Abu Dhabi Film Festival, TEDxDubai and Kcymaerxthaere

So this month of October has been wonderfully busy, filled with events that I made sure I made time for. It's very hard as a full-time student to get away from work and classes, but it's really important that you do. I tried to socialize more, network a little, and just get more into the scene here.

I went to Abu Dhabi Film Festival with Naima. This was actually the first time that we've EVER been out together for something that wasn't class related. Pretty lame considering we've been close friends for maybe two years now, but with classes and all, it was hard to co-ordinate anything. Plus, we don't drive and we're usually broke, so there you go.

We crawled into the back of a van that had no seats. Quite dodgey.

At the restaurant after all the film-watching

We watched a lot of student films in the festival. We're very proud of them because a large number of them got into the festival, and they won awards so that's great. We saw 'The Source' in the evening. It's such a great drama/comedy film about these women in a village in Morocco, directed by a Romanian. Naima should be able to elaborate for us, giving a proper film review since she's part Moroccan.

Then the next weekend, on the 22nd of October was TEDxDubai. I had applied way too late, about 20 minutes before the deadline for registration, and I didn't get in. And then I applied for the free photography position, but I didn't get it either. Naima told me that Jumeirah Hotel was hosting this competition about making up a fake future hotel in 140 characters on Twitter, so I made something up and tweeted it. I sincerely lost all hope that I would get intoTEDxDubai this year. I mean, I wrote about how passionate I was, I sent my photos in, and if my passion and photography couldn't get me in, then how could my writing? And my writing is one of my biggest insecurities.

Well, somehow, I was selected as one of the winners and I got to go to TEDxDubai.

And because I was one of the sponsors, I got to sit in the front row with the speakers

Unfortunately, Naima couldn't make it, so I ended up going alone. I was excited to be independent and all, but I think the experience would've been boosted if she could have come too.

Christian Boer, typeface designer of 'Dyslexie'

I got to meet Christian Boer, who's a Dutch typeface designer that designed Dyslexie, which is a typeface that dyslexics can read. It's really interesting stuff, and if you know about typeface design, it's even more interesting because he manipulated his typeface and broke the rules of type design to make this typeface that actually works for dyslexics . It's really impressive stuff.

Check it out, and if you have any dyslexic friends, then spread the word:

http://www.studiostudio.nl/

And I got to meet Chris Colwell,

(http://www.google.ae/search?gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=chris+colwell).

Please google him, it'll help him get more hits and increase his chances of being found and inspiring more people. He's such an admirable soul, so positive and really truly inspiring.

I had to get his signature to put on my wall

It was a very busy week trying to juggle organizing my time and submissions and allow myself to do things in the outside world. I collected a lot of business cards at TEDx, and I think it's so important to put yourself out there and be assertive enough to get noticed. I found that leaving my group of friends at TEDx was actually beneficial, because I got to walk around and talk to strangers and meet new people. I'm thinking of making my own business card so that I can hand it out randomly and get a bit of attention.

And then on Tuesday night, I got to go out with Naima again. This time we were headed for the XVA Art Hotel in Bastakiya, Dubai. We were on our way to meet Eames Demetrios and unveil a plaque he had installed there.

Eames Demetrios giving a talk about Kcymaerxthaere

Plaque unveiled in linear Dubai!

Bilingual plaque (click on it for closer view)

"Kcymaerxthaere is a parallel universe that intersects with much of our linear Earth. The name comes from the cognate words kcymaara (meaning "the true physicality of the planet") and xthaere (which is a shape with almost an infinity of edges or dimensions--infinity minus 29 to be precise). We explore and tell stories of these other realms through many media, but most famously by installing bronze plaques and historic sites that honor events from the parallel world in our linear world. "

http://www.kcymaerxthaere.com/ (Taken from the website, which will be updated soon).

The stories are really quite lovely and dynamic, and I encourage you to read them and get involved. It meant a lot to me that Naima and I could make time for this and go to the special event because it was really worth it. Plus, we got his business card, so that was another highlight of the evening.

