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“Dabarithms: Palm Wish” (“Daba”: Dubai “rithms”: Algorithms) is an interactive digital, kinetic, geo-location performance project, that uses algorithmic functions calculated in a custom GPS Tracking Android Phone App to direct a “wish-scavenger” around the man-made Palm Jumiera Island (Dubai, UAE) in search of wishes. The Palm Jumiera is named for the island’s direct architectural mimicry of the shape of the fronds of an actual palm tree. Dabarithms selected this fabricated, excessively priced, investor-targeting, Disney-like island, for the purpose of collecting 9 wishes from the inhabitants of this island, who are some of the wealthiest tourists and investors in the world. Our question: “When you have everything, then what would you wish for?” We collected 9 wishes due to the number’s numerological significance, an ancient belief originating in Babylon, Greece, Jerusalem, Egypt and the Vedas, claiming that there is a relationship between a number and coinciding events. In numerology the number 9 is the number of universal love, eternity, the penultimate within an eternal system, faith, the concept of karma, spiritual enlightenment, spiritual awakening, service to humanity, humanitarianism, and more. In Dabarithms, once each wish was collected, sand from the feet of the wisher was placed in a bucket, and the techno-ritualitstic gesture launching a man-made electronic flying fairy drone, served to “activate” each wish. The performance was represented on the American University Dubai campus in a grid of 9 trees. Buckets of sand was affixed to each tree containing lights, along with each fairy drone. The GPS tracks of navigating the Palm Jumiera in search for wishes was played back in software, and the moments in time when each wish was collected, the fairy drone associated with each wish launched into the air and continued to fly around the AUD campus.

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Dabarithms: Palm Wish (2014): Desire, Wealth, Algorithmic Ritual, and the Search for Meaning

Dabarithms: Palm Wish (2014), by Max Kazemzadeh and Reza Safavi, is an interactive, kinetic, and geo-locative performance project that examines the relationship between wealth, desire, technology, and spiritual meaning within the constructed environment of Palm Jumeirah in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Using a custom GPS-tracking Android application, the artists direct a “wish-scavenger” around the artificial island to collect nine wishes from people who inhabit or visit a place associated with luxury, conspicuous consumption, and global investment.

The project begins with a deceptively simple question: When you have everything, what would you wish for?

This question transforms the Palm Jumeirah from a spectacular architectural achievement into a site for investigating the limits of material abundance. The island’s palm-tree form is itself a designed image of nature, rendered through an enormous intervention in the coastal environment. Its artificial geography, luxury-oriented development, and carefully cultivated identity provide a setting in which the relationship between human desire and constructed reality becomes particularly visible.

As wishes are collected, sand from each wish-maker’s feet is placed in a bucket, and a ritualized gesture activates an electronic fairy drone associated with that wish. The project subsequently translates the performance into a second location: on the campus of the American University in Dubai, nine trees are arranged in a grid, each associated with a bucket of sand, lights, and a drone. Software replays the GPS tracks of the original journey, and the drones launch at the moments when the corresponding wishes were collected.

The result is a distributed artwork connecting an individual’s expression of desire to a specific geographic location, a physical trace of that encounter, a technological ritual, and a later kinetic event.

The work’s conceptual significance lies in its transformation of wishing from a private, intangible act into a collective and spatially distributed performance. A wish is spoken or expressed by a person, associated with the ground beneath their feet, translated into a technological gesture, and eventually embodied in the flight of a mechanical object.

Through this process, Dabarithms: Palm Wish asks whether material abundance satisfies human desire, whether technology can become a vehicle for ritual and belief, and how the symbolic power of a wish changes when it is collected, recorded, and activated within an artwork.

1. Palm Jumeirah: Artificial nature and the architecture of desire

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The choice of Palm Jumeirah is fundamental to the project’s conceptual structure. The island is not simply a location in which the artists happen to collect wishes. Its designed geography embodies a particular relationship between human aspiration, economic power, technology, and nature.

Palm Jumeirah reproduces the branching geometry of a palm tree on an enormous scale. The organic form becomes a master plan for a constructed environment, transforming a recognizable natural image into a system of reclaimed land, infrastructure, residences, hotels, and luxury development.

