I normally write about environmental science and technology but I can’t help but notice when governments and economies behave like damaged environmental systems or unstable high voltage oscillators. Global economies have taxed future generations via inflationary policies and amplified the gap between wealth and poverty. The hot smell of ozone should warn us that a […]
Dutch Design Week 2015 is a misnomer, the event actually runs over nine days across 100 locations displaying the experiments and ideas of 2400 designers, including works by students from the Design Academy Eindhoven. Participating designers often focus on environmental problems, but this year many tackled humanitarian problems such as the flow of refugees from the Middle […]
Anyone who hasn’t been to Syria in the last few years can’t possibly grasp the full extent of the horrors Syrians have endured, but we do know it has been unspeakably hard. To take the edge off, a handful of artists in Damascus built what the Guinness Book of Records recently confirmed is the world’s […]
Israeli photographic duo Wyse + Gabriely concluded their first European exhibition at London’s Neu Gallery this month; an attention-grabbing presentation that purportedly explores “the fake and the fraudulent”.
Drop some sand under a high-definition, three-dimensional light microscope and you’ll never look at a beach the same way again. Magnified 250 times, the tiny grains are shockingly gorgeous! Brilliantly colored or crystal-clear, the origins of each speck emerges; spiral shell fragments, petrified corals, gem-like minerals or crumbs of volcanic rock.
It began as a goofy Instagram project. Malaysian artist and architect Red Hong Yi went on a month-long mission, creating a piece of edible art every day. The result is an incredible visual feast.
Egypt can offer more to desert tourists than camels: In the ancient land of the Pharaohs, desert-dwelling invertebrates have often been part of Egyptian folklore, including scarab or dung beetles which are known to navigate by the stars. Now spiders join the story.
A provocative installation by Lebanese graphic designer Wael Kodeih aims to challenge cyber censorship. Part of the fifth annual Exposure exhibition now at the Beirut Art Center (BAC), is it art or gimmick?
British photographer Mishka Henner has produced some disturbing aerial images of cattle feedlots in Texas, composed of hundreds of high-resolution satellite images stitched together into large format prints. This could be the final push to put me off meat.
David Chipperfield Architects have designed a resplendent new building in fascinating, frustrating Morocco, which will house the The Marrakech Museum for Photography and Visual Arts – the largest of its kind in the world.
There is something so haunting about desert landscapes, and much as we love our own in the Middle East region, we are blown away by China’s desert scenes depicted through Shi Shaoping’s “The Eggs” art installation.
A friend tipped me off about this strange structure out in the desert a short drive from Dubai. I tried to figure out what it was on Google Earth before driving out to discover a mysterious, disused, concrete amphitheatre.
We’ve seen a lot of really useful applications for 3D printing, but Yariv Goldfarb’s graduation project for the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem is not one of them: printing plastic molds in order to “play with poop.”
Earlier this year I decided to visit a strange looking waste management site in Um Al Quwain – one of seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates. From satellite imagery it looked like raw sewage was being dumped in the desert, just a couple of kilometres from Um Al Quwain’s precious mangrove estuary.
Israeli artist and designer Ron Arad has expressed his love of Fiat 500s in a curious way as part of an art exhibition at the Holon Design Museum near Tel Aviv: he crushed them, then he embalmed them, and now they are hanging on the wall of an art gallery in his birth country.
Kuwaiti graphic designer Mohammad Sharaf serves up powerful pictures based on current events, salted with modern Middle Eastern humor and instantly provocative.
Ask yourself: if you lived in the deep desert, where the sand burns your soles at midday, would you run outside and play soccer? No sane person should. But Dick Sweeney has sent us thought-provoking images of soccer posts in extreme environments that reveal just how much Arabs love their football.
It’s Earth Day, which means you will see at least 100 stories in your Facebook and Twitter feeds that will list the many ways that you can become a better earthly citizen. And most of them are valid. Yet I yearned to find a more meaningful way to honor the day, so this year I […]
We love the creative eco design coming out of Tel Aviv. Israel faces nationwide challenges of mismanaged waste and insufficient recycling infrastructure, but from the deserts of Morocco to the streets of Tel Aviv, artists like Yotam Shifroni and Gidi Gilam are seeking solutions through creativity. Around four months ago, Shifroni and Gilam opened Studio Sfog in Tel Aviv. Sfog means “sponge” […]
Israeli street artist Nitzan Mintz writes her poems on the streets of Tel Aviv, using disregarded materials she collects from dumpsters and public spaces. “I use only recycled materials in my art,” she said.
Corruption is black, brown, grey, devoid of color. And in Egypt, it can be seen in streets piled high with trash and polluted canals, in maddening traffic resulting from outdated infrastructure, and chronic power outages. Corruption is everywhere, yet this silent killer of hopes and dreams is hard to pin down. Not anymore. A band […]
We have to admit that this isn’t anything particularly “green” about this see-saw, but it does harvest the movement of people to make music. And that’s just downright cool. A temporary installation designed for last year’s Marrakech Biennale, The Rise and Fall blends architecture and art to question how people occupy spaces and how those spaces […]
“This is not a romance story,” Daniella told me during a recent interview. I met the petite woman at her home on Lamu Island in northern Kenya to speak with her husband, Ali Lamu, whose name is synonymous with a brand of upcycled dhow sails or tangas that are now distributed throughout the world. Daniella […]
At the heart of Beirut, Zakaria counters corporate cafe culture with art and heritage As larger coffee and restaurant chains take over the streets of Beirut and other Lebanese cities, smaller, local cafes are abandoning their businesses as they are faced with too much competition. Walking away from the scene is not only a coffee shop […]
On a man-made Abu Dhabi island, fake wind towers heat homes instead of cooling them. I recently photographed a new housing development on Yas Island, Abu Dhabi. You can see it on Google Earth. The wind tower design originates from Persia. The earliest examples of wind towers, used for cooling houses, in the United Arab Emirates can […]
