My Study Semester Experiences at HAW Hamburg My semester studying abroad was an amazing experience that not only gave me a new perspective on the world but also gave me insight to my own life. I learned so much from this last semester that I created an entire portfolio just from work created in Germany. I was able to experience things in life and learn about my life and in art. The experience opened my mind and made me realize what exactly I want to do and what makes me happy. The experience of a new culture and a lifechanging half year seems so much more important to my own development as a person. I have been having a great time being out in the world and creating what I want to create and being pushed in the directions that actually make me a stronger artist. HAW Hamburg was a great artistic atmosphere that allowed me to be what I want and test what I can do while giving me an adventure of a lifetime. Arriving to Germany was An experience for me, I had missed my first flight due to my misplaced passport. The next day I was off and my layover left me in New York. I missed the connecting flight and was stuck in the airport for a whole day until the next flight. I spent the day in new york and then was on my way to Frankfort. in frankfort I fallowed carefully crafted directions given to me by Sophia and was on a train to Hamburg. I sat with my bags in the cabin and eventually met fellow train travelers and began meeting a new culture. I met Sophia who brought me to my new apartment. I was given my room and met my roommates, I had no idea that I was in the best apartment of all Hamburg. Our apartment was located in Georgi Haus on Kamererufer. We are not too close to the U-Bahn like others, and our bar room is not the biggest. We have far fewer rooms than any other apartment building, but ours has a great layout. Our flat has become a family, we may fight and make messes but we help each other and party together. Seven students sharing four bathrooms a kitchen and a Tv room. I thought that this was a norm throughout Hamburg. But as the semester progressed I learned that many of the apartments are very different. Some are dorm style with a lot of rooms crammed one floor. I Loved my room and my flatmates were great I couldnt have imagined a better group of people.
The courses were set up in an odd way that I am not used to. Classes were more like meetings with professionals. Every week was a chance to work through your own creative process and show your ideas. The professor would then steer you in the right direction. We were given creative freedom and could work at our own pace. We would spend most our time developing one project and did not show our work to the class. This produced many different projects that had almost nothing in common. Of course, this is because in my previous university experience, every week had a smaller project on a set curriculum. Each lesson would yield similar results from the students, and everything we learned would combine in one test or project. At that point we could do almost anything but having started in the same place with the same lessons as the other students. Presenting our progress to the class would yield similar ideas or seem alike in one way or another. The freedom in the German university to create exactly what I want was a great experience, but it is the things that I have been learning in and out of school that made this semester so special. In HAW I would not know what to expect from my peers as the semester would run out. There were so many different ideas and skill levels which made it more exciting to finally see what others created. Every time I presented my work I felt like I was getting one on one experience with someone who has worked in their profession and wanted to help me progress my understanding. Each of my professors were very knowledgeable and as I watched each of them create or speak about their profession I felt a stronger connection to the art. Watching one professor create beautiful seriffed letters on a chalkboard or create a book layout from a pile of printed photographs was nothing short of amazing. I enjoyed the open feeling of each class and the work I created was the best I have done so far. Each class gave me something I was excited to show. This may have been because of the way that the class was structured. We had one final project but for the classes in Germany, this was it. We knew what we had to create and had an ample amount of time to work on this project. Back home, we would have lessons and lectures and smaller projects would lead up to the final and we would have three or five weeks to start from what we learned during the semester. Overall, I enjoyed this freedom I created things that excited me and I could turn in anything and get the grade. for some this may equate to substandard work, but I really enjoy what I do, the evidence is in my work.
