainability, the meaning of natural processes for today’s environment, and issues raised by the use of augmented reality. Their work focuses attention on a society in flux, shaped by the impact of fast-paced innovations, without judging.

Man-nature-technology
The changing relationships between man, nature and technology are the focus of Studio Drift’s work. Their first project, Fragile Future, now an iconic series of light sculptures of dandelion heads individually applied to LED lights, brought the duo international renown. Over the years, the work evolved into a system composed of modules, and can be combined in various configurations. Placing and gluing the dandelion seeds to the LEDs is an extremely labor-intensive process and can be seen as a form of ‘slow design’. This type of exacting craftsmanship stands in marked contrast with today’s mass production processes. Fragile Future offers a utopian glimpse into our future, in which the forces of two seemingly irreconcilable worlds unite in a bid to survive. Like almost all work by Studio Drift, Fragile Future can be adapted to create a unique composition for any space. Specially for the Stedelijk, the studio will produce the largest-ever installation of Fragile Future, formed around Fragile Future Chandelier 3.5.

Curator Ingeborg de Roode: “We’ve been following Studio Drift for many years. After purchasing Fragile Future Chandelier 3.5 in 2015, we were waiting for the right moment to show the piece at the museum, together with other work by Studio Drift. Now that they have developed a consistent oeuvre throughout more than a decade and gained international acclaim with pieces such as Concrete Storm and Drifter, this is the perfect moment to present the first survey of their work in the Netherlands.”