mark abouzeid

What is the impact of increased individual mobility (regional and global), millennial travel culture and 2nd generation immigrant integration on perceptions of identity, culture, gender/familial roles, racial tensions and religious tolerance?  What is the secondary impact on family and community?

Cultures travel and take root or get dislocated; individuals internalise nostalgia or experience amnesia.  The mental trauma and anguish caused due to the pull and push factors of belonging to the land of adoption, at the same time, retaining their cultural traditions, creates a third status...the permanently dislocated, without roots. This paper proposes a application of an art research method, “Identikit”, to gauge the Impact of growing individual migration on culture, identity and racial bias.

Corporate Intranets are being heralded as the next focalpoint for the information revolution attracting the interest of information providers, b2b procurement services and knowledge management solution developers.
While demand for these resources is projected to reach in excess of $37 bn by 2001 (src:Cowles/Simba), it is yet unclear how the public information and private data is to be passed between a secure environment behind the firewall and the open environment of the Internet.

The issue is not one of security alone but includes complicating factors of platform diversity and costs related to deployment of any enterprise-wide solution.

This paper examines developments in XML based publishing and the Information and Content Exchange Protocol ("ICE") as a means of passing XML objects efficiently and securely to and from corporate intranets.

“It is not only the dance that we need to preserve but, more importantly,  the act of learning how to dance.”
Mark Abouzeid

Which is more valuable to preserve?

The Object: the size, dimensions, and provenance of a Pyramid or work of Art; or

The Context: technique, materials, innovation, failures, social catalysts and impact on cultures past and present.

In today’s news, video and film industries; emphasis is given to preserving the object…the what…while issues of economies of scale and audience attention span adequate preservation of the context…the why.

Media culture today, in one sense, is still where food culture was in 1988.  When media is processed, just like when food is processed, important elements are taken out, reconstituted, replaced, and reformulated into something resembling the authentic, original reality, but altered in both subtle and unsubtle ways.

Cultural performances, slow food products, and artisan crafts are not complete stories; they are objects out of context and have little meaning in themselves. Instead, they must represent the underlying culture, values, lifestyle choices, and enrichment that participants derive from these activities’.

The story being told is, typically, the subject’s ‘reason for being’ not the filmmaker’s ‘way to become famous’. The screenings are more often online, around a table or at a conference not at a festival or cinema.  Most importantly, success is measured by the community itself and no one else.

SlowMedia producers do not fit into the modern filmmaking ecosystem.  Like community agriculture, SlowMedia has grown from the ground up through the visionary work of its artists, producers, and organisation builders but needs its own model for sustainable production if it is to survive.

Ethnographers and ICH field workers use similar methods to represent the societies and communities in which they work. The tools may be the same, but differences in scope require new best practices to ensure authenticity of context for future generations.

ICH field work, like cultural anthropology, concerns itself primarily with first hand observation of the content and method of Acculturation: the process by which a person acquires the cultural knowledge required by the community and to live (not merely survive) in their environment.

“Ethnography is a research method using first person observation by anthropologists documenting facts while being actively involved in the daily life of subject communities – so called ‘field research’ – resulting in analyses of the subject culture, accenting descriptive or qualitative documentation.” (Conrad Phillip Kottak, 2008, Italian Edition)

Likewise, ICH practitioners depend on participatory observation of the cultural practices they are helping to preserve. The primary difference, however, and something that is fundamental to the ultimate value of their work is based on the primary scope of Living Heritage preservation: the transmission.

New technology presents risk for many customers. They react differently toward this risk based on their innate characteristics, the wants and needs of their companies, and the behaviour of other buyers. The Technology Adoption Life Cycle (TALC) models how different groups of customers adopt to discontinuous innovation at different times. This model helps policy makers and technology developers build the best strategy for each phase of a product’s life.

This is a synopsis of the report on Collective Wisdom, an innovation-research project carried out by Mark Abouzeid in collaboration with Carmen Ciciriello between 2003 and 2004.  It investigates the potential for identifying disruptive innovation as it develops at the microscopic level using human behaviour as a primary signal.