This semester at HAW allowed me to work with letters and fonts, photography, magazine layout, Product packaging and create inventions. I had seven classes and i surprisingly completed each class with something I enjoyed. My first class each week was font design, where I learned about the creation of fonts. We studied the different looks of a typeface and viewed original sketches behind a complete font set. As the semester went on, it was hard to tell who would show up for class on a given monday. We had the ability to go to the computer lab to touch up sketches and create our own font. I had taken a typography course over the summer and this class was a perfect way to continue my education in typography and love of type. The course progressed based on your own interest and work ethic, which for me was great. I was given the choice to work as hard as I wanted, and in this class I wanted to learn. I was able to make my own font from the summer and make it a useable typeface for the computer. I was surprised at how easy it was to create a font in illustrator and copy-paste it into the fontlab program. Once you hit export, outcomes a font ready to use install on a computer availible for use in any program. This was the most exciting part of this course for me. I felt like I held a new power. Not only could I make a typeface, but I could even give the font to a friend to use. I was so excited i began working on other fonts which became the final project for my next class. Taught in the same room, just two hour break later, the professor would walk into a room dominated by foreign students; only three out of ten were regular German students. This was our handmade handwriting class. We learned the beauty of handmade type. This was a way to connect my education in fine arts with typography. Our assignment was to create a set of designs originating with handmade letters. We started with calligraphy and explored the basic tools. We began by examining the happy accidents and the options that can be created with the simple change of angling of the pen nib. Soon we moved on to experiment with whatever we liked. Makers, paint sticks and shapes; anything was allowed. With this we began brainstorming ideas for design. The idea was to create a product or design and present it at the course's conclusion. I had an idea to print on recycled items using stencils and song lyrics. As the semester progressed I found myself working on the fonts more than this project. Luckily with the freedom to change our minds in this class, I simply changed the song lyrics to one song by the Beatles, All You Need is Love. The song selection allowed me to show the different fonts I created presented by in each appearance of the word love While the lyrics in the song allowed me to display the few fonts that I could type with. Some fonts were created by hand then presented by pictures while some were vector shapes, along with this project I created love stencils from my fonts. Each font turned out to be a unique work of art. If I have more time I will continue with this project and keep adding to my font portfolio.
My next course was a photography class. I found myself in a class with amazing photographers. I was not too great of a photographer and my idea was to learn about my camera. This class turned out to be about sets of photos like one would find in a photography book. This is done by taking a theme and sticking to it. once the pictures are developed, the pile is examined and certain pictures go together. these are chosen and after the holes are filled in, an entire book is laid out ready to be printed. This was the photographic eye of my professor anyway. I was actually not proud of my performance in this class. Yes, I learned and saw some great photography, but I was not creating this great photography. This was also not the idea behind the class. We were more focused on shooting within the theme. Any picture within the theme would work, and many of the photos of my classmates were more abstract or of something mundane but once they were put into the book layout everything seemed to work together. I struggled to figure out my theme for most of the semester. I took so many picture during my trip here that any one theme was hard to choose. I finally ended up making the U-Bahn travel as my theme and completed my first photography book, but not without realizing that I should have been in the portraiture class of the same teacher with Sabine and David so I could learn more about my camera and composition. Next up was Nada 1 and Nada 2. both taught together by the same teacher, at the same time. This class was set up unlike the type classes, we were given the same creative freedoms but with the added ability to show up as we pleased. This was the ultimate on your own project. We would create then on wednesdays 9:30 12:30 we were able to come in and show our progress, or not. Often I would shoot for the former, but sometimes I would fall victim to the freedom choose and pick sleep. Nada 1 was a class about product packaging. We were given the assignment to create a store with items that customers cannot use or do not want. There were many ways to think about this prompt. I started by choosing everyday items and tweaked them losing a key element or creating a design flaw. Some of my items posed a conundrum on second glance. Double sided matches, round dice, keys with no hole, ice cube tray with no grid, ruler with hatch marks, pens that only write upside down and many others. My ideas switched throughout the semester, some were more impossible what-if situations like a store that allowed you to print photographs from memories in your head. Another, by a peer allowed a customer to by amounts of time such as a moment. I ended up working in an entirely different direction. Progressing in my work, I created packaging that served a purpose after its initial use. While