This transformation provides a compelling parallel to the artwork’s treatment of wishes.

A wish often begins as an internal, imagined possibility: something a person hopes to experience, acquire, change, or become. Through social, economic, and technological systems, some wishes can be translated into concrete outcomes. Architecture is one of the most visible manifestations of this process. It allows human desires to become buildings, landscapes, institutions, and entire urban environments.

Palm Jumeirah can therefore be read as a materialization of collective aspiration. Its physical form demonstrates the capacity of wealth, engineering, and planning to transform an imagined landscape into a lived environment.

Yet the island also raises questions about the relationship between desire and fulfillment. A place designed to signify luxury and exclusivity invites reflection on whether the accumulation of material resources can resolve the more intangible dimensions of human longing.

The project’s question—“When you have everything, then what would you wish for?”—turns this architectural setting into a conceptual experiment. It asks what desire becomes when the ordinary constraints of material acquisition appear to have been substantially reduced.

Of course, wealth does not mean that a person literally has everything, and the people approached by the project cannot be assumed to share the same priorities or circumstances. The question is most productive when understood as a provocation directed at the cultural symbolism of the site, rather than as a claim about the inner lives of every wealthy person who lives on or visits the island.

The contrast between the island’s apparent abundance and the intangible character of wishing opens a space for considering desires that cannot be purchased straightforwardly: belonging, affection, peace, health, purpose, recognition, or hope for others.

The island becomes a setting in which material wealth and immaterial desire can be placed in productive tension.

Palm Jumeirah is both the subject of the work and a metaphor for the human capacity to construct the world in the image of what we want. By collecting wishes within this environment, the artists investigate the distance between constructing the conditions of material fulfillment and understanding what makes life meaningful.

2. The question of desire: What remains when material needs are met?

The central question of Dabarithms: Palm Wish is philosophical rather than economic: what happens to desire when material acquisition is no longer its primary concern?

The project situates this question within a landscape associated with luxury and investment. Its premise invites a distinction between having and wanting: between the possession of material goods and the continuing human capacity to imagine a different future.

Desire is not a single, stable phenomenon. It can involve immediate needs, personal ambitions, emotional attachments, social recognition, ethical commitments, or aspirations that extend beyond the individual. Some desires can be satisfied through the acquisition of objects; others concern relationships, experiences, or circumstances that cannot be reduced to ownership.

By asking participants to articulate wishes, the artists create a situation in which desire becomes temporarily available for public consideration. Something that might ordinarily remain private is expressed, collected, and incorporated into a shared artistic process.

This gesture can be understood through a distinction between instrumental desire and existential desire.

Instrumental desire concerns the means to an identifiable end: acquiring a particular object, attaining a position, or achieving a practical outcome. Existential desire concerns broader questions of how one wishes to live, what one considers meaningful, and what one hopes for beyond immediate personal advantage.

The project does not establish that the wishes it collected necessarily fall into one category or the other. Instead, its framing invites viewers to consider how different kinds of desire might emerge in a setting strongly associated with material success.

The question also recalls philosophical critiques of the assumption that increased consumption necessarily produces increased well-being. Possessions can satisfy genuine needs and provide comfort, opportunity, and security, but the accumulation of possessions does not automatically resolve questions of purpose, mortality, connection, or responsibility.

The artwork’s significance lies in its willingness to pose these questions without supplying a predetermined answer.

The nine wishes become fragments of a larger, incomplete portrait of human aspiration. Each wish belongs to an individual, yet its inclusion in the installation allows it to participate in a collective exploration of what people value.

This process also complicates the idea that wealth necessarily eliminates desire. Rather, it suggests that desire continues to operate beyond the domain of material acquisition, taking forms that may be emotional, social, spiritual, or humanitarian.

The artwork therefore shifts attention from the objects people possess to the futures they imagine. It asks viewers to consider whether the fulfillment of desire depends on acquiring more, or whether it may also require rethinking what is worth desiring in the first place.

3. The palm tree as symbol: Nature reproduced through technology

The artificial palm form of Palm Jumeirah introduces a second conceptual layer. The island imitates an organic structure, but it does so through large-scale engineering, land reclamation, and architectural planning.

