Tag Archives: Art Center College of Design

Myspace takeover 2.0: New videos track students’ creative progress and problems

Art Center invades Myspace homepage

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.

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The sacred and the mundane: Lynn Aldrich’s witty spin on consumerism

In her quest to transform the known into something curious and unexpected, Los Angeles-based artist Lynn Aldrich makes a habit of scouring hardware stores such as Home Depot for materials she re-fabricates into colorful new constructions reflecting playfully on domestic architecture.

“By making these sorts of archaic physical objects that one has to walk around in reality and be near to experience,” says Aldrich, “I’m attempting to call attention to your physicality in a world that is more and more in a cloud of information.” Out of Ink, In the Dark might at first glance be mistaken for an assemblage of pads of the digital era, instruments of that very cloud. Instead, it’s a classic Aldrich “object,” as sly as it is seductive. Made of old-school ink pads, the piece sold the same day we caught up with the artist while she was installing a two-decade retrospective exhibition of her work, Lynn Aldrich: Un/Common Objects, on view through January 2014 at the Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery. The San Francisco gallery where Out of Ink was on display called to tell her that an East Coast collector had just purchased it.

The exhibition opens Friday, October 11 in celebration of ArtNight Pasadena. The opening night reception on Thursday, October 17, from 7 to 9 p.m., is free and open to the public. RSVP by sending a note to events@artcenter.edu.

Guest co-curators of Un/Common Objects are Christina Valentine, faculty member at Art Center College of Design and G. James Daichendt, Ed.D. associate dean and professor of art history at Azusa Pacific University.

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Inside the extended-play version of the Microsoft Surface DesignStorm video

 

Earlier this month, we posted a teaser trailer capturing highlights from a DesignStorm in which students conceived innovative uses for click-on attachments (code name: Blades) to Microsoft’s Surface tablet. The three-day session consisted of a group of students from the College’s various design departments facilitated by Graphic Design faculty member Gerardo Herrera along with Product Design instructor, Todd Masilko and Jeff Higashi, who teaches both Graphic and Product Design.

DesignStorms are Art Center’s trademarked immersive workshops which pair  expert faculty with select upper-term design students with sponsors to form multidisciplinary teams. Over the course of the collaboration, the teams apply an intensive design methodology to identify opportunities for deeper exploration and innovation.

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How Photo student Dave Koga learned to listen to his intuition

dkoga.bw-7

by Dave Koga

The best way to understand the essence of Art Center is by paying a visit to Pasadena and getting to know some students. The quickest (and cheapest) route, however, is to travel to our recently refreshed “Students” page where you’ll find a mosaic of Polaroid-style snapshots of unfamiliar faces, containing inspiring Q&As about each student’s creative journey.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be rolling out a series of deeper dives into the creative lives of those profile subjects, with highlights from the body of work they’ve produced at Art Center. Today’s installment looks at the winding path that landed Dave Koga in the Photography and Imaging Department of Art Center. 

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Self-portrait by Dave Koga

Why did you choose Art Center? I came to Art Center after leaving a 10-year career in the entertainment industry, where I served as a TV development executive. I have a prior degree in history and art history from UCLA. I have several friends who graduated from Art Center around the time that I graduated from UCLA.  I’ve spoken to them a lot over the years about the Art Center curriculum and the quality of instruction and their collective feedback has been extremely positive. When I made the decision to change careers, Art Center was naturally my first choice.

Biggest creative challenge/breakthrough you’ve faced while at Art Center?
I’ve always been a rational and somewhat linear thinker who relied on logic and intellectual analysis to solve problems. While this mode of thinking served me well in the corporate world, I found it often got in the way of the creative process when I started at Art Center. Learning how to rely more on intuition and observation when faced with creative problems was the biggest challenge and/or breakthrough I’ve faced while at Art Center. I credit two instructors—Ken Merfeld and Mark Wyse—with helping teaching me how to trust and rely upon the intuitive side of my brain. [For more on this, check out Wyse’s essay on repression and creativity.]

What are your most reliable and/or unlikely sources of inspiration?
Inspiration comes in all forms, shapes and sizes. That said, I find that my most reliable sources of inspiration tend to be music, poetry, painting and graphic design.

Who are your biggest creative influences?
My biggest creative influences include Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Ellsworth Kelly, Dan Winters, William Eggleston, Miles Davis and Frank O’Hara.

What do you hope to do when you graduate from Art Center?
My goal upon graduating from Art Center is to build a successful commercial architectural photography business that will generate enough income to fund my gallery-oriented personal projects.

