####Love Your Body Week

The week of Feb. 19 to Feb. 24 was promoted as Love Your Body Week. The campaign aimed to improve self-image and introduce students and faculty to holistic ways of taking care of oneself. Various fitness games, such as the Indoor Triathlon, were held alongside seminars on how to improve eating habits. In some parts of the NYU Abu Dhabi campus, students came across positive body image messages written on bathroom mirrors or posted in the elevators.

####24X

Inspired by Rhizome’s Seven on Seven and Experiments in Art and Technology’s 9 Evenings, NYUAD's Interactive Media Department hosted the Second Annual 24X of the year. For 24 hours on Feb. 24 and Feb. 25, 10 students from different disciplines and classes came together to create something new. Students were divided into five groups of two and given a theme which they had to integrate into their design. Everything else was left to their imagination. The students were free to come up with any type of project — a game, a performance, a poem, a sculpture or a mobile app.

This year’s theme was resistance, which was interpreted by students in many different ways. Some expressed it through art, others through literature or engineering. Claire Neel, Class of 2020, and her partner Jennifer Huang, Class of 2018, focused on two forms of resistance: creating a cathartic release for people who have encountered resistance in their day to day lives and showing the resistance that sound faces as it travels through space. They designed a soundproof box with an Arduino panel that connects a microphone in the interior of the box to an LED panel above the door. The Arduino panel measures how loud the volume is inside the box, so that those outside will have a visual representation. The project is intended for stressed out students looking for a safe place to take out their frustrations.

“My overall impression of the project was mind-blowing. The entire IM department was so open and enthusiastic about teaching me about all the toys and gadgets they had to offer, and there was even collaboration between the groups. There was absolutely no competitive aspect, everyone was more interested in trying to help others’ projects reach their full potential. I don't think this event would have worked without all the multi-disciplinary aspects, and it was really cool to be able to work with people I wouldn't normally have,” said Claire Neel.

####Trisha Brown: In Plain Site

On Feb. 24 and 25, the Trisha Brown Dance Company and the NYUAD Arts Center staged unconventional performances across the NYUAD campus. The site-specific performance fights the constrictions of a mainstream stage and instead puts dancers in unexpected places. The audiences witnessed Brown’s early work, dating back to 1971 New York, called Roof Piece, in which seven dancers occupied seven different spots across campus, including roofs and balconies. As the audience walked through campus, they were able to see different dancers, but never from one spot, forcing the audience to actively engage in the performance. In Floor of the Forest (1970) dancers recreated the notion of the stage using pipelines, ropes and clothes to form a solid rectangular surface.