This relationship between natural form and technological reproduction parallels the artwork’s use of electronic fairy drones.

The palm tree is recognizable as a living organism, yet the island translates its shape into an engineered environment. Similarly, the fairy drone evokes a fantastical or supernatural being, yet its movement is produced through mechanical and electronic systems.

In both cases, an image associated with nature or enchantment is reconstituted through technology.

The comparison suggests that contemporary culture increasingly encounters nature through designed representations. Organic forms become architectural models; natural landscapes become curated destinations; and mythical or magical figures become programmable machines.

This does not mean that the natural and the artificial become identical. Rather, their visual and symbolic boundaries become sites of interpretation.

Palm Jumeirah is not a living palm tree, just as an electronic fairy drone is not a supernatural creature. Yet both can evoke associations that extend beyond their literal physical properties.

The island’s shape communicates ideas of growth, branching, and organic beauty, while the drone’s fairy-like appearance evokes flight, wonder, and magical intervention. These associations give technological constructions meanings that exceed their practical functions.

The artwork thus explores a contemporary form of enchantment in which engineered objects can participate in the symbolic language of nature and fantasy.

This connection is particularly important because the project does not simply place technology in opposition to spirituality. It uses a technological object to activate a ritualized experience, suggesting that contemporary forms of enchantment may emerge through the interaction of mechanical systems, cultural symbols, and human imagination.

The artificial palm and the electronic fairy become parallel examples of how technological construction can reproduce the appearance of something organic or magical while generating new meanings in the process.

4. The nine wishes: Numerology, symbolic systems, and the construction of significance

The decision to collect nine wishes introduces numerology into the project’s conceptual framework. The number nine carries symbolic associations in multiple religious, philosophical, and cultural traditions. In the project’s description, it is associated with universal love, eternity, faith, karma, spiritual awakening, service to humanity, and humanitarianism.

The use of nine establishes a formal structure for the work. Rather than collecting an unlimited number of wishes, the artists select a fixed quantity that carries an interpretive significance.

This decision makes the number itself part of the artwork’s symbolic architecture.

Numerology is based on the belief that numbers can possess meanings or correspondences beyond their quantitative value. From a scientific perspective, the claim that a number independently governs or predicts events is not established by the number’s symbolic associations. Yet numbers can still acquire substantial cultural and artistic significance because people use them to organize rituals, narratives, and systems of belief.

Dabarithms: Palm Wish operates within this distinction. The number nine provides a conceptual framework through which the wishes are collected and presented, while its associations contribute to the project’s spiritual and humanitarian dimensions.

The number also creates a useful relationship between individuality and collectivity. Each wish belongs to a distinct person, but the nine wishes together form a structured whole. The installation does not reduce them to a single statement; instead, it presents them as separate expressions brought into relation through a common numerical framework.

The number’s association with universal love and humanitarianism also introduces a counterpoint to the project’s luxury-oriented setting. A landscape associated with exclusive consumption becomes the site of a process framed by values that extend beyond individual acquisition.

The artwork thereby juxtaposes two different ways of organizing value: the economic valuation of property and luxury, and the symbolic valuation of hope, faith, generosity, and human connection.

The nine wishes need not all express the same values for this contrast to be productive. Indeed, the diversity of individual wishes is part of what makes the collection meaningful. The numerological structure establishes a framework for the work without requiring every participant’s desire to conform to one interpretation.

The broader philosophical issue is how meaning emerges through systems of association. A number can be a quantity, a design constraint, a cultural symbol, and a ritual organizing principle at the same time.

By making nine the organizing number of the work, the artists demonstrate how a numerical decision can become part of an artwork’s conceptual and ceremonial structure.

5. Sand from the feet: Embodiment, place, and the material trace of a wish

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One of the project’s most conceptually resonant gestures is the collection of sand from beneath the feet of each person who contributes a wish.

A wish is ordinarily intangible. It may be spoken aloud, silently imagined, or expressed through writing, but it does not possess a physical form of its own. By associating each wish with sand collected from the wish-maker’s feet, the artists give the act of wishing a material and geographic reference.

The sand is not simply a decorative substance. It connects the individual to the place in which the wish was expressed.

