What I’ve learned

Relative size of things

50000 Years Ago Music Without Sound

Doors of Perception

Play It By Trust

What makes the desert

Stealing thing is

My Sun Machine

Voyage Dans La Lune

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 lotmore pieces, that were excellent. I only choose these few to give you thesample of my taste.

My place

THE THINKERS REFUGEExplanation follows in my Essay.

My Illustrated Essay

My journey a day at a time.

I chose this name for this booklet, because thecourse was a journey for me, started from thenothingness and headed to the unknown. Duringthis journey I realized and found where my secretplace is and how to reach it. Nevertheless it is thejourney, not the destination, which counts. I choosethe “Day at a time” part of the title, because I had tocreate the homework piece on a daily basis. Eventhough I started late, I was able to catch up and Irealized and learned, it is more fruitful, if youconcentrate only on one assignment per day. That iswhy I postponed second week sketchingassignments to the end of the course.

I stumbled upon this course by pure chance: I studybusiness computer science in Vienna and wassearching for online courses that offered ECTSpoints. There are not many courses like that but Ifound this one and remembered I used to dreamabout being architect. I looked at the course andtried couple of assignments and I was instantlyhooked. I wanted to learn observe and stare atplaces and things differently. I want to understandhow architects look at place and objects in multipledimensions. I was really excited about the fact thatwe worked with new interesting apps and howtechnical this whole course is. Due the really originalway of using Instagram and other social platforms tocreate community around this course I enjoyed iteven more. Often I was looking for top 21 choicesand discussed directly with the authors which appsthey used to create their assignments. Sometimesthe apps that were suggested by the communitywere new even for the course creators and that’swhat a good community should really be about. Alsothe peer evaluation was something new for my kindof study. I always tried to check all the sources andcourse materials that were mentioned in theassignment pdfs and I learned a lot of new andexciting things.

I made first step on thisjourney by creatingpublic Instagram profile.I am very private personand that’s why Idedicated whole newprofile account to thiscourse. I started tofollow the top creatorsand anyone whose workI admired. I gained somefollowers too and withthe hashtags I gainedsome audience that Ididn’t expect to have. Icame little late to theparty so I started withthe Observing weatherweak. Which means Ihad to catch up on threeweeks. I tried to read asmany assignments aspossible but I have doneonly two assignmentsper day. That way I hadtime to think it throughand concentrate on thequality of my creationsnot on quantity. I willdescribe my journey inchronological order howthey appeared and whatI was able to learn fromeach assignment.

In the first step calledrelative size of things Ilearned how to takepicture with my phone Inever done it before. Itwas quite challenging butat the end I managed to dointeresting picture. First Iwanted to post picture of acommission painting that Imade. I never tried tophotograph my eye beforeso the photo won. I wasamazed by the powers often video that showed howsmall everything is in thewhole universe. Goingfurther ahead I crackedmyself up with theinstruction on how tomake a crumple a PaperBall. This assignment wasreally cool and I had a lotof fun searching for thebest angle to capture mycrumple paper. I learned tofocus on things without aname and by doing it Idiscovered strange thingsin my surroundings while Iwas on my Universitycampus. Till this day Ihaven’t figured out whatthis thing hanging from theceiling was, but I am sure itwasn’t there 50.000 yearsago.

Next step was dragging me even deeper into abstraction and welooked at things with no name by taking picture of liquid on anasphalt. The snow was melting outside so the liquid was already onthe asphalt and it was interesting how the abstract shapes variedfrom location to location. I couldn’t find a name for some shapeseven if I tried. With next assignment I learned how to get lost intosomething and I remembered when I was very young, how I usedto watch the war between blacks and whites on the televisionscreen when there was no signal. There was never a winner. Thefinal assignment of the first week was the most interesting one. Ilearned what really abstract sound means. First I tried to makepicture like everyone else where they made pictures ofdisconnected earphones or various sound system devices,instruments or water and landscapes, but then I stumbled uponone of the best and saddest pictures of my colleague kosarevv fromthis wonderful Instagram community. It inspired me so much that Istarted to see music without the sound in everything. I made a tonsof pictures but I finally went with the train tracks, because theyevoke sounds of coming and passing trains in my head instantly andthat creates music without the sound.

