With the help of calligrapher and artist Wissam Shawkat and KNOW Creative, Siemens is pleased to present FABRIC, a fresh take on the allure, mystique, and life that is found in numbers. With FABRIC, Wissam and KNOW Creative have weaved the Arab tradition of numbers into Expo 2020 Dubai’s vision for the future—a world where cities are secure, effective, and in harmony with the surrounding landscape.
The majority of the world’s current numbering system originated in the Middle East. The history of our area may be traced back through numbers, but they also connect us to the future. Dubai is the only city that embraces the future, and this year’s Expo served as a demonstration of the revolutionary potential of digitally connected smart cities.
We spend our days working, playing, studying, and having fun while submerged in an unseen sea of data. Simple zero-and-one code sequences make it feasible for us to live in the modern world. This binary coding, which constantly surrounds us and powers our digital age, is what allows us to produce and utilize the enormous amounts of data that we do each day.
Wissam and KNOW Creative produced a collection of 10 calligraphic pictures on various panes of glass for FABRIC. Each graphic shows a different section of the Dubai Expo site’s plan. When seen as a whole, the layers of images combine to create the total Expo plan, which is encoded in a complex zero-and-one pattern. The artwork honors digitalization’s ties to Arabic culture while illustrating its fundamental rules.
From 0 to 9, all ten digits that we are familiar with and use were initially developed in the Arab world more than a thousand years ago, according to Wissam. “This numbering system originated in North Africa and subsequently extended to Europe, where it was practically universal. As a result, Arabic history is where the zeros and ones of modern digital code actually originated.
Arabs created their own numbering systems after being influenced by much older Hindu numbers. From Northern Africa and Andalucia in Spain, Arabic numerals began to expand into Europe during the tenth century. They gained followers thanks to their elegant simplicity. Arabic numbers marked a significant advancement over complicated Roman numerals in terms of logic. Additionally, they had a strong visual appeal as calligraphic forms.
This appeal demonstrates how highly valued writing artistry has always been in Arabic culture. Arabic numbers and lettering emphasize flow and rhythm above all else, with a focus on understated elegance. They are the perfect marriage of form and function.
In this FABRIC project for Siemens, KNOW Creative and I tried to convey the special vitality that a city like Dubai possesses. “No other city has a digital infrastructure as dense. Dubai serves as a hub for the Arabic world, where numbers acquired their widely recognized forms. We believe that this fusion of the ancient and modern, the artistic and technological, will truly excite people.”