The feet are especially significant because they mediate between the body and the ground. They support movement, establish contact with the environment, and make physical presence possible. Sand collected from beneath them becomes a trace of that contact: a small quantity of material associated with a particular person occupying a particular location at a particular moment.

This gesture gives the wish a kind of material anchor.

The process can be understood as a form of symbolic indexicality. An indexical sign is connected to something through a direct physical or causal relationship, rather than solely through resemblance or convention. A footprint, for example, is evidence of contact between a body and a surface.

The sand in Dabarithms similarly establishes a physical association between the wish-maker and the place where the wish was collected. It does not contain the wish itself, but it becomes an artifact connected to the event of wishing.

This distinction is important. The sand does not scientifically preserve the person’s thoughts or intentions. Its significance is established through the artwork’s procedure, which associates the material with the person, the place, and the expressed wish.

The gesture also introduces an intriguing relationship between the individual and the environment. A person may think of a wish as something originating internally, but the project places that wish within a network of physical relations: a body standing on the island, the sand beneath the body, the bucket receiving the sand, and the drone subsequently associated with the wish.

The wish becomes part of a larger material sequence.

This process evokes ritual practices in which soil, water, ashes, stones, or other natural materials are collected and used to mark an event, establish a connection, or preserve a memory. The specific meanings of such practices vary, but they demonstrate how material substances can function as carriers of symbolic relationships.

In Dabarithms, the sand links an otherwise invisible expression of desire to the physical world. It transforms wishing from an abstract psychological event into something that can be collected, transported, displayed, and associated with a subsequent action.

The work thereby suggests that meaning is not always located exclusively in language or thought. It can also emerge through gestures that connect people, materials, and places.

6. The fairy drone: Technology as a vehicle for enchantment

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The electronic fairy drone is the project’s most overtly magical element. Its appearance evokes the fairy as a figure associated with wishes, enchantment, and the possibility that ordinary reality might be interrupted by extraordinary events.

Yet the fairy is not supernatural. It is a manufactured object whose movement depends on technology.

This contrast is central to the project’s conceptual impact. Rather than representing a wish through a static symbol, the artists associate it with an object capable of taking flight. The wish is given a kinetic consequence: a mechanical figure rises into the air when the associated moment in the performance is replayed.

Flight is particularly effective as a metaphor because it suggests release from ordinary constraints. A drone leaves the ground, moves through space, and temporarily occupies a different relationship to gravity and the surrounding environment. Its movement can evoke freedom, aspiration, transformation, and the desire to transcend limitations.

The fairy form adds an imaginative dimension to this physical event. The machine is not merely a flying device; it is a technological object dressed in the symbolic language of magic.

This combination recalls the concept of technological enchantment: the capacity of technical systems to produce experiences of wonder, mystery, or symbolic significance rather than functioning only as practical instruments.

The project does not require technology to become genuinely supernatural. Its effect depends on the recognition that a mechanical object can participate in an experience that feels ritualized or magical because of how it is framed, activated, and interpreted.

The drone becomes a contemporary wish-bearing figure. It translates a private expression of desire into a public, visible event.

There is also an important difference between wishing and fulfilling a wish. The drone’s flight does not necessarily make the wish come true. It marks the wish’s inclusion in the artwork and gives it a symbolic enactment.

The machine therefore does not function as a literal instrument of wish fulfillment. It creates a performative representation of the wish’s activation.

This distinction allows the artwork to explore the psychological and cultural power of ritual without claiming that the ritual guarantees a particular outcome. The drone’s flight makes hope visible, but it does not eliminate uncertainty about the future.

In this sense, the fairy drone is both a machine and a metaphor. Its mechanical operation grounds the event in physical reality, while its appearance invites the viewer to imagine possibilities beyond the machine’s literal function.

7. The techno-ritualistic gesture: From private wish to public performance

The project’s activation gesture is crucial because it connects the collected wish, the sand, and the drone within a repeatable sequence.

A wish is first expressed by an individual. Sand is collected from beneath that person’s feet. The sand is placed in a bucket, and a ritualized gesture activates the associated fairy drone. The event is then incorporated into the installation’s later playback.

This sequence resembles a ritual structure in which an intention is marked through an object and transformed through a prescribed action.

