DRIFT's drone show lights up the sky on the 50^th jubilee of the Van Gogh Museum

The Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh is a familiar name within and beyond the art world. The expressive line work within his brightly coloured paintings has captivated audiences for well over a century after his passing, cementing his aesthetics as his and his alone; often discussed separately from the post-impressionist movement that he was a part of. An aspect of the artist’s works that has been a point of particular discussion is the illusion of movement Van Gogh created in certain pieces, especially his most famous painting, Starry Night. Through modern technology, there have been several attempts to manifest this movement in the artist’s works, however, few, if any, have done so on the scale that the Amsterdam-based studio DRIFT undertook at the Van Gogh Museum in June this year. The tribute performance unfolded across the night sky, through an aerial show featuring 200 light drones, and was conducted in collaboration with DroneStories and TWOFIFTYK.

DRIFT was co-founded in 2007 by Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta, in order to undertake experiential installation art and art performance projects. Gordijn discusses the studio’s connection to Van Gogh, telling STIR, "First of all, we share the same city and backyard, so I feel a certain connection in that sense. In Van Gogh's paintings, I think that he looked at the movements in nature, aiming to capture the fascinating way that nature is always changing. I look at the natural world in the same way, and this is the foundation of our mission at DRIFT." She explains that the studio has long held a dream to undertake a performance piece at Amsterdam's iconic Museum Square, but owing to permits, it was not possible up until now. That dream has finally been realised through their work for the Van Gogh Museum, the result of which not only stands as a monumental tribute to the Dutch master on the occasion of the 50^th jubilee of the art museum but is also a startling display of DRIFT’s technical expertise.

Creatively, the performance art piece is a technical extension of Franchise Freedom, which is one of the studio’s earlier projects. Gordijn is particular to mention that the studio does not typically take up drone shows, but they acknowledge the technology’s potential for artistic expression and do not shy away from deploying it if they are presented with an interesting creative opportunity.

For this project, the studio went to the heart of their personal fascination with Van Gogh’s style of impressionism: his ability to represent movement in nature. As Gordijn explains, they found it in the wind, in the grass, in the growth of the trees, and the formation of clouds, and created one continuous movement, wherein every form evolved from the previous one. The production team accomplished this by setting the flight paths for their drones by feeding in coordinates to a computer system and also took meticulous care to ensure that there would be no collisions by following an extensive set of safety measures.

DRIFT found it quite challenging to create continuous movements through drone flight that would sustain the attention and interest of attending audiences. Gordijn tells STIR, "Van Gogh used hundreds of thousands of tiny brush strokes while we only could allocate 200 drones in the small flight area allocated to us. It was impossible to use his level of detail, so we had to focus on the essence of his style and elements from his paintings rather than attempting to create complete works. But through the project, we learned that everything comes from something and it was a beautiful experience to link all of the connections in his practice.”

Gordijn does not believe that the quality of Van Gogh’s way of looking at the world, or his vision as it was manifested in paint, needs anything new added to it. However, by challenging themselves to translate the movements that he portrayed to movements in real space, DRIFT was prompted to examine his work in great detail and gained even more admiration and respect for the artist.

Discussing their plans for the future, Gordijn explains that DRIFT is always trying to refine and improve upon their art installation practice, in order to evoke more emotion and develop opportunities for transcendental communication between audiences and the art. "We will continue to develop a deeper understanding of the natural world around us by isolating phenomena and movements from their context, in order to show how they are part of all our natural and man-made systems," she mentions. The duo has something big in the works, which they look forward to announcing soon.