Second week was about the Learning to sketch and it was challengingand fun at the same time. In the first assignment we learned to put ourrational part of the brain asleep. We had to sketch a portrait ofsomeone turn it upside down and sketch it again. I am used to sketchon paper but I decided to limit myself and try sketching on the tabletsthat I could get my hands on. First I sketched Bruce Willis on Ipad’s apppaper53 than I have tried the sketchbook from Autodesk on my Androidtablet. By studying the resources to this assignment I get to know theartist Cy Twombly which inspired my favorite graffiti artists Keith Haringand Jaen-Michel Basquiat.

Next assignment was interesting and learned me to consider theperception of edges, spaces, relationships, light and shadows and thewhole gestalt. At the beginning I didn’t knew how to draw the vase. Itall 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 myperfect setup. Next assignment had the excellent name#SomePeopleTheyKnowThings, btw. all assignments had cool names.This one mentioned my favorite lyricist and singer Leonard Cohenand it was fun sketching leaves with no looking although I feltrestrained not to be allowed to look at what I am drawing. The nextassignment the House in Uehara was the hardest for me not becauseof the memory part I have excellent photographic memory but thedrawing part, because I wanted to draw it on tablet. The precisionwas horrible and I have tried it several times and didn’t like thesketch so I waited one whole day without looking at the house andthen I sketched it in illustrator where I could quickly draw anygeometrical shapes. I was surprised how much I remembered afterone whole day. Next sketch was about the hand while blindfolded. Idid this part in the app PaintJoy that offered shape brush that fills theoutlines automatically. It was entertaining.

Third week was about making collages and I learned how tocommunicate my inner selves, represent feelings andemotions and personality with abstraction, I tried to expressplace I was in with a collage and a relationship between meand the place and to represent myself within a place. I wasnot used to create such abstract pieces and it was veryeducational.

Next week was the week I started with the course, myentry week so to speak, but it was really interesting and Iwas hooked instantly. Observing the Weather. Besidesthe cool apps I learned the different points of view onthe sky, how to render the sun with kaleidoscope app,how to render rain, how to make time-lapse of cloudsand obtained nice apps while doing it, and finally how torender the moon. I started to be more aware of mysurroundings and the sky and weather in my area.

The week that followed was about Shaping Diagrams and by doing it we putthings into place. For the first assignment I did a mind map of things that Ithink about at that moment and I come up with list of 101 things Next was thestudy of our body so I wrote the 10 most important characteristic, that you gotto have I also combined little of collage making in this diagram. The diagram ofmy place was really good experience, because I remembered that I draw myplace in pixel art style and used is as a “fake” pie-chart diagram. I also addedextra GPS-coordinates about the places where I spent my time, latitude andlongitude. Than we learned about visual conceptualization and I decided to usethe thinker and Fibonacci spiral as the base for my diagram, where things youthink about gain on complexity with each iteration. Things I put there in thisorder zeros and ones, hearth, my love, three of life, chess, maze, Esher’spieces, matrix movie, and galactic empire from Isaac Asimov’s novels. Lastdiagram I created a combination of symbols in illustrator and described placebody and mind as intervened concept. This weekend was so inspirational and Iwas very motivated because I landed couple of times in the top 21 which gaveme even more energy to work on my pieces and also the likes that you collectfrom the community have very positive effect on the studying process.

Final week was about drawing maps. First we started with mapping our placeas if it was a line. I draw a line that roughly resembled the line I walk every timeI go to the university via train. Next we used geometrical systems and apps tocreate higher level of complexity and I draw my place where I always think, Imapped the place where even kings must go on foot. Further we had to mapour place as if it was a sea, so I draw pixelated zoomed part of an imaginarycoast of an island where I search my refuge if I want to think about stuff. Thenext part was most fun, because we had to map our island so I used a satelliteview of my neighborhood and erased the label signs and corrected someshapes 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 mapto find me. The last assignment was about the constellation and mapping ourplace as if it was a starry sky and to learn to work with metaphors. I somehowanticipated that there will be a star map so while I walked home the nightbefore, I noticed that our building looks like starry sky I made a picture and wassure I will be able to use it somehow. Next day there was this assignment and Icould use it to the fullest.

This journey learned me a lot and at the endI realized that my secret place is abstract inmy mind where I turn to if I need to thinkclearly or I need to relax and refocus. I call itTHE THINKERS REFUGE.