View from the Bridge: The future of humanities, a rising star at Microsoft, and a multigenerational Car Classic

President Lorne M. Buchman moderating at “The Future of Knowledge” event. Photo: John Dlugolecki

Last week I had the pleasure of moderating an evening panel on “The Future of Knowledge” with the co-authors of Digital_Humanities, a recent publication from MIT Press. Introducing the Art Center Dialogues event in the Ahmanson Auditorium was one of the book’s co-authors: our very own Anne Burdick, Chair of Art Center’s Media Design Practices. In her remarks, she mused that “our bombastic title is actually a serious proposition,” and the presentations and discussion that followed were certainly provocative and opened several important questions about teaching and research in the humanities.

Digital Humanities replaces “the paper” with “the project,” looking to the multi-modal and project-based orientation that is at the heart of creative studio practice. The authors argue that our current ideas about knowledge, interpretation and the cultural record developed in tandem with our long history with print. The digital information age upends old ideas about author, archive, memory and knowledge itself. The book positions designers (and by implication what we teach here at Art Center) as having a major contribution to make as these notions reconfigure along with the technology.

The question of how best to integrate the humanities into Art Center’s curriculum is one I care about very much, and I thank the co-authors—who, in addition to Burdick, included Johanna Drucker, a professor in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies; Peter Lunenfeld, former Art Center instructor and professor at UCLA’s Design Media Arts; Todd Presner, chair of UCLA’s Digital Humanities program; and Jeffrey Schnapp, faculty director of metaLAB at Harvard—for a wonderfully engaging evening.

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Creative Footnotes: Kristy Lovich traces the inspiration for her new gallery show to her childhood bedroom

This creative manifesto is part of a series of first-person pieces by Fine Art students reflecting on the ideas informing their work. Each post will feature the artist whose work is currently rotating through the Undergraduate Fine Art Student Gallery, at the Hillside Campus. This week, student Kristy Lovich explores the sources of inspiration behind her intimate and evocative installation entitled, “Don’t go runnin off, there’s lots of shit to carry!”

We are building a house that remembers.
Don’t go runnin’ off, there’s lots of shit to carry!

This Place: and we have so much to do; so many things to look at.

When I was a kid, my mom would ask me to clean my room, the room I shared with my sisters. And because we were always making things, because I was always building something and taking something apart, the room was always a mess. Always in each corner was the evidence of the simultaneous destruction and construction of the small worlds I occupied: the theater, the miniature, the fantastic, the hidden, the movie, the book, the magic. Collections piled onto collections. And alongside these precious worlds were also the objects of this world: the dirty laundry, the trash, the long abandoned can of soda, lollipop stuck to its own paper, a forgotten homework assignment. On that dreaded Saturday morning, when she had finally tired of negotiating the path carved into the sea of things in our room, my mother would tell us that we were not to emerge until it was clean. Until everything was in its place.

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Veterans enlist at Art Center to influence hearts and minds through art and design

COURAGE_FEATURE_HERO

Art Center’s reputation, culture and even the school’s site in Pasadena have been shaped by the military veterans who have come through its doors. From the post-World War II student population burst, sparked by the GI Bill, that led the College to move from its Seventh Street location to the larger Third Street campus, to many notable alumni and faculty, Art Center’s history has been enriched by individuals who honorably served their country.

Today, servicemen and servicewomen—whose discipline and desire to make a positive impact align closely with the College’s educational mission—continue to distinguish themselves as students and alumni.

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Creative footnotes: Student artist, Joanna Bassi on her current show, ‘Hallowed Degeneration’

This is the first in a new series of first-person pieces by Fine Art students reflecting on the ideas informing their work. Each post will feature the artist whose work is currently rotating through the Undergraduate Fine Art Student Gallery, at the Hillside Campus. This week, student Joanna Bassi unveils the sources of inspiration behind her striking collection of sculptures made from charcoal, beeswax and ash, entitled, “Hallowed Degeneration.”

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Nike designer D’Wayne Edwards dares students to supersize their dreams

D’Wayne Edwards at Pensole demonstrating a few of the kicks he’s designed

“Are you awake?”

With these words, more of a challenge than a question, D’Wayne Edwards begins to make inroads into rowdy scrum of inner city high school students seated before him in Art Center’s Ahmanson Auditorium. The response: a cacophony of groans.

It’s 8:30 a.m. on a late October Monday morning and Edwards, founder of Pensole Design Academy and former design director for Nike’s Jordan brand, has come to Art Center to inspire and illuminate the opportunities available to creative students in various areas of design. He has spent enough time with teenagers to know that engaging them at this time of day can be a losing battle. And he’ll need to act quickly to establish that he understands where they’re coming from and, more importantly, he knows what they need to do to get to someplace worth going in the future.

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How embracing failure has helped John Ryan design solutions to life’s most puzzling questions

John Ryan (second from left) works with UNICEF and frog design staff on mHealth solutions

What was your background prior to Art Center?
I was born in Dublin, Ireland and studied multimedia as an undergraduate. I began my career working as a digital and web designer, and early on I knew that I really wanted to start my own studio. After working for a couple of in-house design teams, I couldn’t quite find the right fit: designers weren’t supposed to have the desire to move so broadly throughout the design process. So I started my own business and worked directly with clients throughout Ireland and UK. It was a fun couple of years and I learned a lot from the experience.

But I had always had a desire to go to grad school, and with my weird mix of interests across disciplines — design and art, technology and code, politics and culture — I became hungry for a new challenge that would integrate more of my own passions and curiosities into my design practice.

