u-hall is a mobile space in which children enter to find themselves in a room with a live capture of the outside on both side walls. They find pens and are encouraged to draw on these walls. If they draw on a person, this new “accessory” will stick to the person throughout the entire frame. U-hall will arrive in various neighborhoods with the goal of giving children a small sense of empowerment over their environments. This idea came to me while I was on vacation in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and the war erupted. Everything revolved around it, the latest updates and how it was going to be resolved. The TVs were always turned on with channels being flipped through to get all perspectives and any bits of “new” news. When the electricity was cut and the TV no longer available, conversations never deviated from analyses, updates and rumors. As adults, we all find some logic in illogical situations, but I was very much concerned about how children felt in all the mess. How do you explain this to a 7-year old? We were all trapped in this and they especially could not make sense of their world. I wanted to take them out of this environment and give them something else to do. It had to be fun, not related in anyway to politics and give them a sense of empowerment over their environment. It also needed to be magical and unexpected. Through u-hall, children focus on passers-by to change their looks in an experimental angle. I wanted this to be accessible to many neighborhoods and make it available to as many children as possible. So I quickly ruled out the format of an indoor installation and decided to have it in a truck increasing its mobility. This also added to the magical sense I was looking for, just as a bookmobile does. Because it is an unsuspecting truck from the outside, it gives it a feeling of “secret cave” increasing the feeling of adventure. It allows you to haul in your imagination and creativity.

Once I developed the idea, I came to the conclusion that this would not only be helpful in disaster-struck environments, but could work with all children, anywhere in the world as we are more similar to each other as children and more connected as borders and limits do not make a difference to us. Although this piece is heavily reliant on technology, it is not the emphasis. I’m using lots of technology but only in the goal of drawing on people, using a pen. In a way, it can be seen as reverting to an older technology - the pen. But this pen is magical and will hopefully amaze children and widen their imagination. Another important aspect of this project is that there are no rules. They are free to interpret their world as they wish. Unlike most games, they can make their own rules. Because in war there are rules (i.e. you can’t play outside), here, they are free to draw whatever they like. Looking back in history, it allows children the same whimsical nature of Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with mustache or L.H.O.O.Q. in which he added a mustache to a cheap postcard of Da Vinci’s famous painting.

I like to compare this to a previous project I worked on called Tagtool+Video. Tagtool is a hardware and software interface for drawing and animating graffiti style content. My version combined it with video, in a manner that the drawing became a mask for the video, and so whatever was drawn was filled with the video layer, and then animated. This concept behind the tagtool+video is that video would no longer be bound to the rectangular box, rather it could be manipulated live in a very fluid manner. The similarity with u-haul is this very fluidity.

It can also be compared to the I/O brush developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Kimiko Ryokai and his team. It is in fact the exact opposite of the drawing tool. The I/O brush is used to capture a palette of colors or textures from the environment and use that to paint on a blank canvas. In uhall, I am providing the environment as a canvas and allowing the children to add to it as they please.

One last point that needs to be made: u-hall is about giving a sense of wonderment and empowerment to children in disadvantaged situations. But, there is a reminder that this environment is not real; if the child presses down too long on the wall with the pen, a ripple will go across the video, as a mirage or illusion would. Images Mona Lisa with mustache or L.H.O.O.Q. image. . I/O Brush image . Tagtool+video still from video .