 Who sometimes, once in a while, does make projects at the festival they touch, this was in Hong Kong, on the skyscraper. Yes, they let me troll the whole city with a face on the skyscraper. That's how it is. But more often what I do is I do works that are on the internet for the internet. I work with code, painting and photography. So not only, the only thing I do is, like, doing art-ish. Actually, if you guys are a bit worse at maths at all, you might have seen me making it to a nuisance. Use art in an open source tag. Please do, if you do art or have it in a software that is for art. Inhale. This is not what this talk is about. In the last three years, I had the chance to teach and play around with teaching with art using open source software. Some of this was more workshop and experimental. The other one was more general, your usual classes. So the first one was artistic programming. I'm usually artistic to be able to put the word art in the Turkish version of the class. It's basically a good coding workshop. Look at the twist. The idea was to rather than making it about working art specifically, literally taking the 2D design class, a general introduction to 2D design class curriculum, and try to have the students implemented with code. This was a four-day workshop, four full days, so 32 hours. It's a virtual open source conference at Aksaray. And primarily in the college students. Introduction to photography is what I'm currently teaching since September. And this is just your garden-related introduction to photography. What a twist. Photography basics. So editing basic and lots of coding inside. Full semester university course. Art elected for engineering and architecture students. So these are not fine arts students, but some of them do design. It has been mostly taught in four years. So experimental. Artistic programming. All these adventures, and I decided maybe, okay, let's not go that far. So yeah, as I said, artistic programming, introduction to 2D programming with code. Four-day one project that was part of the academic mission 2017 pre-conference workshop program. Academic mission is an open source conference that has been held yearly in various places in Turkey. One of the most important parts of it is that before the conference, there was a workshop series aimed at students. And these are usually free of charge. Students only need to pay for their stay at a local dorm and their travel. And the year I was there, there was 2,000 students and a lot of workshops. Most of the technical stuff, but there was a few music and art related things as well. So I had 19 people signed up, 15 people showed up because undergrad. Mostly students are coming to engineering because it's an open source conference. They are the ones who are most interested. Although I had some other engineering students and a lecturer who was in the mix. Nobody had any prior experience with art. I asked. So we started from the beginning. So presented the students with the basics of composition and color. I introduced them to coding as a tool integral to artistic practice. That was my primary goal. To have them use programming, not as a programming tool, or something to create tools necessarily, but to make art. So they had to think of it like using brushes. One example, one thing I did, for example, was first assignment was using two ellipses and making a composition out of those two ellipses. At this point they didn't know each statement, they didn't know four ellipses. They just knew how to draw ellipses on processing code. We were using processing code. Students started to engage in experiments within the end of the first day. This was either the first day evening or the second day morning. This was a student who had done really coding prior. One thing that I was not expecting, a lot of them had very little experience in coding. So we did actually end up doing covering the basics. And by the time we were done, sorry for the image quality by the way, many of them had mastered the concepts by the end of the workshop. So one group was really going off by the end of the first day and another group really just did open up by the second day. One threatening group finally relaxed to experiment and play around with at the end of four days after tweeters are trying to convince them that, you know, do your own thing, don't just copy what I'm doing. But yeah, these were the results. One student, which I was not expecting, went completely sidetracked instead of like doing artworks he started working with to play around with the idea of analyzing existing images. This was not what I was teaching, but that's where he went. So like here he's trying to, this is pretty simple, and he was just trying to look into which color out of RGB is dominant in the painting, in different pixels. The experience, it was four days, students were generally very enthusiastic and this is a curriculum that worked. And this is something I'm still constantly to work on both as workshop and more teaching materials but then I got sidetracked by the experiment too. Since September 2018, I'm teaching at ITU, which is a local technical university. The university is actually one of the more high-ranking ones in Turkey and it's mostly engineering programs and architecture programs. And I did actually approach them thinking that I would be teaching creative coding but as it turns out they had needed certain classes and photography was the one I agreed to teach. I actually didn't share what I was doing until a week before