A vine branches wildly...

This year in CLMOOC (Connected Learning MOOC) I have been tagging along with the doodling in July and August.

What I like about it is the low stress challenge of regularly creating some sort of artistic image which is shared with others in the community.

In past editions I have taken time to explore digital image manipulation applications or digital drawing/painting applications.

This year I started concentrating on finding the limits of what I could draw with my fingers on an iPhone and then playing digitally with resulting output.

Generally speaking such "creations" are very fast. A few seconds or a few minutes of scribbling on a screen and then I share.

Speed in a sense was of essence...

Then I got fed up with the facility of it all.

If, actually drawing on a small screen with a finger isn't that easy - it's fiddly, it's quick to get effect.

I got fed up of fiddling and then swiping and clicking.

If "connected", it felt like I was disconnected from the world around.

Is that what being in jail feels...I wonder.

Are we being fiddled for effect?

Quick sale...long retraction...

Clearing out the cellar

We were clearing out the cellar.

I came across an old artist's box which was falling to bits and covered with dust. I repaired it's warped veneer, sharpened a couple of ancient pencils, tried to soften up the paint brushes, inspected the pastels, looked wistfully at the child's watercolor set and sat down in the garden to draw a vine.

That vine attracted me on a number of levels: its form, its colour, its texture, its history, its rootedness.

A vine branches wildly.

I got taken up in the intricacy of the vine's winding, I found myself drawing and redrawing its elipses, eyeing up its angles, and got altogether wound up in how the vine had grown.

It doesn't look much of a drawing but I spent a fair old time in communion with that familiar yet unfamiliar plant.

I could have photographed it in an instant and ignored it.



I would have had no relationship with it to talk about.

I realise what I have been missing in recent times.

I had serious longterm relationships with trees, rocks and mountains.

I would lose myself exploring their textures with my fingers.

We had history.

That beaten up artist's box...

I would lose myself for hours drawing on scraps of paper, smudging the charcoal, the pastels, the pencil shading.

Art, I feel, is an intimate relationship with one's surroundings, with one's fellow beings.

Finally it's only when one really loses oneself a good while that one may find oneself.

I came back and redrew the shape of the trunk (does one say trunk for a vine?) out of pleasure for its form.

I came back and started a close study of its offshoots, its cracks, its cut and tutored branches.

After a few minutes the heat of the sun forced me to seek shade.

Sun-lounger, feeling the heat...

I turned my attention to a turquoise cushion and orange towel on a sun lounger.

It was the colour which got me, the colour and the light, then the cushioning.

The child's watercolour set was set awash with wet brush.

I rediscovered the care one must take with the flow of water, gravity, pigment intensity.

I rediscovered the joy of scribble, shade, smudge, time, taking time.

Whilst the digital gives me rapid effect, the old artist's box brings me affect.

I feel my breath, a little breeze behind me and I pause for thought.

Touched by vines, cushions, sun on my back, my daughter sitting over there on a sofa, I am given time to contemplate....

From clicks to contemplation.

Love you to bits.

Fake me.

Brand me.

Spam me.

Fuck me.

Love you to bits. 

I am retouched.

Love you to bits.

via GIPHY

Walking out loud...

This is a fragment of a doodle, a much larger doodle.

 After a week of emotion, connection, experience, I had many ideas buzzing. I had to get it all down on paper. This is one of what will be a series of posts which I shall attempt to write to make sense of this larger doodle.

I have a great deal of thinking to do.

I have a great deal of working through, of walking through to do...

It was a week of walking out loud, which started with a need to get out of the classroom box.

After the flood of emotions resulting from the Paris attacks, by the time I got to Thursday, I felt exhausted.

I am pretty sure that this line of Maxime's post "L'homme libre" had made a click in my head.

"Fermez vos ordinateurs, allez courir, allez rire, serrez vos proches dans vos bras, envoyez un message d'amour."
("Close your computers, go and run, go and laugh, hold those close to you in your arms, send a message of love.")

I suggest to the group who had arrived for a class that we go outside, that we feel the sun on our backs, the wind on a our skin, that we should walk and speak together.

They were a little surprised at the idea, but they agreed, packed up their bags and we left for a rambling tour of the campus plateau.





We spoke together in little groups, sometimes coming together to look at the surrounding landscape, a flower, a landmark on the horizon. We shared photos of where we were from, we spoke of the time that we spent in classroom boxes. We visited regions through the eyes of others, through the words of others unknown to us. We spoke of imaginary friends...

On coming back to the classroom, we sat down and each wrote or drew his impressions of the time that we had spent together.

This week we are to collect our fragments together to reflect our different experiences of walking out loud.

Distant connections?

I met Tanya Lau from Australia during Rhizo14, we have worked and played together intermittently since then.

It is difficult for me now to disconnect my trail through the various hashtag communities that I have journeyed. At one stage, I don't remember when, Tanya introduced me to her friend Bruno Winck. Over a series of tweeted conversations, and to cut a Storifed version of the circumstances of our meeting short, we met last Friday, in the flesh.

It is this which is surreal, really: here was a person who I knew little of a month ago, who perhaps a few months before I had suggested meeting (because I learnt he lived in the same region as I) for a walk, now standing in this same classroom in which I am writing now.

This is a fragment of a photo, a much bigger photo.

All of this resulted from a spark of inspiration, a reversal of a position and the acceptance of an invitation from the faciliators of #digiwrimo to contribute a piece.  I had thought (as often) that I would really not have the time to participate in #digiwrimo, like I had thought that I wouldn't have the time to participate in #rhizo14, #clmooc, #ccourses, #rhizo15...

So here I was actively participating in #digiwrimo and Bruno suggests that I involve some of my students with #wolweek.

What the hell was #wolweek I asked?

A few days later, not really knowing what might happen, I managed to get a group of students to blog every day for a week.

They had pretty much never blogged before...

Not only did they blog, but one or two of them also started making connections with people participating in #wolweek...

This is the moment when lessons learnt from Laura Gibbs during #ccourses came to the fore.

I curated all the student blogs into Inoreader. 

So there he was, Bruno Winck, standing in my classroom.

Very quickly he had gathered students around him and they were listening to him explain networking on Twitter, innovation,  MOOCs...

As he spoke, I was myself beginning to learn a little about him, this person who had appeared from a Twitter stream....

We went for a meal afterwards, our conversation flowed from one theme to another, pretty much uninterrupted, apart from by the four courses of the meal.

We left the restaurant to walk a little way up Ceyrat gorge, one of my favourite local promenades.

It is the background image to my Twitter profile. 

Conversation continued upstream and downstream.

On getting back home, the following morning I found no other means to try to make sense of it all than to doodle.

As I was scrolling through my photos over the past couple years, I was struck by the diversity of people met, experiences had, places visited, connections made.

I see that this connected world maybe digitally connected but it is physically enacted, emotionally embodied...

I thought back to Maxime's lines:

"Fermez vos ordinateurs, allez courir, allez rire, serrez vos proches dans vos bras, envoyez un message d'amour."