My Journey To ThingnessTatjana SimjanovicArchitecture 1o1 Part 1From Nothingness To Place

Instagram - t.simjanovicFacebook-tatjanaG+ tatjana

Part 1 What I have learned

Week 1: Taking pictures

Computer screen ok. For the moment

Power of ten for later.

#Relative size of things

“To think in pictures stands nearer to unconscious and is unquestionably older than the later both ontogenetically and plyco genetically.” Sigmund Freud

When focused on eye , glass reflection captured the moment frozen in time of the computer screen reflection.

Week 2 : learning to sketch

#PlayItByTrust

#DoorsOfPerception

To see using your mind invisible to the eye.To accept the beauty of outcome,to perceive the material world.The world and interleration between the people is not black and white ,as Yoko Ono said you have to play it by convincing each other.

To look at the dimensions of shapes in different way.To see out or in. To switch a part of our brain in order to perceive the void , the negative space, full or empty in either way.

It is the empty space which makes bowl useful.

convincing each other.

#WhatMakesTheDesert

The place which is marked by the colour of thought.Wormlike a fireplace, repeating like a desert.

Week: 3 Making collages

#StealingThings

To be overwhelmed sometimes by the place. To investigate the endless meaning of a total space of a pure and absolute light as mentioned by Piero Manzoni.

#VoyageDansLaLune

To bring the moonlight inside

Week 4: observing the weather

#SomePeopleWalk

To render the rain. In Edouard Manet painting Le Déjeuner sur

l'herbe creating a different perception of rain, water and painting.To increase visual perception and skill to enable us to portray the weather.

Week 5:Shaping diagrams

#YouGottaHave

Relationship between mind , body and external world. Interaction between inner sensation through body and perception of others towards it. Inner struggle for expression. Tried to express primeval through a sense of ballet Rite of spring by composer Igor Stravinsky.

Week 6 :Drawing maps

#YouCantCriticize

To evolve connectivity through continuous use of a only one square which is repeated, using different colours and sizes. The squares are connected with rhomboids to make them appear to float in a sort of perspective view. It is not real,your eye is tricked into believing that it is.

Part 2 : What I have learned from others

doors of perception by panyuk

To understand the perception, shape and volume of space using simple lines.There is no vase , but the vase was there , made an imprint.

Romance in many dimensions by diana.topan

To use abstract forms colours, shadows and shapes simply but expressivly.

To express the space and way of thinking at the moment, using an overlay of collages with particularly strong shapes and dynamic interrelations between them.Use of even tonality and uniformity adds to perception of space

Inside no outside by sarah kaushik

What makes the desert by guess-ana

Unidentified space represented with monochromic rendering. Focused on the space and body which we can interpret in a few different ways.

Stealing things by lubagrudinska

Inside outside by lizzielalayelow

Use of bold colour , combination of colours , rendering and use of new Ios application - glitch.To steal from others and produce individual strong peace.

Use of colour , contrasting it with non colour layering to great effect. Digital and more bold Robert Delaunay.To use bold colours and non colours to express depth of space.

Brian Eno say by lizandrevna

My sun machkeep_on_askingine by

The depth of space , layering of simple forms . Storytelling through symbols.

Use of very simple elements to great effect.

Ones destination by keep_on_asking

You cant criticize by keep on asking

To render feelings through the ostere use of tonality with layering of colleges and hand drawn lines. To express the place and the oppression of walls.

You cant critisize by ppon1985

Use of photo image and geometrical layering to achieve desired effect and expression.Simple but very effective.

Part 3 My place

Part 3: My place is my memory

My space overlooks the garden. I can see the birds and their are mouths are open to song. I cannot hear them , it is stillness unless the wind is strong. I can see the fox , urban one, sometimes.My stydy-where I spend most of my time , working , solitary. But my special place is connected with memory of play as a child, with other people, with experience of growing.My special place.

#OnesDestination

Week 3 Making collages

It feels like my place is becoming swallowed from outside.

And I look through the window into the sky

#ExcuseMeWhile

Week 4: Observing the weather

#BrianEnoSays

To find myself physically in the space with memory escaping from my heart to find my special place.

