What I’ve learned
Relative size of things
50000 Years Ago
Music Without Sound
Play It By Trust
Doors of Perception
Stealing thing is
What makes the desert
Voyage Dans La Lune
My Sun Machine
Your Mind Will
Ones Destinations
If you start to think
Be sure you
A Line Is A Dot
No Man Is
This World Is
What I’ve learned from others
I Was inspired and admire all of these, in no particular order. There are lot more pieces, that were excellent. I only choose these few to give you the sample of my taste.
My place
THE THINKERS REFUGE Explanation follows in my Essay.
My Illustrated Essay
My journey a day at a time.
I chose this name for this booklet, because the course was a journey for me, started from the nothingness and headed to the unknown. During this journey I realized and found where my secret place is and how to reach it. Nevertheless it is the journey, not the destination, which counts. I choose the “Day at a time� part of the title, because I had to create the homework piece on a daily basis. Even though I started late, I was able to catch up and I realized and learned, it is more fruitful, if you concentrate only on one assignment per day. That is why I postponed second week sketching assignments to the end of the course.
I stumbled upon this course by pure chance: I study business computer science in Vienna and was searching for online courses that offered ECTS points. There are not many courses like that but I found this one and remembered I used to dream about being architect. I looked at the course and tried couple of assignments and I was instantly hooked. I wanted to learn observe and stare at places and things differently. I want to understand how architects look at place and objects in multiple dimensions. I was really excited about the fact that we worked with new interesting apps and how technical this whole course is. Due the really original way of using Instagram and other social platforms to create community around this course I enjoyed it even more. Often I was looking for top 21 choices and discussed directly with the authors which apps they used to create their assignments. Sometimes the apps that were suggested by the community were new even for the course creators and that’s what a good community should really be about. Also the peer evaluation was something new for my kind of study. I always tried to check all the sources and course materials that were mentioned in the assignment pdfs and I learned a lot of new and exciting things.
I made first step on this journey by creating public Instagram profile. I am very private person and that’s why I dedicated whole new profile account to this course. I started to follow the top creators and anyone whose work I admired. I gained some followers too and with the hashtags I gained some audience that I didn’t expect to have. I came little late to the party so I started with the Observing weather weak. Which means I had to catch up on three weeks. I tried to read as many assignments as possible but I have done only two assignments per day. That way I had time to think it through and concentrate on the quality of my creations not on quantity. I will describe my journey in chronological order how they appeared and what I was able to learn from each assignment.
In the first step called relative size of things I learned how to take picture with my phone I never done it before. It was quite challenging but at the end I managed to do interesting picture. First I wanted to post picture of a commission painting that I made. I never tried to photograph my eye before so the photo won. I was amazed by the powers of ten video that showed how small everything is in the whole universe. Going further ahead I cracked myself up with the instruction on how to make a crumple a Paper Ball. This assignment was really cool and I had a lot of fun searching for the best angle to capture my crumple paper. I learned to focus on things without a name and by doing it I discovered strange things in my surroundings while I was on my University campus. Till this day I haven’t figured out what this thing hanging from the ceiling was, but I am sure it wasn’t there 50.000 years ago.
Next step was dragging me even deeper into abstraction and we looked at things with no name by taking picture of liquid on an asphalt. The snow was melting outside so the liquid was already on the asphalt and it was interesting how the abstract shapes varied from location to location. I couldn’t find a name for some shapes even if I tried. With next assignment I learned how to get lost into something and I remembered when I was very young, how I used to watch the war between blacks and whites on the television screen when there was no signal. There was never a winner. The final assignment of the first week was the most interesting one. I learned what really abstract sound means. First I tried to make picture like everyone else where they made pictures of disconnected earphones or various sound system devices, instruments or water and landscapes, but then I stumbled upon one of the best and saddest pictures of my colleague kosarevv from this wonderful Instagram community. It inspired me so much that I started to see music without the sound in everything. I made a tons of pictures but I finally went with the train tracks, because they evoke sounds of coming and passing trains in my head instantly and that creates music without the sound.
