Week 5-6-7-8: Along with the ideas

Hello dear viewer,

During the past weeks we've tried to think of something concrete for our project. Using the principles of "De Stijl" and especially the aspects of the painting by Piet Mondriaan, we wanted to create an emersive and interactive experience.

After a presentation at the "Van Abbe Museum" we had a lot of positive feedback about the way we were heading with the project. One of the key point was that we had to think of the "Why?" behind the project alot. A big part of this side, for us, was the principles of the painting itself. Angela wanted us to add our own twist to the concept.

The Cube

After a lot of brainstorming and figuring out how we could give a better and maybe easier realisable twist to our project, we came up with the cube. We went a bit more into the further details and prepared the concept to show it to our teachers. They were both really enthousiastic about is, which ofcourse pleased us.

The cube would be a cube made of glass or another material to that extent and filled with smoke/water/another substance. By using beamers from different sides we could project beams through the cube, creating a 3d mondriaan idea.



We made a presentation for this concept, and Angela agreed with it, still emphasising that the story behind our project should be solid and believable.

Here is a link to the presentation

When we discussed the project with teachers at Fontys, they though the project wouldn't work out, visually as well as economically. After testing a small and early version of the project however, we found out that with a bit of tweaking and using cheap methods like ping-meters with arduino's, the project should be manageable.

We met with Angela and she was very enthousiastic about what she had seen so far. There are still a lot of possibilities to further improve the experience of visitors, like using smoke in the room around the cube to make the beams go through the entire room. This would emphasise the infinity of the beams, which is also present in the painting by Piet Mondriaan. Angela will try to arrange a separate room for us to work on our project, where we could test the changes we would make right away.

The time has come to start building on our physical artwork. We will start with a list of required materials to start building the cube and install the beamers in the right position. Using AS 3.0, we should be able to read the signals of arduino ping-meters, and therefore make the artwork interactive.

We will keep you up-to-date with further progress as we move on. We got a holiday-week coming up now, so we will start the construction and programming progress in 2 weeks.


Yours sincerely,
Fontys Baltan Group 3 2011

Week 3-4: Brainstorms

Hello dear viewer,

Week 3

During this week we brainstormed for several options to create something for the second assignment: "The Antisublime".

We went to a smaller room in our school-building and made use of the whiteboard over there.
Here is a picture of the whiteboard with brainstorm.

One of our ideas was to make use of a water-tank to display the invisible weight of people passing by. We noticed that we were thinking about possible techniques for realisation way too early, as we were told not to think about that aspect just yet.

Eventually we thought of creating a sort of sine in the watertank, displaying the sound people would make in front of the tank. This would be an interactive piece of work.
Below is a video of a simple animation which we made to explain the concept a bit further to our teachers.


The water bubbles would be created by compressing air into the tank in a time and place specific patern.


Right before the conversation with our teachers, another concept came to mind. The idea was to make sound from a certain direction and someone's presence visible through different pieces of "blankets" being formed into a cube within a room.
On the back of these pieces several beamers would project light, whom's colour and intensity would depend on the volume and tone of sound. The lights would move alongside the person within the room, creating a spectacular patern on the sides.

Unfortunately, we do not have any visual appearance of this concept.



Week 4

During this week we became more and more interested in the first assignment, considering "De Stijl". We wanted to create a new, more advanced way of looking at a painting by the artist Piet Mondriaan.

Focussing on the painting, which was made of only 90 degrees corners and the basic colors white, blue, red and yellow, we started coming up with ideas.
Our first plan was to show the painting on a wall, being 3d, so that the person could emerge into the painting.

Our second idea had our preference though. We would create a floor which would light up in colors and patterns of the mondriaan painting, projecting the colors onto the floors and adding different kinds of effect to it.
You can view the document here


Yours Sincerely,
Fontys Baltan Group 3 2011

Week 1-2: The assignments

Hello dear viewer,

In this blogpost we describe our first 2 weeks in the project

Week 1

During our first week of the project we met with our colleague-students of the group.
At first, we made a list of rules considering the basic ways of behaviour during the project. With a yellow and red card system we will maintain the right attitude from everyone within the project.
We found out that we were all students following the course "ICT & Media Design", meaning that we should all watch out for overextended use of complicated techniques.

However, we were all willing to learn on this aspect of the minor "Lifestyle".

We also Received a document containing the mail-correspondence between Peter Verbeek, our assisting teacher from Fontys, and Angela Plohman, Director of Baltan Laboratories.
Here you can find the document


Week 2

Following up, during the second week, we got the descriptions for 2 assignments from which we could choose.

The first assignment was one describing an idea around "De Stijl".
Here you can find a picture of the document.

The second assigment was about "The Antisublime" by Lev Manovich.
Here you can find a picture of the document.

Our first preference lay with the second assignment, making the invisible visible
in a stylish way. We will keep you posted with any further progress.


Yours sincerely,
Fontys Baltan Group 3 2011

Welcome to our Baltan Project

Hello dear viewer,

As a group of students studying at Fontys Hogescholen ICT in Eindhoven, we will keep you up to date with our latest progress using this blog. Over here you can find reports about brainstorms, meetings and technical + visual progress of the project.

We will also post reports about presentations and the feedback related to these presentations.


Yours sincerely,
Fontys Baltan Group 3 2011