Spaces to Places

Recently opened in Downtown Dubai, The Pavilion is a contemporary art space which not only encourages dialogue between art and its audience, but is also a vibrant space for the neighborhood, with galleries, a cinema, library, espresso bar and restaurant. The architect Abboud Malak has said, “It’s anything you want it to be; just come and bring your computer or socialise. It’s a versatile space and encompasses everything.... The people will make the space what it is.”

I often go there to do research, write or hang out with friends. The design with its natural woods has a very calming effect. It is a place where creatives can work, socialise or simply be.

Spaces become places when individuals or communities endow them with meaning. Spaces become places through the participation of people.

One’s experience of a particular space evokes emotion and memory and gives rise to what is often referred to as a sense of place. Some spaces are so designed that they encourage the individual to spend time there alone, others invite participation and interaction with others, and others encourage both.

Right now, we find ourselves having to move, more and more, in online space. 

 

In a sense we have become online nomads, meeting fellow travelers from different places, countries and cultures in a space not limited by time. We often tend to wander from site to site, perhaps unaware that we are actually in search of online oases. These are sites that nourish and refresh, and where we are met with online hospitality.  When this is not so, we simply click away and are transported down another corridor.

Whereas many see today’s technologies encouraging placelessness, this need not be the case. What is required of us now is a special generation of architects and designers, creators of online spaces which become special online places for current and future users. 

Physical spaces designed by architects to encourage reflection or interaction are not empty. Their features encourage occupants of the space to interact with it in a particular way.

Online spaces need to be created in this way too.

Just as decorators move shapes around to find the right place and the right fit, so too the positioning of words, widgets, links, videos etc can be approached with mindfulness.

It is encouraging, for example, to see new blog technologies coming in to being that will move away from the linear and allow positioning of videos, pics and words all over a blank page. Such collage like blogging will most definitely promote creativity.

The spaces we occupy online deserve our respect.  We can declutter by regularly emptying our mail boxes. We can consider not retweeting that which we have not read or watched.  A mindful online presence will require that we don’t simply fill the space we encounter with mere words, simply for the sake of filling it. 

If we have our own website, we should be aware that the home page is an online door. What image does it portray to the first time visitor. Does it encourage the visitor to enter? Is it welcoming? Does the architecture of the website enable the visitor to meet others there? Does it encourage the visitor to return? Does the visitor feel at home there?  Does its mindful design include windows that provide vistas, and bridges that lead to new sites. 

Is it a pavilion, a dome, a light filled space where others are encouraged to be?

 

          I saw that my life was a vast glowing empty page and I could do 

anything I wanted. - Jack Kerouac

The space where we meet online is like this too. It is certainly vast, and when we look at our handheld gadgets, it is certainly glowing. What are we going to do with it? What are we going to create?

Storytelling and Scheherezade

Up until a little while ago, Scheherezade and Linda had never met. Separated by distance and time, their paths had failed to cross. 

A child of the east, Scheherezade came into being, once upon a time, before the 9th century. Born in Africa in the 20th century, with ancestors from Europe, Linda was very much a child of the west.

Once, when she was a young girl, Linda had attended a symphony concert. Fascinated by Rimsky-Korsakov's "Scheherazade" she went out to buy the record. Each time the needle met the vinyl disc, the haunting sounds of the music would issue forth, and Linda would feel herself caught up in another world.

She did not know that Scheherazade was the name of the daughter of a vizier, or even that Rimsky-Korsakov was Russian. No one told her, and because she did not have easy access to one, she did not research any of this in an encyclopedia.

Many years later, air travel made it easier to cover great distances, and Linda found herself living in the Middle East.

One morning, while waiting for her coffee in a Starbucks, Linda picked up the magazine section of a daily newspaper, only to be confronted with a picture of Scheherazade on the front cover. Their paths had crossed anew. 

After reading the article, Linda immediately went home to google Scheherazade and learn more about her. Memories of music once loved, came flooding back, and YouTube allowed Linda to relive them.

She found the newspaper article online and continued her research.  

At one stage, to take a break,  Linda stepped into her Twitter stream. To her amazement, she was met with these tweets: 

@qsedki “King in 1001 Nights represents the reactive rash part of us. Shehrazade represents the thinking considerate part.” - Chris Payne #TEDxAlain

@qsedki “I think Shehrazade didn’t have stories beforehand. I think she conjured them up right at that moment.” - Chris Payne #TEDxAlain

@qsedki “We can either be reactive or we can think and consider how we want to live our lives and take the necessary risks” - Chris Payne #TEDxAlain

Very much conscious of synchronicity, iPad in hand, she mailed the tweets to herself for later use.

Technology had brought two women together and allowed them to meet. By means of it Scheherazade was able to tell Linda her story. She could recount how she had offered to spend the night with a king who, angered by his wife's infidelity, had taken to marrying a virgin ever day and then having her beheaded! 

She told Linda how on that first night she began telling a story but then did not complete it. His curiosity sparked, and wanting to hear the end of the tale, the king spared her life for a day. The next night she not only finished telling the tale but began another, stopping yet again before its completion. Her stories fell into many genre and often she incorporated tales within tales.