Art Center’s Media Design Practices program was exactly the kind of interdisciplinary environment I was looking for—innovative, experimental design work that would give me a platform to engage with the bigger ideas, concepts and questions that lay beyond the previous client work I had been doing.

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‘Insights’ highlights: 108 high-intensity doses of creative inspiration in 130 characters or less

Alum Lynne Aldrich leads a tour of her sculpture exhibit in the Williamson Gallery

While Car Classic dominated last weekend’s headlines, with its lineup of head-turning, high-revving art-imitates-life works of automotive aesthetics and ingenuity. Sunday’s auto design showcase wasn’t even the only audacious display of Art Center’s creative assets on view last weekend. On Saturday, the College hosted a curated selection of seminars and workshops known as Art Center Insights. The invitation-only event offers donors and trustees an opportunity to experience what it’s like to be Art Center student for an afternoon (minus the mountain of pressure to complete competing creative projects).

After a lunch in the student dining room with President Lorne M. Buchman, participants chose from the following Session 1 presentations: 3D Printing: A Revolution in 3D, Environmental Design: The Safe Aqua Project and Interaction Design: Evolving User Experience. Then came the second and final round of workshops: Transportation Design/Sustainability: Nature, The Mobility Innovator, Photography: Portraiture Unplugged and Fine Art: Lynn Aldrich: Un/Common Objects.

Because Insights reaches only a small slice of the population who might benefit from it; we embedded reporters in each of the workshops and live-tweeted the entire event. Taken together, these concise dispatches offer a cohesive (if not comprehensive) narrative of what it was like to experience Insights and the inspiring ideas and tools exchanged over the course of all six workshops.

Some people dream of being king for a day. But Insights makes a good case for the rewards that go along with being a student, for a day or a lifetime. Hopefully the chronicle below will conjure some of that mind-expanding thrill vicariously.

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Entertainment design students restore Halloween’s fading fear-factor

Let’s face it: Halloween has become scarier than ever before. Unfortunately, that’s happened for reasons that have little to do with the ghosts, goblins and the great gobs of candy that began as Celtic custom marking the death and rebirth signifying the of the harvest season. Over the past decade or so, Halloween has been co-opted by profit-hungry pop-up superstores hawking disposable “Scream” masks and spooktacular inflatable lawn decorations to consumers hoping to purchase a more sanitized version of the collective cultural experience.

But as Halloween has become more homogenized and commodified, there are fewer surprises that await revelers, leaving a major deficit of the kind of adrenaline-spiking thrills that have defined the mythic tales that have defined the holiday, like Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Edgar Allen Poe’s the “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In other words, all treats and no tricks makes Halloween a very dull holiday.

It’s time fright back into Halloween night. With that in mind, we’ve resisted the temptation to celebrate the proliferation of clever (but defiantly un-scary) costumes referencing politics (the debt ceiling) or pop culture (“Breaking Bad”). Instead, we’ve plumbed the deepest recesses of the creative firepower on hand at Art Center for the kind of mythically unsettling visual storytelling that evokes a low-grade version of the terror that follows a night of spooky campfire stories. The above slideshow is a curated selection of images by current and former Entertainment Design students, whose work often involves conjuring the reference points for otherworldy cinematic sci-fi fantasias. You’ll also find the artist’s explanation for the ideas informing the dark and twisted images which capable of sending the fragile among us sprinting to safety. Care to join us in our effort to re-haunt All Hallow’s Eve?

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Cobras, Stingrays and Mako Sharks, oh my! Auto afficionados get “Inspired by Nature” at Car Classic

This past Sunday, nearly 2,000 visitors—transportation designers, car collectors, auto enthusiasts and more—assembled at Art Center College of Design for its popular annual Car Classic event. This year, the event showcased transportation design “Inspired by Nature” and celebrated a generous recent gift from Southern California philanthropists and car collectors Peter and Merle Mullin, who attended the event.

Nearly 90 carefully curated cars, trucks, motorcycles and bicycles–many of which, in keeping with the event’s theme, were inspired by birds, fish, insects and other natural phenomena–were on display at the event. A jury of alumni, faculty and industry leaders issued Best in Class awards to 18 vehicles in eight categories; while attendees voted for five vehicles in five categories.

Local custom auto designer Gary Wales’ 1917 La Bestioni Boat Tail Speedster was named the People’s Choice award winner. The Inspired by Nature award went to the 1959 Chevrolet Corvette Racing Stingray, whose lines were originally penned by alumnus and Car Classic honorary guest Peter Brock. And a 1961 Chevrolet Corvette Mako Shark, designed by alumnus Larry Shinoda, received the first ever Kids’ Choice award.

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My most memorable film: Billy Weber on ‘Days of Heaven’

Richard Gere and Brooke Adams in “Days of Heaven”
Photo by Bruno Engler. Paramount Pictures/Photofest

The following piece about Art Center Film faculty member, Billy Weber, was originally published in the September-October 2013 issue of Editors Guild Magazine

Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978) was, and remains, a riveting film. From the opening montage of period stills accompanied by Saint-Saens’ musical suite, “The Carnival of the Animals” to the final shot of young Linda Manz’s character skipping off into an unknown future, the film has an emotional, almost hypnotic, pull that never lets up.

The editing is such that practically every cut brings a new flood of information, in an elliptical style in which image and naturalistic sounds take precedence over dialogue. And yet, despite the lack of normal storytelling convention, the film packs an emotional wallop unlike very many movies in history. Released 35 years ago this September through Paramount Pictures, “Days of Heaven” introduced a new style of storytelling to the American cinema, albeit one that has not been widely imitated.

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