A contribution to the project from Mexico.The Big Blue Ball project has been unleashed onto the web and will soon be unveiled to Europe when its author visits Paris and Amsterdam in the next few weeks.

The Big Blue Ball: Pictures, people, place project is the work of CQU Brisbane International Campus lecturer Donna Wright.

The Big Blue Ball is an international research project that uses creativity and creative arts practice as a way of sharing ideas across cultures. The project facilitates intercultural dialogue, broadening understandings about ourselves and our world and encouraging diversity awareness and tolerance.

Eight pictures, ‘primary cultural texts', were specifically developed for the project and provided to participants for interpretation.

A total of 150 young adults from 90 nationalities have taken part in the research to date and it continues to regularly engage new members from around the world.

Encouraging the use of the communication technologies developed within the creative and visual arts has given participants the opportunity to expand creative possibilities, dynamically activating creative processes and allowing for a wider range of representation that can more adequately illustrate their ideas.

Project members have responded by writing descriptives, poetry, narratives and free word associations in English and in their first language. Paintings have been produced, digitised images have been created, images have been hybridised, and other pictures and photos have replaced them.

The project is extended through a continuing interchange of ideas between Ms Wright and project members.

Donna WrightCreative reflections of participants' interpretations have been recorded on miniatures; small, magnetic-backed, wooden blocks, 100x100mm in size.

The blocks are protected by a hard, clear lacquer. They fit neatly in the palm of a person's hand, are accessible and easy to handle.

These hand-painted pictures act as memory units providing a collection of semiotic building blocks that can be renegotiated by the viewer.

Over 200 of these miniature ‘imagetexts' have been produced and are made publicly available at various exhibiting sites; spectators can continue the communication process by moving the blocks around on the table and up the wall, reflexively constructing new ideas and new meanings.

The project website www.blueballproject.net/  provides both an exhibiting space for the Big Blue Ball collection, which is updated regularly, and an interactive creative exchange where the public can be part of this intercultural playground for sharing ideas in an increasingly globalised world.

Ms Wright will soon leave for a 6-week trip to Paris to take part in an exhibition and to present a workshop/paper to the International Humanities Conference about the project.

"I'm doing a series of paintings that will be included in an exhibition at American University in Paris, held during the International Humanities Conference. I'm taking my research project to the conference and will be doing a workshop/paper with the delegates. I will also present the paper to the International Conference for Diversity in Organisations, Communities and nations, in Amsterdam," Ms Wright explained.