Rituals often establish transitions. An ordinary object may become ceremonial through the circumstances in which it is handled; an everyday movement may acquire significance when performed in a particular sequence; and a private intention may become socially recognizable through a shared procedure.

In Dabarithms, the activation gesture creates such a transition. The wish moves from being an individual’s expression to becoming an element in a collective artistic process.

The term techno-ritualistic is particularly apt because the gesture combines the symbolic organization of ritual with the operation of a technological device. The drone is activated through a process that has both mechanical and ceremonial dimensions.

The gesture is not merely a button press or an incidental technical operation. Its meaning derives from the sequence surrounding it: the wish, the sand, the bucket, the drone, and the larger framework of numerology and place.

This sequence also raises questions about how contemporary rituals are produced. Ritual is often associated with religion, tradition, or established cultural practices, but artistic interventions can create new ceremonial structures by organizing objects, actions, and expectations in deliberate ways.

The artists construct a procedure through which an ordinary technological object becomes part of a symbolic event. The drone’s flight is both a technical action and a performance of activation.

The result is a form of participatory mythmaking. The participants contribute wishes, the artists establish the ritual structure, and the installation gives the resulting events a visible and repeatable form.

Importantly, the ritual does not require a shared religious belief among participants. Its structure can be experienced as playful, theatrical, reflective, or spiritually suggestive. The work leaves room for different interpretations of what it means to activate a wish.

Its conceptual strength lies in showing how technology can become meaningful through ritualized use, even when the underlying mechanism remains entirely mechanical.

8. The grid of nine trees: From individual desire to a collective constellation

The presentation at the American University in Dubai campus translates the original wish-collecting performance into a spatial arrangement of nine trees. Each tree is associated with a bucket of sand, lights, and a fairy drone. The GPS data from the original journey is replayed, and the drones launch at the moments corresponding to the collection of their associated wishes.

This arrangement creates a second geography for the artwork. The original performance occurs across Palm Jumeirah, where wishes are gathered from individuals encountered in the island’s environment. The later installation brings these separate encounters into a campus setting, where they become part of a coordinated spatial composition.

The nine trees operate as distinct points within a larger structure. Each preserves an association with an individual wish, yet the grid brings all nine into a common visual and temporal framework.

This relationship between the individual and the collective is conceptually important. A wish is personal by nature: it expresses an individual’s hopes, needs, or aspirations. Yet the act of collecting wishes makes them available for comparison and collective contemplation.

The grid does not necessarily reveal the content of each person’s desire. Instead, it gives the collected wishes a shared spatial presence. Each tree becomes a point of reference, and each drone flight activates one element of the larger composition.

The arrangement also introduces a relationship between organic form and technological organization. Trees are living organisms, shaped by growth and environmental conditions. The grid, by contrast, is a formal arrangement that organizes space according to a predetermined structure. The buckets, lights, and drones bring these two dimensions together, placing technological artifacts within a setting associated with living growth.

This juxtaposition recalls the artificial palm geometry of Palm Jumeirah. In both locations, organic forms and technological systems become entangled: the island translates a palm tree into an engineered landscape, while the installation associates trees with sand containers, lighting, and flying machines.

The trees also suggest a potential metaphor of rootedness. A wish is expressed by someone occupying a particular place, and its associated material is subsequently situated within a different environment. The sand and drone carry the memory of the original encounter into a new spatial context.

The installation thus makes the movement of meaning visible. A wish originates in one place, becomes attached to material, and is reactivated in another.

The result is not a literal reconstruction of Palm Jumeirah. It is a spatial interpretation of the original performance, preserving selected relationships while changing the context in which they can be experienced.

9. GPS playback: Memory, chronology, and the choreography of data

The use of GPS playback adds a temporal dimension to the installation. The movements of the wish-scavenger are recorded during the original performance and subsequently replayed through software. When the replay reaches the moments at which the nine wishes were collected, the corresponding drones launch.

This means the installation does not simply display an archive of past events. It uses that archive to generate a new sequence of physical actions.

The GPS track becomes a kind of score for a kinetic performance. Just as a musical score organizes the timing and sequence of sounds, the recorded route organizes the timing and sequence of drone launches. Geographic information is transformed into a temporal structure that can be reenacted.