Week 6 : Shaping the diagrams #IfYouStartToThink

To find the way on the zigzag track from space to place , to connect, to remember. To find unbearable lightness of being connected by the stairs.

#BeSureYou

#HumanBehaviourFlows

Week six: Drawing maps

#NoManIs

My mythological island , my memory

Week 6:Drawing maps

#ThisWorldIs

Week 6:Drawing maps

Binary code

Part 4 My illustrated essay

Part 4 My illustrated essay

It was always clear to me that my place was not that exciting to other people.Some commented that its to bare , some some that is nice , some would not have a black floor or grey walls. It has a view to the garden with curtains which resemble the garden , white with green abstract leaves, which provide a night time garden when I can not see the daytime one any longer or at least when there is no moonlight.

But this is not the special place i was heading to when i started from zero I mean from nothingness. And it was really nothing , I barely heard of Instagram. My right hand was my computer, work horse, my phone was for communication , mails , work, boring stuff.I had to empty it of all useless data clogging it, to have space for all those existing cutting and pasting, drawing and other ‘strange’ apps.

When I made the first image out of nothing and close up, it was scary, my eye looked distorted, strange.After doesn attempts it was better and I made it. I educated my eye with my eye.I learned how to do close ups and started my journey.

Then it was paper , crumpled one , the folds of it. It resembled to me some deep soft ravines on the planet I do not know, the mountain with no name - yet. I learned to see the new form out of just paper, crumpled one. And I got lost inside its folds.

I looked at the things with no name and saw them .

And then it was a silence of the sun gliding over 2000 years, every day , every month , every year. And silence was different, every day , every month every year. I can see the music of the sun cascading over.

When you are in the land where there is no name you look at the things and see them for what you think they are. Your memory of places and objects tries to find the answer, but sometimes there is no answer, and when there is no answer, we can not speak , there is a silence.

Photo of Pantheon dome made on visit to Rome August 2013.

The gurney through nothingness, through sketching comencess, rediscovering the ways to trick the barren, to free it. To put the logic asleep.To understand more.To close your eyes and feel the space and sketch. To open your eye but close your mind. To sketch from memory to see what you can't see and what you can through the night or through the day, to involve your memory.

On this journey I had to draw quickly, I was concerned that i will forget. And I did forget or did not see some things even though my memory was few seconds away. My brain was selective,it did not notice the car, the concrete columns going all the way through the top. My memory perceive them as a trees, to resemble the tree in front. And at night time the house looked as a owl, warm and guarding its inhabitants.The house which is deceptively simple but in reality complex and full of balancing and counterbalancing sensations.

Kazuo Shinohara’shouse in Uehara

There was nothingness, pure nothingness.The first step to thingness was through the collage. How do i represent myself? No recognizable things , but i did have them, I could not free enough myself to let go of things- recognizable. And I felt lost,a bit.But then, I thought and understood. I have to free myself from things , have to think in shapes ,colours, textures and express what I feel and think about using them.

Homage to Kurt Schwitters and Roy Lichtenstein

Sometimes I feel that black and white would be just easier to live with, without the colour, with little colour. But interrelations and complexity of cognitive are colorful.I tried to express outside no outside with various black and white shapes,forms and textures. To provide a perspective to black and white , to implement the space which appears dimensional like it is complexity of thought. With adding a little colour for expression of cognitive growth.

How to get to that special place from nothingness? In the heart of every place there is a fire and fireplace. As per chance, there is no heating in our house for some time now , boiler problems. Bit there is a fireplace , warmth and glow , and cosiness it provides. Human interaction increases with fire,like in olden times when hunter gatherers had luxury of time and story telling. The transition from non place with the help of symbols to a place on the images of the fireplace rendered and granular projection.

From warmth of the place to journey to myself in the place through symbols and cutouts.I have chosen to use my surrounding through figurative representation of weightlessness, discovery of myself inside the place.There is still an unknown represented as a void of a black square . It might be that i was influenced by, or took literary quote from Matisse “there are always flowers for those who want to see them”.

We started to look at the sky in our journey to thingness, the locus, the place. The sky everchanging, blue and grey and black and orange and green. With new pair of eyes trained to understand the desert. Not that sky is the one , but it is vast and ever changing also. To understand the different skies we learned that we are closer to understand different places.And when you have a sky, then, there is the rain and the sun and the moon.

