Arnold Jan

I have a background as Interaction Designer and Consultant Interactive Media.I work at the Haagse Hogeschool, teach Interaction Design and work on a new curriculum.

Lab 1 Short movie: An other trip to the moon 

Steampunk

Steampunk is a genre which came into prominence during the 1980s and early 1990s and incorporates elements of science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, horror, and speculative fiction. It involves a setting where steam power is widely used but incorporates elements of either science fiction or fantasy.

Works of steampunk often feature anachronistic technology, or futuristic innovations as Victorians might have envisioned them, based on a Victorian perspective on fashion, culture, architectural style, and art. This technology includes such fictional machines as those found in the works of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne

Le voyage dans la lune, Georges Méliès

One of the first films of this genre is Georges Méliès' film Le voyage dans la lune. It is a silent movie that is loosely based on the novels "De la Terre à la Lune" by Jules Verne en "The First Men in the Moon"  by H.G. Wells.

A trip to the moon, Jules Verne

This story by Jules is considered to be one of the first science fiction / steampunk novels "avant la lettre". The story was published in 1865. It is about an attempt to travel to the moon. A capsule is shot by a giant canon. The three moon travelers inside the capsule do not succeed to land on the moon but travel around it.

Jules Verne became famous by his predictions about the development of science and technology. He predicted a trip to moon 100 years before it happened. Some of his predictions were quite accurate. In his novel the capsule landed in the see and the launch was at Cape Canaveral. Both events became true.

Short movie: An other trip to the moon

In this short movie I made a "mash up" of illustrations from Jules Verne’s novel, the movie by Georges Méliès and footage of the real Apollo 11 trip to the moon. The film compares the fiction with the facts.

Lab 2 Installation: Cat in the box

Schrödinger's cat

Schrödinger's cat is a thought experiment, sometimes described as a paradox, devised by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger in 1935. It illustrates what he saw as the problem of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics applied to everyday objects. The scenario presents a cat that might be alive or dead, depending on an earlier random event. The thought experiment is also often featured in theoretical discussions of the interpretation of quantum mechanics. In the course of developing this experiment, Schrödinger coined the term Verschränkung (entanglement).

The thought experiment

A cat is put in a box, along with a deadly device. In a Geiger counter, there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small that perhaps in the course of the hour, one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none. If it happens, the counter tube discharges, and through a relay releases a hammer that shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. But there is also a possibility that the cat is dead. You will never know for sure. Therefore the cat is dead and alive at the same time.

The installation

We constructed an installation that is inspired by the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment. In our installation the cat exists in two parallel universes. The state of the cat, dead or alive, can be observed and changed in the universe outside of the box. The state of the cat inside the box is uncertain. There is some entanglement because when you change the state of the cat outside the box something inside also changes. The cat can be observed by a webcam, directly with your eyes, through a hole, through a mirror. Maybe the way we observe the cat has influence on the state and location of the cat. But we can never be sure.