Human Arabesque

TEDxSummit was the first Middle Eastern TED conference and a one-week global TED gathering. The goal: to define the future of ‘Ideas Worth Spreading’. The summit united 700 TEDx organisers from 120 countries in Doha, Qatar. We set about finding the ‘x’ within traditional arabesque patterns to mashup TEDxand Middle Eastern culture. We fused architecture, dance, maths and magic into a bespoke 18m high- mirrored structure that hovered over a multi-colour moving floor to create the world’s first human arabesque. The experiment resulted in a kaleidoscope of infinite arabesque patterns choreogra- phed to a soundtrack composed by Yasmine Hamdan.