Drawing Upon Understanding is inspired by Anthony’s solitary upbringing nurtured by hyper contextualized emotionful movies and television. The work juxtaposes the simplicity of drawing with the harsh truths of human existence, understanding and emotion. It shows the differences between illustrations, of creatures and abstract thoughts, created by a person compared to a newly sentient program. Where people naturally learn and grow to understand the world around them through experience and feelings with others, an amalgamation of code can only strive to mimic such acts in lieu of true understanding. In a way, Anthony aims to show an intense overdramatization of how he came to know the world and people around him; through watching, mimicking, and establishing his own ideals and perceptions. In this video, hand drawn images are strewn together with corresponding emotions and abstract thoughts to show the program’s progression to attaining human level insight and thought. However, these ideals are too overwhelming and the only reasoning left to understand is the pain of existence and the program destroys itself. Anthony’s work hopes to elicit a sense of compassion and life to the program that somehow opens a path of empathy between the audience and itself.