Art Center invades Myspace homepage
Update: Our quartet of students leading our Myspace occupation has produced a new batch of posts — three videos and one written narrative. Visit our Myspace profile for the latest news on how these artists and designers are devising solutions to the roadblocks and detours they encounter en route to their destination: creating something of lasting value that didn’t exist before.
Space. Whether it comes in the form of a blank canvas, an empty sound stage, a blinking cursor on a computer screen or a room of one’s own — space itself has always been fundamental to the act of creation. Art Center has long provided that space for its community of compulsively creative forward-thinking doers and makers, united by a desire to disrupt the status quo with explosive feats of imagination and artistry.
At its most basic level, it’s an invitation to create, explore and invent. And put simply, artists need their space. This was the operative principle behind the supernova success of Myspace, the 1.0 generation social network that became a hub where music lovers connected to their favorite bands. Ten years later, Myspace has reinvented itself, beginning with its June 2013 relaunch, as a social network “purpose-built to empower an infinitely expanding creative community.” The new Myspace has been designed around 21st Century creators’ needs to “connect, make, discover, collaborate, promote and expand.”
And what better place to seed that artistic ecosystem than the hothouse of creativity that is Art Center? So, for the next week, Art Center’s unique approach to bringing audacious ideas to fruition will receive unprecedented exposure as it stages an occupation of the MySpace homepage, which has a massive global reach of 35 million users.
During the planning stages of this social (network) action, it quickly became clear that this friendly takeover should not be driven by Art Center the institution, but rather by its students, who comprise the heart and soul of the College’s spirit of invention and innovation. With that in mind, Art Center’s occupation has been designed to capture the process of creation through five students — Charlene Chen (Graphic Design), Andrew Cameron (Graduate Art), Addie Liang (Film), Terry Carr (Product Design) and Carolina Rodriguez (Illustration) — as they attack a creative challenge over the course of a term at Art Center. So, between now and December, each of the participating students will publish a series four dispatches (beginning with today’s introductory videos) tracking their progress, in the form of videos, blog posts, graphics and photography. And because this is Art Center, there should be no doubt that that each student will deliver a finished creative project at the end of the term.
Ideally, this collaboration with Myspace will shine a light on the rigorous approach to design thinking and creative problem solving that form the College’s distinctive creative ethos. And hopefully this initial group of students will be the first of many to come.
Without further ado, meet (and join) the first wave of Art Center’s MySpace occupiers here.
