Flow, Exploring Netherlandish Art

Flow combines text and images from the MFA’s Center for Netherlandish Art to educate visitors about Dutch and Flemish culture and history in a way that’s engaging and easy to understand. It shares stories about their deep cultural connections to water, the 17th-century Low Countries as a hub for innovation in the sciences and humanities, and the movement of people into and out of the region, by choice and by force.

Each interactive piece is a projection combining three distinctive layers: a background layer, a dynamic “flow” layer, and a layer of informative content. Activated by camera sensing, the projections transition between these layers, revealing multiple stages of content as visitors approach the virtual canvas.

A core element of our strategy in designing Flow was creating a memorable interactive experience that everyone would feel safe using in today’s world. For us at Bluecadet, that means helping our partners like the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston move away from touch-based tablets to more spatial experiences based on interaction driven by proximity, gestures, and motion.

Bluecadet designed Flow to appeal to as wide an audience as possible — particularly those who may be unfamiliar with art history. Rather than confront visitors with exhaustive “tombstones” of educational text, we worked with the expert curators at MFA to create and share brief impressions of life in 17th-century Netherlands. As a result, the interactive works quickly and accurately convey a sense of what it felt like to live in the artists’ world.