I used caleidoscope to look at the sky and found that geometrical shapes which kaleidoscope forms are mesmerising. Pieces of sky and surroundings are arranged and rearranged in geometrical order.The sky moments are many it freezes a particular moment in time.Our holes to see the sky through and interpret it.

We soaked in the rain ,made others drench and made building float in the lakes of rain.Some people drenched , some felt gentle rain drops.I made a collapsing building at first to show the power of raindrops and the ways distraction the rain can cause, although I love nothing better than rain on hot summer day and feel of it on the skin and sound it makes like a nature composer.

The sun rendering I looked through the eye of Thicket application. I saw the strung peace of sun ray deep inside the blackness of space. And I also saw the light of the flash of phone camera on top of plain paper to depict that concentrated power of the sun. The Sun also peaks through the clouds overlooked from my study window. On that day when Hyperellipse application omage was taken the sky’s weather situation was dramatic. I named it Pride and Prejudice.My perception of place with its strong connections of surroundings was slowly forming with increased sensation of new heightened perception of the conditions on Earth and beyond.they way I looked at the clouds , the sky the moon was changed. I have, now, my own hole in the space around me.

Rendering the moon - thinking process

How to get from nothingness to place? As William.S.Boroughs said <your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.>

How to give a name to a place with no name, to mean something, to become the place. To organize oneself. Small thoughts to become thoughts with meanings and names, to map the brain and its thoughts and what is not and what is priority. To provide the diagram of the mind.

I started with the the green blackboard, with “tabula rasa”. With one blackboard - one thought , not defined as yet. The addition of a few more to form a spine and arms of thoughts. Then I added the words to give the names and pictograms to provide the meaning without the words. The play with words and no words - pictures to say the same universally for everyone to understand.

thought process of rendering of shaping diagrams

transition from primeval to abstract to minimal with no words

To add the body to this place, to grow inside the space and become part of it, to start existing with all its thoughts, confusions, memories, knowledge and lack of it, needs and wishes.I rendered the highly strung body of a ballet dancer which represents the conflicts of modern society - stressed living with primeval connections to dance and expression of our inner senses and feelings.

rite of spring ballet internet image

This place of mine started to grow - from the physical - room -study with addition of different meanings attached to bare physicality.

In order to express connection between mind and body I tried to strip everything to bare basics. The confines of a physical space and its surroundings which you can not escape at present <It might become possible sometimes in the future> is a line drawing of a cube. The thoughts are the cognitive ability to communicate, to make agreements or disagreements; to imagine.

The red dot is a memory ,the special place

The search for finding connections between our body, mind and place and which one influences which, was the progression of our search for that special place. Connections between all of them are interlinked. They all influence each other. They can not function on their own. We cannot function and live without this interconnection. We can not have a memory without it.

My diagram of “be sure you” might not read as a diagram proper, but discovery of that connection and the feeling of discovery is symbolized by the balloon. To distance oneself and look from above, to free, just for the moment, the mind from the body to search for this special place.

And to see the map from the above. Is it a line or a curve or a space made of these lines.

How to define the space with precision geometry? The approach is to provide some meaning to geometry to express the place in space with the play of surfaces and projections, with the perspective of far away and close by. But what is far and what is close and what is in between in the place? They overlap and change in time as space does.

The transition from the geometric and precise place to the concept of map metaphor was a stepping stone to the dimension of layers. Layers of past memories and present.

We imagined the island, place as one. The image above is an island of pixels inside the computer's brain in the sea of the past, raised from the places where one lived, were happy and then vanished.To find the island and start to own it, whatever that island might be. In the shape of dreams and water play, with symbols of what you were and what you are striving to become. With maps of wishes and figures of mythological authority, with a sea of foam, with fragments of the past. My island.

From island to starry sky to the depth of the cosmos. Mapping the imaginary places. Mapping dimensions of reality through images.

1o1 team thank you -where next?

The end

All works unless stated by T. Simjanovic for architecture 101 part 1 course.Instructors:Stefano Mirti Anne-Sophie GauvinPetronela NitaABADIR Accademia di Belle Arti