the class and I realized I'm teaching art with open source and this is something I've been creating for the past year and I'm just doing it. That happened. So yeah, that wasn't exactly planned. My goal was when I was planning this class was I'm going to be teaching photography with basics, editing basics and creative coding again. Also, Mr. University course parts, this is not a workshop. This has been so far talked twice. It's about 15 students to 17 students because Erasmus and drug people come in during the ad drug period are talented for a mix of engineering and architecture so it's mostly turned out for a few years a lot of people want to take photography and later years register for it so that's all it works. They have a variety of experience in background and art and photography some were interested in art, they didn't do it. The most experienced student I had was someone who had done photography for about six years as a hobby. I have also students who said that they never taken a photograph before including for social media. Or so they said. So what was the existing course outcomes? This is a standard photography course. It's been talked by multiple instructors in different ways so my outcomes still have to fit the standard outcomes of the introduction to photography course. I also put myself the goal because I think this is something that needs to be explored that the students when they finish the course should be able to work theoretically doing photography jobs or that is relevant to their skills. So they should be able to work with open source software that I'm going to teach the class with but at the same time if they need to they should be able to use the industry standard software. And the third thing that I put myself as a goal was it's not just important for them to be using open source software. I can't teach them to be developers and I don't think that should be the goal but maybe they should get used to the idea that the tools are not ready to make things that are immutable. You can change them or you can make your own. So that was the point of having coding in there. And how do you achieve that is the question. This is a pinhole lens I made from the existing adapter and a cardboard and a menu. It leaves a lot of light so I don't need to add more tape to it. Don't make the mistake I did, just add more tape. So this was one example I brought them as an example of how does the camera work. Also, societal. It's actually pretty obvious if you think about it and it's not like something that is reinventing that novel. What I am doing is rather than teaching them software I am trying to teach them the concepts so that they understand exactly what they are doing and what exactly the software is doing. So we start with composition and things they don't need to know in terms of aesthetics, composition and color and the levels of that. These things just get confused and mixed up in the order of teaching but these were very clear structures that they had. We talked about how humans see the light because photography is not just some abstract thing that is documenting the reality. No, it is just the way we... Nothing we see is exactly real. Not about the camera series, not what we see with our eyes. It's always an interpretation of something. So first, we discussed about how humans see the light, how we see the world, how our eyes work, things like that. We also discussed how the camera represents the light. We discussed practical things like aperture and shutter speed, like how we expose an image, how we make sure that the image is well lit. But we also discussed things like how does the sensor, what is there, filter? For example, or that how does an image file store the data This is a simplistic way. I'm not talking about the compression algorithm. I'm talking about just the general idea that it is a canvas, it's a silhouette, there is also vector images and what are they. Simple things. And once we get there, we can discuss what the software does to the data. And we do all of this with processing dark table, and new game. So basically rather than telling them, you need to make sure that you don't have huge spikes in your and of your histograms. What we did is that we are going to I did in front of them, I didn't have Santa code, but in front of them started writing a code that's going to take the canvas, put the image in there, explain what different parts of the code did, what's the function, what is the statement, what is for loop, etc. Show them pixel array, first taking an image, then making an image grayscale, then making a histogram of that image. So when they see a histogram, they understand exactly what is going on, on any software, not just a specific one. And they also understand the difference between a logarithmic histogram and a linear histogram and why what does that mean and potentially why that has been chosen. So we also see in tools like how do you deal with what can your own code do that is not necessarily available in the software. For example, we had a sample code that again I did write and show in front of them that they could use if they tried to. So far more than it did, but somebody's similar. That is taking two images that has taken side by side and making another part of it, a stereo image that is red and cyan. So just to demonstrate that you can create tools that are not necessarily available and that that is not something that is up there and out of reach. So after all of this information, obviously, once they start