This process complicates the distinction between documentation and performance.

A conventional video recording preserves an event for later observation. In Dabarithms, recorded information actively controls the timing of the later installation. The past becomes operational: it does not merely describe what happened but determines what happens next.

The installation therefore exists across two moments in time. The original performance establishes the route, encounters, and wishes. The subsequent presentation reactivates selected moments through the movement of the drones.

The audience experiences the result as a new event, even though its sequence is determined by the earlier performance.

This is a significant feature of computational art. Recorded data can become an executable structure, allowing past activity to generate present consequences. The archive is no longer simply a repository of information; it becomes a mechanism for producing action.

The GPS system also introduces a relationship between geographic and temporal coordinates. Each wish is associated with a location and a moment in the original journey. The later drone launch reproduces the temporal position of that encounter within the installation’s sequence.

The result is a choreography in which space and time are linked through computation.

This arrangement also raises a broader question about memory. What does it mean to remember an event by repeating its structure rather than simply representing it through an image or narrative?

The installation preserves selected relationships from the original performance: the sequence of the journey, the moments when wishes were collected, and the corresponding drone activations. It does not reproduce the complete experience of encountering each person or moving through the island. Instead, it transforms the past into a new form that can be encountered by a different audience.

Memory here is both preserved and reconstructed. The recorded route retains a trace of the original performance, while the installation reorganizes that trace into a new spatial and kinetic experience.

10. Algorithmic navigation and the limits of control

As part of the broader Dabarithms project, Palm Wish uses a custom GPS application to direct a participant through Palm Jumeirah in search of wishes. The application establishes a set of navigational rules, but the resulting experience unfolds through encounters with people and places that cannot be entirely predetermined.

This structure recalls the Situationist-inspired projects Egyrithms and Beirithms, which use algorithmically generated directions and activities to disrupt habitual navigation and encourage unfamiliar encounters with urban environments.

In Palm Wish, the algorithm serves a specific conceptual purpose. It turns the island into a field of inquiry, directing the wish-scavenger through a landscape associated with luxury and investment in pursuit of something intangible.

The application provides a procedural framework, but the wishes themselves emerge through interactions with people. The algorithm can guide the search, yet it cannot fully determine what another person will wish for or how that person will respond to the question.

This produces a tension between computational organization and human unpredictability.

The route can be structured through software, but desire cannot be reduced to a navigational instruction. The application can help establish where the participant goes, while the social encounters along the way introduce content that remains contingent.

The project therefore distinguishes between organizing the conditions of an encounter and controlling its meaning.

This distinction has broader implications for contemporary digital systems. Algorithms increasingly determine what people see, which routes they follow, which options are recommended, and how their activities are sequenced. Such systems can structure opportunities without fully determining the experiences that result.

Dabarithms: Palm Wish makes this relationship visible by using algorithmic navigation to facilitate an inquiry into human aspiration. The technology organizes the search, but the meaning of the resulting wishes cannot be generated by the algorithm alone.

The project suggests that a computational system can create the conditions for discovery without necessarily controlling what is discovered.

11. Wealth, humanitarianism, and the ethics of wishing

The project’s choice of location and its use of numerology create a further contrast between material wealth and humanitarian values.

Palm Jumeirah is associated with luxury-oriented development, while the number nine is framed in the project through concepts such as universal love, service to humanity, and humanitarianism. This juxtaposition invites viewers to consider the relationship between individual aspiration and responsibilities that extend beyond the self.

A wish may concern personal fulfillment, but it may also express concern for family, community, strangers, or the future. The act of collecting wishes in a wealthy environment opens a question about whether abundance changes the scope of a person’s desires or their understanding of what matters.

The work does not need to assume that wealthy people are inherently selfish or that material prosperity prevents humanitarian concern. Such assumptions would oversimplify the relationship between wealth and human motivation.

Instead, the project places a question about the meaning of abundance within a landscape that makes economic inequality and conspicuous consumption relevant interpretive contexts.

What would it mean for a wish to move beyond the individual? Could the experience of material security create opportunities for generosity, or does the pursuit of more wealth continually generate new forms of desire? How do people imagine a good life when their aspirations are not limited to acquiring possessions?