This continued for a thousand and one nights, by which time the king had fallen in love with her and she had borne him three children. Made a wiser and kinder man by her presence and her tales, the king spared her life and made her his queen.

Linda listened in awe. And then it struck her!

Each one of us is a Scheherazade. Each one of us has a story to tell and today's technology makes it possible for each story to be heard. The space we inhabit here, allows each one of us to be not only the audience but also the storyteller. This is global theatre and global storytelling on a grand scale.

Scheherezade told stories within stories. Digital storytelling is able to contain links within links. Storytelling becomes visual, oral and written simultaneously, and interactive technology allows teller and listener to merge.

It is an age where individuals and thereby whole cultures can meet on a daily basis. Stereotypes can be broken down and  perspectives broadened, as we discover how the "other" is not so "other" after all.

Linda turned to Scheherazade and asked her if, for the purpose of her blog, she might allow her to change her name to Schere2herezade. 

She only smiled. The story had begun again :)

Suspended Together

The minute I connect to the internet I enter a space, which though not visible to the eye, is filled with enormous activity.

Going “online” is an entry into a web of interlinked connectivity and information. Navigation in this space has to be learnt, but once mastered, opens the door to a world of connections and information.

This ever-growing web of interconnectedness is suspended, as it were, over all that takes place in the world today. We are reminded of what Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere. In 1959 he wrote that technology was creating “a single organized membrane over the earth”.    

Not only is this web of interconnectedness suspended, but the minute we crawl into it we become suspended together.

“Suspended together” is also the title of an artwork recently featured in the exhibition entitled “terminal”, which I visited in Dubai. The artist is Manal Al-Dowayan and the piece created in 2011 is neon with black paint.

Although part of an exhibition focusing on air travel, this piece also spoke to me of the concept, which I have chosen to call here2here.

here2here is first an foremost a space of community, a place of the “we”, a place where we are “suspended together”.

At first, I used to think of this space as an in-between place, a place where we meet before going our separate ways.  In some sense it still is, but as advances in technology make connectivity and communication more instant and accessible, and with the advent of social media, this here2here space is also becoming a place where many of us spend a good part of our day. 

My physical state of being, my location, what I am thinking, or that which I would like to share with another, is available 24/7 if I so wish, with others sharing a similar stream.

A collective stream of consciousness is arising as it were, and is flowing even through hand held gadgets of individuals.

Suspended together we ride virtual waves, we hear the opinions of others we are only able to meet because of this space, and we are challenged to broaden our worldview.

Our electronic interdependence also allows cultures to meet. It is enabling the taking of a planetary perspective, the taking of multiple perspectives, and is encouraging dialogue with other perspectives. We begin to recognize diversity and at the same time we realize the need for unity. 

We are learning to develop empathy, as the “other”, we suddenly realize, is more like us than we had imagined.

Karen Armstrong, in “Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life”, states that compassion means “ to endure (something) with another person, to put ourselves in somebody else’s shoes, to feel her pain as though it were our own, and to enter generously into her point of view”.

As we are suspended together, the heart is encouraged to open to allow this all in. 

The compassion so essential to a peaceful existence in a global world begins to blossom.

Centre of Now

Downtown Dubai recently launched a campaign entitled “The Centre of Now”. It aims to highlight this area as the hub of what is seen as a global cultural movement focusing on fields such as architecture, business, cuisine and culture.

Currently living in this area, I am often subjected to the advertisement banners for “The Centre of Now”.  

Words are wrapped in layers of meaning waiting to be unfolded. For me, the words “centre” and “now” have connotations of mindfulness and so I look at the banners with perhaps an added appreciation.

Jon Kabat-Zinn states, “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way; on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally”.

Mindfulness calls us to be present right where we are. It invites us to be centered in our current now and to be aware of it. This practice assists us in arriving at what may be termed the “Centre of Now”.

Each person’s Centre of Now is unique, influenced by location, state of mind, feelings, culture, upbringing and worldview.  At the same time, there is a collective Centre of Now shared by us all. It is a place of stillness beyond it all, a whirlpool of possibilities, an invitation to creativity.

As I write from the city of Dubai, I am reminded of the Bedouins who knew what it was to have a centre which was always changing as they wandered through the borderless desert. Immediate movement was always a probability and wandering was an act of connectedness. The ecology of the desert was a reminder that life was interconnected. 

This is a century of mobility. Habitation is no longer seen as being fixed and global citizens are on the move. 

This century also brings with it a technology unheard of before. Connectivity and communication have been made possible in ways that boggle the mind.

As citizens of a global village, we need to seek in newfound ways, as global nomads, the centre the Bedouins were very aware of.

It will bring us to the Centre of Now, the heart of the present moment.

You are invited to watch the following video. I view the scene in it from my balcony. At the foot of the Burj Khalifa, the Dubai fountains dance to the music of “Baba Yetu” by Christopher Tin. The lyrics are in Swahili and are a translation of the Our Father. It epitomizes for me the hope I find present in a global city, where I daily experience amazing diversity and at the same time a feeling of great unity. Surely this will be present at the Centre of Now.