As the weather cools down and the UAE heads into festival season, it’s not only a feast of popular culture, comics, books, fashion and film that residents and visitors have to look forward to.
Lurking among the capes and cameras, and now entering its third year, is SciFest Dubai, which starts tomorrow and runs until Monday.
“You don’t need to be a scientist to love science. We just want to promote science and education and involve everyone in the festival and the conversation because, for us, it’s important for everyone to be scientifically literate,” says Lara Matossian, the festival’s founder and chief executive.
“We want everyone to have a sense of awe and wonder about science that goes beyond what you experience in the classroom, and recalibrate their relationship with science and how it affects what they do with their lives.”
A real challenge, but after three years, the festival’s organisers seem to be getting the balance between education and entertainment right. While many of the week’s activities will be based in schools, and are already fully booked, the big draw for the public is expected at the weekend – Friday’s performance by London-based Catalan “cyborg artist” Moon Ribas – at the Mohammed bin Rashid Academic Medical Centre in Healthcare City.
Ribas grew up in Mataro, Spain, before moving to England where she studied experimental dance and choreography. But what is a cyborg artist, anyway?
“She has a cyborg chip implanted in her elbow that monitors every earthquake in the world,” says Matossian.
"It makes her feel every earthquake that takes place on Earth, right down to [level] one on the Richter scale, and she creates an improvised dance from this which she calls Waiting for Earthquakes. The movements she makes in the performance are entirely informed by the scale and latitude of earthquakes that she feels."
Ribas is no newcomer to the world of cyborg art. For her first professional piece, in 2007, she wore a pair of glasses that only allowed her to see colours and not shapes for three months, and met people she could not even see.
She is also the co-founder of the Cyborg Foundation, an international organisation that encourages humans to become cyborgs. The foundation also promotes cyborgism as an art movement.
“She used to walk around with sensors in her ear that interpreted all the movements around her. Whether she was walking or driving, it would feed all that back to her and then she would interpret that data into a performance-art piece,” says Matossian.
If cyborg art sounds a little avant-garde, fear not. There are plenty of other sessions taking place over the weekend. On Friday, there will be a host of science-themed panel discussions – the Café Scientifique meet-up and the Pecha Kucha talks – at the Mohammed bin Rashid Academic Medical Centre, aimed at a grown-up audience.
The other sessions in the same location are more kid-friendly, including solar viewing and a science stage show.
On Saturday, SciFest Dubai heads over to Dubai Children’s City for sessions packed with excitement for the whole family, including science shows, science-themed storytelling, planetarium shows and science magic shows.
cnewbould@thenational.ae