Over the past 20 years, I have applied specific models to each stage of the stakeholder analysis in helping clients and institutions create business strategies that are turned specifically to theirs and the market’s stage of development.  These models provide essential insight required to apply subsequent models with a higher level of accuracy and validity.  On their own, each models has strengths and weaknesses.  Integrated into an information and analysis chain, weaknesses are eliminated and dependable insight is generated.

Think of all we miss on a daily basis by not looking up.

Featuring the architecture of famous buildings we pass through on a daily basis: London, Paris, Milan, Florence, NY, etc.

Inspiring ceilings we never notice; metro ventillation vents as beautiful tryptics, the eiffel tower as never before.

La prova che gli Italiani e gli Stranieri possono convivere.

“In questo periodo di crescita di intolleranza razziale che viene alimentata dalla crisi economica, “Non Sono Clandestino” cerca di dimostrare il valore che gli immigrati forniscono al loro nuovo paese sotto forma di scambio culturale, di diversità, d’innovazione e di turismo.  Si tratta di una provocazione positiva che evidenzia i valori italiani (o di altri paesi) e vuole maturare la consapevolezza che senza gli immigrati la nostra economia crollerebbe.”
Mark Abouzeid, fotografo e fondatore, Non Sono Clandestino.

Il progetto, sostenuto dell'assessorato alle politiche giovanili e pari opportunità, nasce dall’idea di cambiare il modo di percepire gli extracomunitari, evidenziando il loro importante apporto culturale, sociale ed economico. Per questo abbiamo selezionato artisti americani, stilisti giapponesi, astrofisici cileni, cantanti di blues filippini, ricercatori colombiani, mediatori culturali yemeniti, registi ghanesi.
Il Nuovo Nuovo Mondo
Una provocazione visiva a sei temi

La mostra “Il Nuovo Nuovo Mondo”, presentata all’interno della rassegna “Non sono clandestino”, sintetizza questa visione interculturale, mostrando anche un nuovo modello economico per la realizzazione degli eventi culturali di cui si fa interprete. L’evento si colloca nell’ambito delle celebrazioni dell’anno Vespucciano.

Original catalog for My Enemy My Brother - awarded Peace Prize by the Region of Puglia.

My Enemy, My Brother
If we begin to see each other as we are...brothers, all striving for the same things and with the same problems...then maybe we can begin to put an end to this madness. We are fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, bosses, employees, emigrants, lovers and, most of all, children.

We live in the Middle east as well as the East End...or Atlantic Avenue...Edgeware Road...the Left Bank. We are Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jews, Druse, Persians and much more.
As long as we see each other as different, the wars will never end. When we begin to see our enemy’s face as that of our brother’s, then there can be hope.

Nemico Fratello
Se iniziassimo a vederci come fratelli, tutti impegnati nelle stesse cose e con gli stessi problemi, forse potremmo iniziare a porre fine a questa follia. Noi siamo padri, madri, sorelle, lavoratori, imprenditori, emigranti, amanti e soprattutto, figli…

Noi viviamo nel Medio Oriente, e nell’Occidente, nell’Atlantic Avenue o in Edgware Road…

Siamo Musulmani, Cristiani, Sikhs, Buddisti, Jews, Druse, Persiani e molti altri…

Fino a quando ci considereremo diversi, le guerre non avranno mai fine. Quando inizieremo a vedere il volto del nostro nemico come quello di un nostro fratello, allora ci potrà essere ancora speranza.

After decades of, often criticized, conservative economic policies and cultural heritage protectionism, Oman is perfectly positioned to win tourism's greatest prize: the cultural tourist, writes Mark Abouzeid.

One of the largest and fastest-growing global tourism markets, cultural tourism accounts for up to 40% of tourism traffic annually (OECD).  The global wealth of traditions has become one of the principal motivations for travel, with tourists seeking to engage with new cultures and experience the global variety of performing arts, handicrafts, rituals, cuisines and interpretations of nature and the universe.

As a natural consequence to globalism, regular travelers are seeking more depth, context and authenticity than their mass 'check-list' tourist counterparts.  They devote more time to each destination, spend more overall but need to feel a connection with the culture they discover.