Re-imagining Haiku
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
February 2016
How can we invite ourselves to build and maintain our culture? How do we make culture relevant and interesting? How can we contextualize past cultures for our current society? How can we interpret culture for the 21st century?
Haiku is a very short form of Japanese poetry. The most famous of them are typically characterized by simple, yet profound observations on the everyday world. Some were also accompanied by Haiga, a style of Japanese painting that sought to emphasize the depth of the meaning the poem conveyed. Could the reinterpretation of Haiku for the 21st century make its profound meanings more widely accessible?
The project took special interest in the absence of light to convey a story, in contrast to many other artworks that use light to fulfill its function. It proposes installing transparent filters on the luminaires printed with opaque artwork that would cast a shadow to illustrate the artwork being displayed. The visitors could then touch the wall embedded with a heat sensor to reveal the artwork above the printed text on the wall. It hopes to encourage visitors to interact with the artwork by introducing their own shadows, as opposed to artwork that is meant to be untouched.
The project proposes using Pop 11 - a luminaire supplied by Otylight. Find the product here; http://www.otylight.com/product-item/pop-11/#