Second week was about the Learning to sketch and it was challenging and fun at the same time. In the first assignment we learned to put our rational part of the brain asleep. We had to sketch a portrait of someone turn it upside down and sketch it again. I am used to sketch on paper but I decided to limit myself and try sketching on the tablets that I could get my hands on. First I sketched Bruce Willis on Ipad’s app paper53 than I have tried the sketchbook from Autodesk on my Android tablet. By studying the resources to this assignment I get to know the artist Cy Twombly which inspired my favorite graffiti artists Keith Haring and Jaen-Michel Basquiat.
Next assignment was interesting and learned me to consider the perception of edges, spaces, relationships, light and shadows and the whole gestalt. At the beginning I didn’t knew how to draw the vase. It all clarified While I was at my girlfriend and gave her some flowers, she put them in a vase close to the window blinds. That was my perfect setup. Next assignment had the excellent name #SomePeopleTheyKnowThings, btw. all assignments had cool names. This one mentioned my favorite lyricist and singer Leonard Cohen and it was fun sketching leaves with no looking although I felt restrained not to be allowed to look at what I am drawing. The next assignment the House in Uehara was the hardest for me not because of the memory part I have excellent photographic memory but the drawing part, because I wanted to draw it on tablet. The precision was horrible and I have tried it several times and didn’t like the sketch so I waited one whole day without looking at the house and then I sketched it in illustrator where I could quickly draw any geometrical shapes. I was surprised how much I remembered after one whole day. Next sketch was about the hand while blindfolded. I did this part in the app PaintJoy that offered shape brush that fills the outlines automatically. It was entertaining.
Third week was about making collages and I learned how to communicate my inner selves, represent feelings and emotions and personality with abstraction, I tried to express place I was in with a collage and a relationship between me and the place and to represent myself within a place. I was not used to create such abstract pieces and it was very educational.
Next week was the week I started with the course, my entry week so to speak, but it was really interesting and I was hooked instantly. Observing the Weather. Besides the cool apps I learned the different points of view on the sky, how to render the sun with kaleidoscope app, how to render rain, how to make time-lapse of clouds and obtained nice apps while doing it, and finally how to render the moon. I started to be more aware of my surroundings and the sky and weather in my area.
The week that followed was about Shaping Diagrams and by doing it we put things into place. For the first assignment I did a mind map of things that I think about at that moment and I come up with list of 101 things Next was the study of our body so I wrote the 10 most important characteristic, that you got to have I also combined little of collage making in this diagram. The diagram of my place was really good experience, because I remembered that I draw my place in pixel art style and used is as a “fake” pie-chart diagram. I also added extra GPS-coordinates about the places where I spent my time, latitude and longitude. Than we learned about visual conceptualization and I decided to use the thinker and Fibonacci spiral as the base for my diagram, where things you think about gain on complexity with each iteration. Things I put there in this order zeros and ones, hearth, my love, three of life, chess, maze, Esher’s pieces, matrix movie, and galactic empire from Isaac Asimov’s novels. Last diagram I created a combination of symbols in illustrator and described place body and mind as intervened concept. This weekend was so inspirational and I was very motivated because I landed couple of times in the top 21 which gave me even more energy to work on my pieces and also the likes that you collect from the community have very positive effect on the studying process.
Final week was about drawing maps. First we started with mapping our place as if it was a line. I draw a line that roughly resembled the line I walk every time I go to the university via train. Next we used geometrical systems and apps to create higher level of complexity and I draw my place where I always think, I mapped the place where even kings must go on foot. Further we had to map our place as if it was a sea, so I draw pixelated zoomed part of an imaginary coast of an island where I search my refuge if I want to think about stuff. The next part was most fun, because we had to map our island so I used a satellite view of my neighborhood and erased the label signs and corrected some shapes of buildings and surrounded it with circles that represented the water. In Instagram I tagged myself in so you could theoretically use it as treasure map to find me. The last assignment was about the constellation and mapping our place as if it was a starry sky and to learn to work with metaphors. I somehow anticipated that there will be a star map so while I walked home the night before, I noticed that our building looks like starry sky I made a picture and was sure I will be able to use it somehow. Next day there was this assignment and I could use it to the fullest.
This journey learned me a lot and at the end I realized that my secret place is abstract in my mind where I turn to if I need to think clearly or I need to relax and refocus. I call it THE THINKERS REFUGE.