Welcome to my small website for the summer semester 2025 in the "Digital Fundamentals" course at the Braunschweig University of Art. My name is Ivo Jérôme Hartwig, and I've been studying Visual Communication since October 2024. On this site, you'll find all the projects, including group work, that me and my classmates completed during this second semester of fundamental courses. From AI-generated videos to self-built calculators, you'll find so much more. To give you a little preview and perhaps pique your interest, we spent a lot of time exploring the topic of artificial intelligence this semester. We focused on questions like: How can we use it for our own future? How can we create new projects with it? How can we implement it as a core component in our work? If I've sparked your curiosity, you're warmly invited to take a look around this documentation!
LEARNINGS
I believe the most fundamental and important thing I learned this semester is how to work with artificial intelligence effectively and, just as importantly, how not to. This understanding came from constantly working with AI on projects and from our debate club, which focused specifically on this topic. I've come to the conclusion that it simply makes sense to move with the times and use this new and exciting technology. However, what's personally important to me is that the process behind a project isn't skipped because of AI. For me, every design or artistic work needs a certain depth—a concept. In my opinion, AI can't replace that yet. But you can use this technology wonderfully for your own projects. For example, I built a navigation chat where a large language model receives geographical data from me and acts as my point of contact for routes. To put it concisely: Artificial intelligence is a great help and a wonderful way to execute projects, but it shouldn't replace all the work.
TOOLS / TECHNIQUES / CONCEPTS
Naturally, we spent a lot of time on artificial intelligence this semester, which both excited and challenged me. However, I have to admit that this topic also started to get on my nerves after a while. Everywhere you look, someone has a very specific opinion about it. In the long run, it was just too much for me. That's why I would say at this point that the concept behind the Teachable Machine is what fascinated me the most. To make it a little more understandable for everyone: a Teachable Machine is a "machine" that you can train yourself using specific data. For example, you can train this machine to recognize colors or numbers. This project was a bit of a headache at times, but in hindsight, I have to say it was one of my favorite topics this semester.
SURPRISINGS
To be honest, what surprised me the most was how much higher the level of work was in the course—and from myself—compared to the previous semester. Looking back, I really realized how many projects we completed in such a short time. In the first semester, we started with the basics: HTML, CSS, and P5.JS. We began by making simple and static sketches and practicing how to build a website in the first place. In less than a year, we've developed so much that we're now building our own chats with large language models. To sum it up: Considering that almost no one in the course had prior experience, we've come a very long way and developed very quickly and strongly, whether that's in our technical skills or our collaboration with each other.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATIONS
This is just a short summary – check out my website to learn more about my projects and experiences!