Being awesome in purple

And yea, that's been October for me. It was also two of my bestfriends' birthdays; Lex and Megan. So HAPPY BIRTHDAY to them and I wish them the best this year!

I'm tired 'cause this post took forever to make, but I had to immortalize this month.

Lessons learned: make time for yourself, go out with your closest friends, meet new people, network a little, and balance it all. It takes a while to get a handle on, I'm still working on it, but I know it's worth it. I actually asked if Eames Demetrios if he ever sleeps, because he gets so much done, and he said that it's really all about balance. Which made me laugh inside, considering I started this blog and I design the way I do because I can't balance in the design world and my professors tell me I have a serious issue with this whole 'balance' thing. I'll try my best to balance my schedule though.

And that's it,

-Deena

So Far

Alright, I apologize for not having posted for a while.

Naima and I are finally in Second year, getting closer and closer to what it feels like to really study design.

We're both incredibly busy, and spend most of our free time either eating or crying.

I decided to come by to drop off some photosketches I made for our Photography Basics class.

I really wanted to work with lighting for our first project, but I soon deviated from that into almost underwater photos. My models are basically submerged while I stay above water and desperately hand-signal to them in order to try and direct their movements. It's been quite the challenge.

My first issue was with shutterspeed, and I brought in two huge lights to eliminate my speed issues. So now I can shoot relatively fast and get really clear images without all the water dust particles showing. I'm aiming for a crystalline look while trying to simultaneously distort my model's face. It's hard to find a meeting ground. On average, we take a minimum of 500 photos just to have 3 photos come out nearly close to what I'm looking for.

It's been five weeks in the process and I feel closer to the outcome.

Just a bit more to go...

-Deena

I did not die! But there's tons that's happened/happening.




n.aw

Back in UAE

So we left Malaysia last night and arrived safely in Dubai. It was a pretty awesome summer overall, spent a lot of time with the family and one of my bestfriends, Megan, came to visit for three weeks. We fasted during Ramadhan, and then she left to Thailand, and I celebrated Eid with my family. Had a couple of shoots with my sister.

Did quite a bit of writing, have loads of essay drafts about art and other related topics saved in my notebook and laptop. I'll probably brush them up and post them to the blog one day. I realized that one of the most important things I should work on this summer was actually my writing and increasing my vocab, so I worked on that. Finished reading a book with no pictures, 'The Windup Girl' by Paolo Bacigalupi, which is a sci-fi book set in 23rd century Thailand. It was a great read, highly recommended if you're into that kinda stuff. The author's insights into South East Asia are also really accurate and eye-opening, I appreciated the honesty although some parts were completely made up and the author admits that, so please don't take too much offense if you do read it.
I'm now reading 'The Help' by Kathryn Stockett, which is awesomely fantastic so far. I'm on a complete roll with that one, can't stop thinking about the characters either, as if they're people I know personally in real life.

Hope everyone had a good summer.
-Deena

Summer Shoelapse

I needed a new pair of heels for summer to match my new brown handbag. I couldn't find any brown heels in the stores that were the right color or design, so I whipped out my supplies and made and cut these new shoes in under two hours. Total production cost about $3. Money well spent I think.

These shoes were a pair of black pumps that I had for my first high school prom. Later though, I had cut them and redesigned the peep-toe and accents and detailing on the sides of the shoe. A second prom came up, and so I made them into a pair of white heels with pink flowers to match my second prom dress.
And now, they are my brown summer shoes.

I'm wearing my pajamas in the video, as I've said, I suffer from summersonia,
-Deena

In the meantime....

What is a singularity?

If the matter in the universe were spread uniformly, then it must have been infinitely compressed at the first moment. In other words, the entire cosmos would have been squeezed into a single point. At this point the gravitational force, and the density of material, were infinite. A point of infinite compression is known to mathematical physicists as a “singularity”.

