‘Let’s BEAT Waste!? One announcement and one question for the visitors of Glow. The artists from Fontys BeCreative don’t use the word BEAT for nothing. We shall beat that waste! A beautiful ambition that visitors can see with their own eyes and discover. A beating heart, which will be fuller and more perfect when waste is disposed. The interactive artwork exists of two main parts. The enormous mechanical heart that has panels that move and 4 smart trash bins. The bins and the heart are connected by led tubes, whereby visitors get a reaction when they throw waste in the trashcan. As the waste piles up in the four trash bins, the panels close. So that the heart will become complete. Next up the heart will glow and the lights will clump together to a beautiful red heart. The message is clear: keep the city clean.
The heart
The heart represents the state of our community in the city. How cleaner the community, the better the heart is. The trashcans invite people to keep the city clean. The more bins are filled, the bigger the joint art. Fontys BeCreative communicates with glow about recycling, the consumption culture, environmental awareness and how much or how little the actions of an individual have effect on our society. The heart beats triumphantly when people see the effect of their, sometimes little, actions. To make the sustainability circle round, the heart has a low energy consumption and is made of re-used materials.
The team
We are a team of engineering students all following Minor BeCreative at Fontys University of Applied Science. During the minor you learn how to approach technical challenges in a creative way and how to convert that into a concrete project. This year the Glow team consists of nine students, mainly third year students, who follow different studies: Mechatronics, Electrical engineering, Automotive and Product design. For everyone in this group art means something else. It is a collective effort by an artist or multiple artists that causes the individual to take a break from his own life. Dwells on the issue and looks at the resulting artwork from an unfamiliar perspective.
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Acknowledgment
The student team wishes to thank the following organisations for their great support to the project: Glow Eindhoven, Philips, Ergon, Plano Plastics, and Fontys University of Applied Science.