The numerological associations of nine offer one symbolic framework through which these questions can be considered. The installation does not establish that every wish expresses universal love or humanitarian intent. Rather, it places individual wishes within a larger structure that invites consideration of collective values.

This distinction allows the work to explore ethical questions without prescribing the correct answer.

The artwork also raises a question about the relationship between the expression of a wish and its fulfillment. A wish can articulate an aspiration, but its expression does not ensure that the desired outcome will occur. Some wishes depend on other people, social circumstances, political decisions, economic resources, or events beyond individual control.

The fairy drone’s flight provides a symbolic enactment of a wish, but not proof of its realization. The mechanical event can make hope visible without resolving the uncertainty that accompanies hope.

In this respect, Palm Wish is less concerned with granting wishes than with creating a space in which desire can be expressed, materialized, and contemplated.

12. Philosophical impact: Technology, ritual, and the materialization of hope

The philosophical significance of Dabarithms: Palm Wish lies in its ability to bring together several systems of meaning that are often treated as separate: economic value, personal desire, geographic space, natural materials, numerology, ritual, and digital technology.

The project begins with a question about wealth but does not remain confined to economics. It transforms that question into a participatory performance in which wishes are collected, associated with physical traces, activated through ritualized gestures, and translated into a later kinetic installation.

Each stage changes the form of the wish without completely resolving its meaning.

The wish begins as an individual’s aspiration. The sand connects it to a place. The ritual gesture associates it with a technological action. The drone gives it a visible and kinetic expression. The GPS playback then reactivates the event within a collective installation.

This sequence demonstrates how an intangible idea can acquire material and social presence through a carefully structured artistic process.

At the same time, the work reveals the limits of materialization. The sand does not contain the wish; the drone does not fulfill it; and the GPS record does not explain its significance. These elements establish relationships around the wish, but its meaning remains connected to the person who expressed it and to the interpretations of those who encounter the artwork.

This tension is central to the project’s philosophical force. Technology makes the wish visible, but it cannot exhaust what the wish means.

The work also challenges a narrow understanding of technological systems as tools for efficiency and control. Here, GPS software, lighting, and drones are used to create a ritualized experience of hope and symbolic transformation. The technology does not simply solve a practical problem; it becomes part of an artistic inquiry into the relationship between desire and belief.

The project consequently offers a form of contemporary enchantment grounded in physical mechanisms. Its magic is not the claim that machines can grant wishes, but the recognition that technological objects can participate in experiences of wonder, reflection, and collective meaning.

Ultimately, Dabarithms: Palm Wish asks whether the fulfillment of human aspiration can be understood exclusively through material possession. By collecting wishes in a landscape of conspicuous luxury and transforming them into a distributed kinetic ritual, the artists shift attention from what people own to what they hope for.

The work transforms wishing into a material and spatial performance, suggesting that even in a world shaped by wealth, engineering, and technological control, the desire for meaning remains irreducibly human.

13. Integrated conceptual framework

Element of the artwork	Conceptual significance
Palm Jumeirah	Represents the transformation of aspiration into an engineered landscape and raises questions about wealth, luxury, and fulfillment.
The question “When you have everything, what would you wish for?”	Distinguishes material acquisition from emotional, existential, and humanitarian aspirations.
GPS-guided wish-scavenger	Uses algorithmic navigation to structure encounters with people and places.
Nine wishes	Creates a numerical and symbolic framework for organizing individual expressions of desire.
Numerology	Introduces the relationship between numbers, cultural belief, and the construction of meaning.
Sand collected from each wish-maker’s feet	Establishes a material connection between an individual, a particular location, and the expression of a wish.
Electronic fairy drones	Transform wishes into visible kinetic events, combining technological mechanisms with the symbolism of enchantment.
Techno-ritualistic activation	Converts a private expression into a repeatable public performance.
Nine trees on the AUD campus	Reorganizes individual wishes into a collective spatial composition.
GPS playback	Converts a record of past movement into a score that generates a new performance.
Lights, sand buckets, and drones	Establish relationships among material traces, symbolic objects, and technological action.
The relationship between Dubai and the university installation	Connects the original site of encounter to a second location through data, memory, and performance.