LONDON.- The art world’s latest interpretation of the global craze for touch-based technology has arrived in London, with an impressive new exhibition set to be unveiled in Canary Wharf on 9 January.

‘Marbles’, a new interactive artwork by Dutch artist and designer Daan Roosegaarde, recent winner of the prestigious Design for Asia Award, features eight spectacular glowing forms which come alive upon human touch, using sound and colour to communicate to people in the vicinity and to each other. The exhibition runs until 2 March 2012 in Jubilee Park, on top of the Canary Wharf Jubilee Line Station.

Keith Watson from Canary Wharf Group, which curates an award-winning public art collection and programme, said “Roosegarde’s Marbles reflects the demise of traditional childhood games, such as marbles, and the current obsession with interactive technology, questioning how it can be used in a more social manner.”

“This shows how art reflects, and often spearheads, the recent rapid change in interactive technology. We can expect to see more of this in future, not only at Canary Wharf, but around the world.”

As dusk falls, the park will come alive with Roosegaarde’s Marbles, their glowing forms, complementing the spectacular London Ice Sculpting Festival taking place at Canary Wharf on Friday 13 and Saturday 14 January 2012.

Marbles is part of Canary Wharf Group’s annual Winter Lights exhibition, where artists and designers using light and occasionally sound have literally lit up the dark days of winter. It follows last winter’s bit.fall by German artist Julius Popp, another breathtaking artwork using technology and digital media, which produced an ever-changing cascade of words derived from a live newsfeed, a wall of water falling into Middle Dock in Canary Wharf.

Canary Wharf Group recently launched Sculpture at Canary Wharf: A Decade of Exhibitions, a beautiful commemorative book celebrating a decade of Canary Wharf’s award-winning exhibition programme.

Daan Roosegaarde
Artist and architect Daan Roosegaarde (born 1979) explores the dawn of a new nature that is evolving from technological innovations by creating interactive landscapes that instinctively respond to sound and movement. Roosegaarde’s remarkable works of art function as a documentation of the dynamic relation between architecture, people, and technology.

His sculptures, such as ‘Dune’ and ‘Intimacy’, are tactile high-tech environments in which viewer and space become one. This connection, established between ideology and technology, results in what Roosegaarde calls “techno-poetry”.

In 2009, Roosegaarde won the Dutch Design Award. He has been the focus of exhibitions at Tate Modern, the National Museum in Tokyo, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and various public spaces in Rotterdam and Hong Kong. In December 2011 Roosegaarde was winner of the Design for Asia Award.