Category: Diary

Last evening was the opening of MinD (Made in Dubai). Billed as an alternative art festival and timed to coordinate with the Art Dubai festival this week, MinD focuses on works of art by Dubai residents and the local art scene here.

Aviarium by Elizabeth Monoian and Robert Ferry

Our piece, Aviarium, consists of 12 obedient sugar birds dressed in cellophane watching a video and one similar little sugar bird who tried to get away. The video is a loop of a bird flying multiple times into a window with sound that mixes a David Attenborough commentary on the Lyre bird with the amplified sound of the smacking. The lyre bird is held up as the exemplary overachiever to which all sugar birds would aspire, the ends to which the means it is suggested might be the sisyphean degradation of one’s soul.

When we struggle individually to find meaning for our lives in this complex and interconnected world, we do so with the assumption that our actions are willful—that we have real choices to make between doing what is easy and what is just—in setting ourselves apart as successful and dernier cri, as model citizens and conservationists, as entrepreneurs and progressives. Much like the “Allegory of the Cave” from Plato’s Republic expanded the notion of reality to include metaphysical world, the Aviarium seeks to expand our notion of what is required of us in a contemporary society that has become enlightened to the evolutionary construction of our behaviors and emotions and the seemingly deterministic functions of our neural systems. Perhaps the light of the cave fire is comparable to the ‘light’ of our collective notions of normality that have helped to defined the concept of civilization for all of history.

Mass Produced by Toma Gabor

My Little Pony by Sarah Lahti

Flight by Rebecca Rendell

The Funeral Procession by Michael Bray

Darwin “Japat” Guevarra

Construction series by Hind Mezaina

Fathima Mohiuddin and Karen Dias

Guillermo Munro

Ruja Alexis

Beats by Liz Ramos-Prado

Lantian Xie

GesturoDubai: A Mer-chan Souvenir (live performance and video installation) by Wayne Osborne and Katy Chang

Pidgeon, Barry Anderson

We’re taking care of Bailey, one of the cats who call the AUD campus home, after his surgery earlier this week. Poor little Bailey got his hind quarters caught in a claw trap of some kind. No one knows exactly how since he managed to get himself free from it before being found and taken to the veterinarian a couple weeks ago by Faye Doran who works at AUD. Faye is an angel to these street kitties, feeding them and taking care of them as best she can. We’ll have Bailey for a couple of weeks until he’s ready to meet back up with his friends and family again on the campus grounds.

Earlier this month, a week of amazing design events were coordinated surrounding the MENAlab , a series of labs where participants got get hands-on experience led by top design professionals from around the world. Beth and I participated in a panel discussion at the beginning of the week that was moderated by Joumana Al Jabr, the co-founder of Febrik NGO in Beirut. It was a fast-paced week of excitement and I wish every week could be so socially engaging and intellectually stimulating. But perhaps we would all become too exhausted.

Here are some photos from the last day of the lab series where the participants presented their work to the public. Giorgio and James would be very disappointed that it took me 3 weeks to post these since their lab was all about the immediacy of our interconnected social networked world!

Elizabeth and I have launched our new website. It highlights all of the work that we have been doing in the past years with the aim to attract both for-profit and not-for-profit clients who are interested in high quality design and are conscious of its ecological impact. Projects range from architecture, to social practice art and studio art, to non-profit and NGO web design, to graphic design, and curatorial work.

Studied Impact Design is a multidisciplinary design house focused on the environmental impact of design. Through various projects in social practice artwork, architecture, new media, and graphic design, we call attention to issues of resource and energy conservation. And we take action through our designs to minimize the impact that our projects have on ecosystems so that they are sustainable additions to our shared living habitat for generations in the future.

Sustainability is not just about resources, but also about social harmony.

Elizabeth and Dina taught a senior project class last semester for the visual communications students at American University in Dubai with the theme of Sustainable Cities. The students stepped up with some amazing projects with various takes on a city that is “sustainable” in a very broad definition of the word. A show of their work has been up at DUCTAC for the past couple weeks. As Elizabeth so eloquently put it:

The students began the semester deconstructing the concept of sustainability to understand their coursework in a broader context of societal needs. What they all agreed on is that this term goes far beyond the ideas of ‘green’ and ‘eco’, and in fact, is a holistic concept that includes notions such as peace, imagination, respect, human connections, beauty, and justice. Emotional space, the physical self and all levels of human interaction were considered. Simply put, the students understood that actions such as racism and hatred are not sustainable, whereas kindness and respect are sustainable. With these understandings, a harmonic balance between nature and humans is better achieved.

You can read more about the exhibit in the Khaleej Times article that came out today.

And yesterday evening, the all-new TEDx-DUCTAC monthly lecture series opened with the same theme. The first pre-recorded talk was Dr. Hans Rosling speaking to the US State department about world heath statistics and making the subject amazingly fun and engaging. Bjarke Ingels of BIG followed his pre-recorded TED talk with a live phone call from a ski slope in Austria where he answered questions about his architecture from the audience. The real highlight was a live lecture given by Dr. Sgouris Sgouridis from Masdar Institute of Science and Technology on the subject of a parallel energy currency market which exchanges a unit called an Ergo that is based 1:1 on an energy unit such as a Kwh or a joule. It uses market forces to stimulate real-time incentives for conservation in cities that will rely 100% on carbon-free energy, like Masdar City.

We just arrived back from Copenhagen where we presented the LAGI project to an esteemed group of artists and art historians at the conference, The Artwork Between Technology and Nature. We had the opportunity to engage in thoughtful discussions with such influential academics as James Elkins, Lorraine Daston, and Linda Weintraub. The final keynote talk was by the artist Olafur Eliasson whose work was also on display at the REthink exhibit at the Statens Museum for Kunst. It was a delightful and engaging conference and we were very honored to have been selected to participate.

We didn’t have very long to walk around the city, just one evening really while it was already getting dark. But we’ll be back for certain; it is now definitely one of our favorite cities.