"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely"- Rodin

Experience is like my moto in life. I want to experience all I can in every aspect of life. I love trying new things to experience them. I want to travel the world to experience all it has to offer. Even bad experiences are still an experience.

Is experiencing something just a waste of time? They just become memories. I believe memories are the key to our existence therefore experiences are everything to me. Our character is built on our experiences. Helen Keller's quote sums it up nicely. She says "Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved." Because of my past experiences and interest in art and design I have been inspired to follow that career path. The importance of experience was touched on in a topic we all did in "Art Technology and Culture" with Neil, "The Aura on Art". Do we really have to traveling thousands of kilometers across the globe to see artwork such as the Mona Lisa , seen over a crowd of people, when in the comfort of our own homes we can view a copy through the internet and zoom in on Da Vinci's work closer than we could even with our naked eye. So why? Because of the aura, the atmosphere, the experience.

We can and do learn from our experiences. As the post heading quote goes, "Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely". We can learn from all our experiences. Good and bad. As an example, when a baby is learning about life and doesn't know what the outcome will be if it does a certain thing, it learns from the experience of doing the certain thing. This is a real life example, when I was a about 2yrs old and still learning about what outcomes an event would produce, Mum would tell me "No don't touch the heater, it's hot" and then one time she didn't say no so I touched it and burnt my self and I cried. But I learnt from the experience and never touched the heater again.

We use our experiences to aid our imaginations. For example, we can imagine what extremes like war would be like even though we haven't experienced it our selves because we associate it to a memory (previous experience) and our knowledge (what we learn from that less extreme experience). This was covered in "Visual communication" last year and is called isomorphic correspondence. We correspond to image by relating to something else. Our imaginations are very powerful. When people close their eyes in a movie, what their imaginations can produce is often worse than the visual on screen.