Niklas Roy

I'm Niklas Roy, a machine builder, an artist, an engineer, sometimes a designer and always curious about how things work. And as making things seems to be the best way for finding out how things work - making things is my most beloved activity.

Unfortunately, I'm unable to categorize my work. But at least, I could manage to list it up many things that I've made in the past. This incomplete list can be found on my webpage. I want to encourage everyone, who has more distance to myself than I have, to find out what I'm working on. And to categorize it. And when you've found the category, please tell me.

For the Summercamp in Ghent, of course I'd like to build something. Maybe it will be a machine which works somehow by itself in the city? Or perhaps it will be a tool which just works within a sort of performance that is carried out in the city? Who knows? I don't. But what I know is, that this all depends a lot on what the other Summercampers are up to. I'm open.

Fountain-idea

"The fountain that you have shown me on the picture is a very nice gift from the Ghent city council to the public. It provides a refreshing ambience on hot Summer days to people which spend their time in the park. But the fountain is also quite a big system - and the service that it provides is very general and not individual at all. It accesses all people at the same time in the same way. For me, it is comparable to something like an old style TV-station. It broadcasts continously its one program and you as the viewer only can decide either to view it or not. But you don't have any further choice about the quality of the program. In an age, where we can all generate, remix and transmit individual programs via various technologies, big general systems like this fountain seem a bit "last century"-fashioned.

In my project, I'd like to tap the fountain. Via water-wheels, I want to use it as a source for low power electric energy. This energy will drive a set of little fountains, all designed different, and all mounted inside different plastic buckets. Those little fountains will be rented out to the people which spend their leisure time in the park. The little individual fountains are all connected with long cables to the power generating water wheel in the big fountain. The small fountains are mobile and they can be distributed inside the whole park. So if a couple of friends decides to sit 50 metres away of the big fountain, they can have their own little fountain in the middle of their group. For entertainment and refreshment."

http://niklasroy.com/