MICA/ZAYED Piece Together Campaign

Course Name

Name of Institutions:

Maryland Institute College of Art

Zayed University

Instructors:

Dr. Nanci Takeyama

Bernard J Canniffe

Peter Chomowicz

Course Syllabus -

Project Description:

3-week art project that explores human thought

Background:

Purpose:

To understand and learn about cultural differences.

Mission Statement

Our goal is to explore human thought on a global scale through an e-campaign. Our inspiration derived from our own personal experiences from interacting with one another. We realized how much we had in common and how wrong our impressions were. We want to give people of all nationalities and races the same opportunity to communicate and share ideas across the globe. We hope not to impose our own personal beliefs but to instead unite everyone under two questions, What is an Arab? and What is Islam? We also want people to view one another as human beings not as religion, race or gender as the media has it. Therefore our videos stimulate a human quality that is true and real. This will give people the chance to refocus their perceptions or preconceived ideas about one another.

Project Statement:

Piece Together is a campaign created to depict human communication. By viewing different points of view from different cultures, we can begin to look at individuals separate from cultural stereotypes.

It began with students from Zayed University in Dubai, UAE and students from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD coming together to celebrate differences in culture and to bridge the gap between popular stereotypes.

Cultural Immersion

Process (sketches, photos, explanations):

Logo

logo-process-digital-sketch1

Video

videoprocess1

Website

webprocess1

Project Outcomes (Images, photos):

http://www.piecetogethercampaign.com

7/2

We first shared ideas about names, and we wrote words up on the board, and rough sketches of what the site would look like, and made a list of content that needed to be on the site. Shareena shared the videos she had gotten the night before. Shareena and Amna worked together to find the Arabic equivalent to the name we had chosen, then Amna and Crystal got to work on the logo while Shareena and Dani began sketches for the site, and discussed how to begin creating it. 

The domain name for the website was bought, piecetogethercampaign.com, and the hosting plan. Tomorrow, the group will be getting videos from public areas, to gather more information. 

 

7/1

We worked toward refining our ideas, and developing a resolved concept. We decided to use only 2 questions, so the campaign is clear and there is one main point our responses are focused around. We edited our proposal, made changes to our goals and created a timeline. For the rest of this week, we are going to work on getting video responses via our web campaign through myspace, facebook, craigs list and various blogs. On Sunday, we are going to start compiling the videos. 

 

We also tossed around the idea of having our site and logo have elements that are hand drawn, if not everything. This plays up the ‘human element’. The goal of this will be a colection of different points of view from around the world. This gives people real perspective, from those living in the Middle East, to those who have only heard about it through the news. These opinions will be coming from a face and a personality, which will reinforce our idea of regarding people as people, not a culture/clothing/stereotype.

6/30

Today we threw around ideas about what we could create. We had the idea of doing something with video the day before, since we could create an entire virutual campaign at basically no overhead. Plus, it would reach more people, especially through YouTube. We first started with rough ideas regarding clothing and trying to eliminate cultural stereotypes due to clothing. We planned to have video clips of women saying a statement that would relate to people everywhere, such as “I call my mom everyday.” In this, we hoped people to see similarities as humans rather differences by culture. 

After meeting with Bernard, Peter and Nancy, we refined our idea to a ‘viral campaign’ to ask people a certain question and have them send a video to use. We will then compile all the videos we have collected and post them on a website. This makes our campaign more open, instead of forcing the viewer to have a certain point of view. 

We came up with two main questions “What is an Arab” and “What is a Muslim”. We feel these questions are open enough to get a varied and interesting response, but not so specific to Dubai as to make the campaign too complex. We interviewed several people yesterday, and collected their responses to see how they responded to the questions .