Although one is led on quite elementary grounds to expect a singularity at the origin of the universe, it required a mathematical investigation of some delicacy to establish the result rigorously. This investigation was mainly the work of British mathematical physicists Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking. In a series of powerful theorems, they proved that a big-bang singularity is inevitable as long as gravity remains an attractive force under the extreme conditions of the primeval universe. The most significant aspect of their results is that a singularity isn’t avoided even if the cosmic material is distributed unevenly. It is a general feature of a universe described by Einstein’s theory of gravitation – or, for that matter, any similar theory.

There was a lot of resistance to the idea of a big-bang singularity among physicists and cosmologists when it was first mooted. One reason for this concerns the above-mentioned fact that matter, space, and time are linked in the general theory of relativity. This linkage carries important implications for the nature of the expanding universe. Naively, one might suppose that the galaxies are rushing apart through space. A more accurate picture, however, is to envisage space itself as swelling or stretching. That is, the galaxies move apart because the space between them expands. (Readers who are unhappy about the idea that space can stretch are referred to my book The Edge of Infinity for further discussion.) Conversely, in the past, space was shrunken. If we consider the moment of infinite shrunk, it must literally disappear, like a balloon that shrivels to nothing. And the all-important linkage of space, time, and matter further implies that time must disappear too. There can be no time without space. Thus the material singularity is also a space-time singularity. Because all our laws of physics are formulated in terms of space and time, these laws cannot apply beyond the point at which space and time cease to exist. Hence the laws of physics must break down at the singularity.

The picture that we then obtain for the origin of the universe is a remarkable one. At some finite instant in the past the universe of space, time, and matter is bounded by a space-time singularity. The coming-into-being of the universe is therefore represented not only by the abrupt appearance of matter, but of space and time as well.

The significance of this result cannot be overstressed. People often ask: Where did the big bang occur? The bang did not occur at a point in space at all. Space itself came into existence with the big bang. There is similar difficulty over the question: What happened before the big bang? The answer is, there was no “before”. Time itself began at the big bang. As we have seen, Saint Augustine long ago proclaimed that the world was made with time and not in time, and that is precisely the modern scientific position.

No space, no time, no matter

No matter how hard you try you will never be able to grasp just how tiny, how spatially unassuming, is a proton. It is just way too small.

A proton is an infinitesimal part of an atom, which is itself of course an insubstantial thing. Protons are so small that a little dib of ink like the dot on this ‘i’ can hold something in the region of 500,000,000,000 of them, or rather more than the number of seconds it takes to make half a million years. So protons are exceedingly microscopic, to say the very least.

Now imagine if you can (and of course you can’t) shrinking one of those protons down to a billionth of its normal size into a space so small that it would make a proton look enormous. Now pack into that tiny, tiny space about an ounce of matter. Excellent. You are ready to start a universe.

I’m assuming of course that you wish to build an inflationary universe. If you’d prefer instead to build a more old-fashioned, standard Big Bang universe, you’ll need additional materials. In fact, you will need to gather up everything there is – every last mote and particle of matter between here and the edge of creation – and squeeze it into a spot so infinitesimally compact that it has no dimensions at all. It is known as a singularity.

In either case, get ready for a really big bang. Naturally, you will wish to retire to a safe place to observe the spectacle. Unfortunately, there is nowhere to retire to because outside the singularity there is no where. When the universe begins to expand, it won’t be spreading out to fill a larger emptiness. The only space that exists is the space it creates as it goes.

It is natural but wrong to visualize the singularity as a kind of pregnant dot hanging in a dark, boundless void. But there is no space, no darkness. The singularity has no around around it. There is no space for it to occupy, no place for it to be. We can’t even ask how long it has been there – whether it has just lately popped into being, like a good idea, or whether it has been there for ever, quietly awaiting the right moment. Time doesn’t exist. There is no past for it to emerge from.

And so, from nothing, our universe begins.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, pg 27-28

It can not and will not end like this.
Because I've only just begun.