Bulbhead was an animated essay introduction projected onto the façade of the Emirates Palace, revealed before prominent Mît guests during the Hct ceremony ( Higher College of Technology & MIT / Abu Dhabi 2007. ) .
Verticality as Setup
Setup concept – I proposed a *vertical screen setup—a narrow, ascending frame that made space for aerial performers and gave the content a sense of upward motion and discovery. It aligned naturally with the idea of the *door as a portal to other dimensions. The format created intrigue by focusing attention into a slender opening while preserving the full beauty of the wide and contrasting Emirates Palace facade space around it.
I introduced a groundbreaking fusion of physical performance and digital storytelling: a 10-meter-high vertical projection screen, transforming traditional stagecraft into a towering visual spectacle.
Concept Design & Rational
The identity of HCT is symbolized by the bulb—an emblem of human creativity and innovation. I began with a series of sketches, exploring different visual directions that could represent this concept. These early outlines evolved into a range of expressive visualizations, each offering a unique mood and stylistic tone. The bulb transformed into flying balloons, barbed wire and broken glass, a world map, the keyhole of a door, a questioning human head, a hammer, an hourglass, an atomic reaction, viruses, and finally a nuclear explosion—each metaphorically expanding the idea of human creativity from a simple spark into something far more multidimensional, profound and most certainly… dangerous.
Each act began with a dark school-style chalkboard, where the title of the act—often referencing a famous historical or cultural event—was written in white chalk.
Opening sequence
The opening moment unfolds with a seamless real-time interaction between suspended live performers and immersive projected content. As the performers begin their vertical ascent, every movement is tracked manually from the control room by intelligent software—A single Fire spot that follows them, piercing the darkness like ancient torches.
With each step upward, they erase the shadows of a symbolic cave wall, gradually unveiling ancient hieroglyphics—fragments of forgotten stories and sacred symbols. This dramatic unveiling represents the dawn of culture—a moment when humanity first began to carve its identity into stone.
The performance becomes a metaphorical journey through time, where movement reveals memory, and light becomes language. It is not merely an introduction—it is a ritual awakening of history through motion, projection, and light.
Flash forward to seven ancient Arabic doors, each one unlocking the next—an uncertain passage through time or into another dimension, born from a phase where intuition led and answers were secondary.
The duality of creativity
Act 3 focused on the danger of ideas and creativity. In this sequence, the once-symbolic bulb morphed into a monstrous creature with long, stick-like legs, eerily roaming through a faceless, nameless city. This transformation revealed the darker side of invention—the moment when pure ideas escape control and begin to reshape the world in unintended, often unsettling ways. the transformation of the bulb into a robot like creature emphasizes the duality of creativity: its potential for both brilliance and destruction.
<p><a href=”https://vimeo.com/256284795″>BulbHead 2007 – Edition 2018</a> from <a href=”https://vimeo.com/h3omc”>h3oconcepts.ae</a> on <a href=”https://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a>.</p>
Bulbhead was the second piece in my Head” Trilogy—positioned between *GearHead, the mechanical genesis of a emerging Internet era in 2000, and *QuestionHead, the unresolved echoes of human interaction with Technology: a content played in the frame of HCT in Abu Dhabi featuring a ghost screen projection interacting with performers and a backscreen projection.
GearHead was my first show—projected onto the newly built Dubai Internet City façade for its launch ceremony. Even then, I was already testing the edges of expression, letting subtle visuals hint at a language I hadn’t fully learned to speak yet.
The Birth of BronzPunk: Alchemy of Aesthetics and Myth
Aesthetics Through Time & Space
Bulbhead marked a turning point in my visual language—a crucible where recurring elements first emerged and began to cohere into a personal mythology. Rotating gears became not just mechanical parts but symbols of time, repetition, and inevitability. The long-legged creatures, drawn from the dream-anatomy of Dalí, wandered through desolate cities like estranged gods—avatars of imbalance in the age of hyper-logic.
The visual tone of the work, once simply “sepia” or “vintage,” has since evolved into what I now call BronzPunk: a fusion of old-world patinas and speculative futures. It’s an aesthetic of decay and resilience—bronzed surfaces, rusted elegance, mechanical bones dressed in myth. This style bridges the classical and the dystopian, the remembered and the imagined. It allows room for contradiction: nostalgia without comfort, progress without resolution, invention haunted by its own shadows.
In Bulbhead, these elements were not decoration—they were visual arguments, metaphors stitched into the choreography of light, projection, and movement. The work began the conversation that would continue through GearHead and QuestionHead, and ultimately through my broader exploration of how the human psyche contorts under the weight of its own creations.
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