Daan Roosegaarde is a Dutch artist whose installations include a distinctly practical component. His work often includes light design and sensors to enable direct interaction from the audience, or they include an element to change the environment in which they exist.
By merging art and technology into an urban space, Roosegaarde creates a vision of the future in our current cities. He considers concepts such as clean air and clean energy to be fundamental to our daily lives, a point he underscores with installations which seek to purify their environment.
Encapsulated in the Dutch word schoonheid (beauty, a quality pleasing to the eye), Roosegaarde seeks to create clean beauty, art which improves the world around it in a tangible sense.
Nowhere is that more apparent than in his smog free project, a series of three designs which removes impurities from the air. The largest being Smog Free Tower, at 7 meters tall, this installation can filter 30,000 cubic meters of air per hour, converting the impurities into jewelry.
His other works include Urban Sun, a system which claims to be able to remove 99.9% of airborne viruses, including COVID, using far-ultraviolet light and SPARK, organic, biodegradable firework alternatives.