many boxes or packaging ends up in the recycling bin or even the trash, I combined three pieces of cardboard to make a strong, light weight table for a laptop. This board, known as a GRrinNs (or Grins for short) was a very simple solution to a problem of meaning less recycling. As we, not only in America but Germany too, find ourselves tossing the packaging away, we sometimes realize that we can recycle. But when we recycle there is still so much more work to be done to turn this into something useful again. My idea was to make the box something more likely to be kept and used for another purpose. Like a child creating a fort from a discarded box, I found the fun and entertainment from making something from nothing. I made this Grins into a multi-use tool, complete with ads and a store plan. This project became more of a life's work feeling where I can continue to create this wherever and whenever I find a box. I loved this project, I feel like I got a lot of ideas out on to paper. My Nada 2 class was about magazine layout. We were assigned a magazine project with the theme of luck. I worked with different folding ideas, different paper sizes. I found a way to take one piece of A3 paper and cut and fold it so that it could be opened two ways. My idea was to have a good luck and bad luck side. Later after examining my ideas on the concept of luck, it became the create luck side and the make happiness side which would then allow the reader to choose to be superstitious and believe in luck or instead choose to create happiness which, I believe is why people rationalize luck to something they can not control. But they would be able to choose which they would like to do and the magazine would aid their goals. I then put this project on the back burner. I was working on many different projects and needed a way to show them, of course a portfolio would be the best way. And with this, my project became a magazine that showed how lucky I've been. This scrapping of perfectly good ideas was a theme of my whole stay in Germany. I then created my portfolio as a project and now have a catalog of projects that I created in one semester. The next class I chose was called Graffiti spüren builder. I soon learned that the urban idea of graffiti was not a theme in this class, but rather referring to the abstract and layered aspect of abstract painting. Though I was more excited to make graffiti, I stuck with the class and had a lot of fun playing with paint and composition. It became a stress relief and a way to test different methods of painting. In this class I would play with splatters, drips, different types of paint, and overlapping colors and ideas. Some works were more abstract others were of subjects and others stories or figures were apparent, toward the end of this course i even worked using recycled items as my canvas. This was great fun and I concluded this course in an odd way. I was late to the final showing of our paintings. I made it to class to see the last student leave. I was upset but decided to show my work anyways. I laid my paintings on
the floor and my professor seemed surprised at all the work I had created. I asked her which of my recycled paintings she liked best and I gave them to her. She had always liked talking to me in both german and english. she even wanted to have a meeting where i would help her and a friend with their english as they were about to depart on a trip to the states. I was unaware of how professional an abstract painter my professor was. As I put away my work she left and returned with a book. I read the cover and found that it was a book of her work 1972 2002. It was an amazing gift, a signed copy of 30 years of work as a professional abstract artist. My final class each week was the international workshop, which is an attendance optional class. We were free to come in and get the sort of peer review that I had missed in my other classes. Presenting our work to be poked and prodded and critiqued by our classmates and our professor was a good idea. Our professor was one of the best and brightest free thinkers that could really put ideas and new perspectives in our heads. I loved the directions he would lead the conversations and have the students think in new ways. I was happy to show different works and learn where I may have gone overboard or when I had forgotten the main idea. This class helped me gain a better connection to my peers at HAW. This was the main thing missing from my experience at HAW, peer review. We go through a whole semester and for most classes only meet our classmates a few times to share our work. Though we still created great things without this element, I can not help but wonder how each of our projects would have changed with a few more minds in the creative process. My semester was a wonderful experience packed full of classes. But it was not only the classes that made such a strong impact on my life. It is the things I did and the people I met. It was the students I met many of them from the european exchange student program. Hanging out with these guys was a vacation. Each of us had very different lifestyles, everyone with different cultures. Somehow we found ourselves together sharing a beer and learning that we are not too different from each other. It was the most amazing group of people with so many languages. Everyone was studying along their curriculum but found time to party all together. The whole experience was better than anything I could have imagined. I am proud to say I experienced a semester abroad and learned so much in one semester in Hamburg, Germany.
The best public transportation Only a 3-5 minute wait for the next train Runs all night on weekends I could ever imagine plus night buses all paid for with my student ID The Bahn takes away all of the transportation worries Safely travel through all of Hamburg Each train is very punctual
Believe it or not, we found some extra time to Party with the most diverse, interesting group of once in a lifetime We have many different cultures studying for many differnt professions all meeting in Hamburg sharing a meal or a beer. friends Luckily, we still have Facebook... Wether we meet in a flat, or a bar we always have quite a night ahead of us.
Oh, The Diners Meeting up with some friends over a brunch of Ja products or a Spanish meal prepared by your flatmates simple, delishious plans Eating actual traditional German meal was not as likely as something ethinic or traditional of another culture. Extra points for crateing these meals together with your friends sharing recepies, cooking tips, and even different ways of eating your rice.
Christmas Markets and the Hamburger Dom Free to the public events happen throughout the year, but the Christmas markets were packed with shoppers and familes all huddling over Glühwein The Hamburger Dom is a fair in Hamburg that takes place three times a year and is known as the biggest public festival in the north of Germany.
Like living in a snow globe... This winter was beautiful, Just visiting the snow is nothing like having it blaket the city. Erasing and covering, hiding the imperfections. We were even able to walk out on to the frozen Alster Imagine waking up and walking outside to find this on your way to school. also imagine you have lived your entire life in sunny California The alster froze but later the water beneath drained and the ice layer shattered. Amazing and cold.
Berlin Trip Far too much to see in one trip. many important events, history and such a beautiful place The places we visited and the things we saw really brought all of my german history to life.
We might not remember the dates or exactly how important these places really are, but, the memories we made and the few we recorded brought a group of exchange students in Hamburg a whole lot closer. Ryan Castillo