seeing basics of editing using a software, it was actually filled with a lot of background information about why we were doing that edit and why we were choosing to do the edit that way and what maybe perhaps the algorithms or what does the contrast do, what does the tone care do, what does the blur do. They have at least some idea as to what is happening. These students were given in second half of the class Ratchet and Small Assignments a final project that they're going to work on. The students had a series of keywords to choose from. Their task is to choose two keywords built because they're inspired by these keywords to create a series of images based on that and the result, this was one student who decided to take a picture of two sides of the two different locations, public spaces. So a ferry station, a bazaar and a mall. At night, once it was isolated and during the day, once it was busy, and then he combined those two images to express the difference of the people being there and not being their mates. So this was made by using dark table and gap. Another student decided to take the keywords to be an empty and imaginary world where humanity had vanished. This student, oh, I forgot to put this on, actually ended up using Photoshop. Oh, by the way, I taught this class in Opus Air Software. They were welcome to use any tools they wanted. Another student ended up using, you know, noise and dark as keywords and did works that explored the chaos and noise of the city that has congested and filled with buildings. And what she was using was actually reflections of skyscrapers that reflected even more buildings and sometimes that one tree that was left isolated among everything else. Another student was working much in a more autobiographical sort of way, son and life, and she used that as an idea of how this son sort of brings her positivity when she shies her in the morning from her window. So she first out of use again. By the way, some of the students did mix up open source and commercial software. Some students just went completely open source software once they realized they pulled and that this was a useful tool. The last one, the keyword was life and noise and the student actually started working with caves near Istanbul that had early human civilizations in it to reflect the difference between the modern city and the caves that were there. The last student, just son and blue, what if this son was a blue star instead of being the yellow star that it is and how that would change our world around it and then completely on side by side. Dark Table in this case. Of course, when you start teaching class rather than a workshop, it goes according to plan. You might have to not give an assignment to April 2nd because Dark Table has a very humorous April Fool joke in it that shows up when you open your software in April 1st. Can you please not have your full breaking jokes in future? I beg you, the students are already having a hard time. Just saying. I appreciate it. I think it's funny but at the same time it's just like... Is there an option to turn it off now? Yeah, let's say you do not throw it off April 1st. Okay. I'm glad to hear that, I didn't know that, thank you. But still, I mean, it's just... Yeah, maybe, alright. So, all just aside, experimenting is harder when greater involved because coding isn't a thing and when they think that they're integrated even through when they're not going to, they get scared and their minds elsewhere. Also, students are more likely to go for alternative that they perceive is safer and unfortunately safer ends up being familiar, already installed and they'll know. Even if they haven't used before, they heard from their friends that this is the best software and that's what they're time to go for and I have to convince them that no, actually it's easier to do the entire thing than it is on Photoshop. I have to have this conversation for a particular case of use. And then most of all, they will try to do something with the commercial software that's really it's incompatible with like Panorama stuff and then get stuck on the science which is my main concern. I use an installation on the lines systems are often the nose and mouth which poses increasing number of problems and options are even more focused on cameras and smartphones and this is a very serious problem because I have one student who refused to use her his best best stuff altogether. He was like, I want to do everything all at the same time on my phone. I was at first very surprised and then it was just like yeah, wait, okay 10 years from now this is going to be half of the classroom we need to think about this. It's not depression. Education is not a replacement for advocacy. We need to do this. It's important to teach some open source tools and it is good to be we can do this today but this needs to happen together with advocacy and other strategies that we have in place. A lot of students get to use open software in some of their work or all. Students prefer to use commercial alternatives adapted by information basically the whole idea of transparency didn't work that they were able to use the information they learned elsewhere I guess that did work, that was fine as they have used the commercial software in the open source. We can't work on advocacy and promotional open source software right now and we are doing that. We need more software agnostic or open source software basically. Educational material and curriculum and for me at least that's the next step.