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Where Next?

Art Approach for a New Hotel Chain
Dubai, UAE

“Where next?" This is the question millennial travellers ask themselves the minute one trip is over, and well before the next. Perhaps even while still on the plane flying home they are already thinking about the next destination.

A new series of hotel developments targeted at millennial travellers in the UAE had already put extensive thought into how to position their new brand to this generation of global nomads. But the question of how the art program within the hotels could further capture this audience remained.

In the age of Instagram and AirBnB, millennial travellers expect more from their hotel experience. They are design savvy, discerning and globally-aware. They expect a thoughtful and well-curated aesthetic and cultural experience. Thus, the hotel must offer something that other options available to these travellers cannot: an immersive art and design experience executed on a grand scale. And, where better to do so than in Dubai, a 21st Century city with rich cultural heritage to draw from.

MONUMENTAL GRAPHIC ART
Transforming Environments with Wall Covering Murals

Hotels are unique in that they are expansive spaces with high, vaulted ceilings and long-stretching corridors. Their footprint, too, is large with voluminous spaces for circulation and gathering. Whereas framed art and canvas pieces may become lost in such rooms, monumental-scale murals allow the art and it’s viewers to “explore without borders”.

How better to make an impact than by transforming an innocuous architectural element—a plain wall—into a feature art piece. By seamlessly integrating larger-than-life imagery with the built environment, murals deliver a high impact, immersive experience.

TYPOGRAPHICAL & TEXT ART
Creating Universal Language

Language is a powerful tool that many artists, such as Bruce Nauman, Jenny Holzer, Tracey Emin and Lawrence Wiener most famously, have become renowned and respected for their manipulation of.

For these artists, the combination of the words and the context of where and how they are placed, create aphorisms: statements that express a general truth or astute observation in a concise and memorable form.

Thus, in targeting a generation that is incredibly self-aware, the hotel should consider the statements it makes with text-based artworks as an opportunity to convey more than simply the spirit of travel, but a meaningful sense of the times we live in.

GENERATIVE ART
Local Input, Artistic Output

Generative art refers to artworks that utilize algorithms and other non-human autonomous systems to create art. While the frameworks and behaviours of these systems are often outlined by the artist, the final piece is ‘generated’ by the system itself, offering unique work which continually self-propagates.

The art reinvents itself as the system takes in new data and interprets it through the lens of its programming. This technology could be incorporated into each hotel guest room by utilizing the existing televisions for display.

Once the art’s conceptual framework and aesthetics have been developed, each individual property could incorporate regionally relevant elements, such as data inputs generated from within the local area, to create a generative art experience that is consistent to the brand and unique to the property.

Collaborative Art
Aggregating #MyDubai Memories

In 2014, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed, Crown Prince of Dubai, launched a social-media project calling residents to share their pictures and videos of the emirate using the hashtag #MyDubai. The result is a Dubai autobiography that populates itself live on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

The hotel could utilize this philosophy of mass amalgamation by inviting guests to contribute their memories to an ever-evolving mural wall. This could be generated by Instagram images that are tagged geographically at the hotels, from the #MyDubai hashtag, or from countless other possible sources. It could be a digital display, or the images could be transposed as physical artworks on display.

Proposal prepared for Farmboy Fine Arts while employed as Design Director with support from senior designer Jordan Hilliard.