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Ilene

"Today we finally discussed what our final project would be. We had to think of something that would illustrate our vision of the statement "All humans are equal" and "People should all share their lives and gain experience through interacting with each other and learning more about each other while keeping an open mind" We all had similar ideas of how to illustrate this. Both Fatma and I envisioned a design that showed a merging of multiple cultures. When Alia got here she told us she had blocks we could work on, which when the project is finalized, the viewer can actually touch, showing the interactive nature of this program. We will each make our own designs illustrating our own culture, and then swap them and merge our cultures. In the end we will have a piece showing the unique qualities of one culture, and then what happens when they are mixed. On top of that the viewer can mix and make cultural designs for themselves and see what type of images they get.”

“We also went to dxb lab today to learn about some of the structures they had made and were working on. It was interesting because much of their work revolved around principles similar to that of our mission statement. The main idea of our statement is that people should embrace the unique qualities of their own culture, yet respect and learn from other people’s culture. The people who talked to us were not from Dubai. They had both studied in California, and they were both raised in Germany. If they did not have open minds to other cultures they would not have learned what they learned and they would not have been where they were. On top of that, a main theme of theirs was mixing building styles. In the examples they showed us they used a modern western style using old Arabic styles for inspiration and as building blocks.”

Fatma

on the way to the firm

combination of two images I took on the way back

Today we did more discussions on ideas and ways to approach the project. Within the group we thought of doing an interactive instillation. The viewer takes part of creating the artwork at that moment of time during the show by juxtaposing and putting together parts of images of our different cultures with their own way or perception of how it should be creating a new mixture of culture. Then we presented our idea and got some good feedback and other related ideas that were interesting like having a doll paper like instillation where the audience can play dress up with figures that look either western or eastern and have attire of different cultures on them to create a culturally mixed interactive piece. Another interesting idea that Bernard tossed at us is to have a flip animated thing like the opening of the series Ugly Betty

We though what if we had self portraits of each one of the group Emirate American and Korean on tiles or blocks and each part of the portrait is sectioned In a way when it gets flipped for example the Korean person’s eye is put together with the American nose put together with the Emirate lips.
Although they are all good ideas, I feel we’ve been doing a lot of talking and so little doing. We should find time to make the artwork instead of wasting time talking about how it should be and save the time while doing the process.

Later today we went to an architectural firm. It was really good and inspiring despite the fact that I’m not an interior or architecture student, I still found the collaborative spirit of the firm to be great and inspiring.

Bora

"Our group discussed for the project that we are going to create within a week and half. As our mission statement is “All humans are equal”, we want to create artworks by merging multiple cultures into one. Since our group is created with three different cultures, Emirate, US, and Korea, our works will show six different images, which three reflect each culture and other three images merge together. The six images will be on blocks of a cube that can be rotated around, and a viewer can play and rotate the blocks to create images that the viewer wants to see. It will be nice to interact between artists and viewers, which arts can be seen from different perspectives. We are going to work from scraps of images from each culture and discuss how we are going to create images coming together.

We visited an architecture firm, dxb, in Dubai today. We met two architects, who both are Germans and graduated from an architecture school in California. We could see how they are working in Dubai, where many different cultures are coming together so quickly, and from their different background cultures, they design buildings to be their own style with the respect of UAE culture and people and understanding of the environment. I really like their designs, which are very minimalist and stand out by their unique designs."