Microsoft cracks the Surface with an Art Center Design Storm

Earlier this month, Microsoft placed the latest iteration of its Surface tablet in the eye of an Art Center Design Storm. For the following two days, a group of tech-obsessed designers (the futurists of the future?) gathered in a classroom at Art Center’s Hillside campus for a super-charged idea generating session with a single directive: Conceive the most mind-popping attachments and accessories for the device imaginable.

A flood of innovative and enticing ideas flowed from this quintessential Art Center technique designed to stimulate creativity. Watching the above video — produced by Microsoft and shot and edited by Art Center Film alum, Erik Anderson — feels a lot like peering into the right side of a designer’s brain as it fires at full capacity.

Have a look and feel free to let loose with your own unexpected and innovative concepts for  Surface improvements in the comments section below.

augh.: Streetwear with a conscience by Art Center students

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting

- e.e. cummings

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Aye Hasegawa models pieces from the Fall/Winter collection, entitled The Wanderer
Photography by Simia Rassouli

It is simple: You are who you are. If you cannot explain yourself to a child, then you do not understand yourself, which means that you have constantly complicated your life and confused yourself because you have listened to what others have told you instead of listening to your own inner self. You know that the right thoughts and the right words are simple: They are raw and elegant. You use common words to say uncommon things. Those words have force. Your presence is forceful. Life is very simple, but it is YOUR choice to live it simply or to complicate it.

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Blazing a trail from Art Center to Burning Man


Burning Man, the annual creative bacchanal drawing some 50,000 hedonistic seekers, makers and disrupters, kicks off next Monday in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada. This year’s week-long confab celebrating self-expression, community and the ephemerality of art and life itself draws its theme from John Frum, the messianic figurehead of the cargo cults of the 1930’s and ‘40’s, which sprung up on South Pacific islands after American troops landed there and dazzled the natives with their exotic first worldly possessions. After the servicemen departed, the islanders built altars and monuments intended to lure these otherworldly Americans (John Frum was derived from the endless series of G.I.’s introducing themselves as “I’m John from…” ) back to bestow them with another bounty of MRE’s and walkie-talkies.

It’s a legend tailor-made for Burning Man, which culminates with the incineration of a giant effigy of the eponymous wooden figure, constructed on site by an army of artists. And though Art Center has never embodied the anarchic temporality of the Burning Man ethos. There’s an argument to be made that Burning Man’s cultivation of a cult of makers, sustainability evangelists and big-dreaming visionaries is more closely aligned with Art Center’s forward-thinking values than it may seem to the naked eye.

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Culmination celebration: Summer 2013 graduation events

Graduation at Art Center

With the all-nighter intensity of finals safely in the rear-view mirror, excitement mounts as Summer Term 2013 graduation week gets underway. Here’s an overview of the campus agenda, which teems with an array of culminating events showcasing the handiwork of the creative talent pool about to flow into the marketplace.

Thursday, August 15

Industry leaders and professionals, employers, corporate partners, donors and alumni will get the first look at the Summer Term’s graduating artists and designers at this year’s invitation-only Graduation Show Preview. The show will feature student projects from major fields of study at Art Center, including Advertising, Entertainment Design, Environmental Design, Film, Graphic Design, Illustration, Photography and Imaging, Product Design, Transportation Design, Graduate Industrial Design and Graduate Media Design Practices.

Graduation Show Preview will be held at Hillside Campus from 6:00 to 9:30 p.m., with a private reception hosted by Alumni Relations immediately following.

From 3:00 to 5:00 p.m., Graduate Media Design Practices will host a lab research discussion followed by an exhibition and reception, from 5 to10 pm, in honor of this term’s cohort of graduates, which includes the program’s first Field Track students. These events take place on South Campus (950 Raymond) and are open to the public.

Saturday, August 17

Join us in the Sculpture Garden at Hillside Campus from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. for our graduation ceremony. Cross-disciplinary faculty member and alum, Richard Keyes — who teaches popular classes in color theory, design principles and narrative structure — will deliver the commencement address. We will also hear from valedictorian and Environmental Design student, Rosa Tsaihua Lee and present the Art Center Student Leadership Award to Photography and Imaging student, Kate Marie Buntsma.

After the ceremony, Graduation Show opens to the public from 6:00 to 9:00 p.m., where work by the newest Art Center graduates will be on display. In addition to Hillside Campus activities, Graduate Art and Graduate Media Design Practices will host  a Graduation Show at South Campus from 6:00 to 11:00 p.m.

Free valet parking will be provided at the Hillside Campus from 6 – 10 p.m.  Self-parking will be available at South Campus throughout the evening.

Congratulations to our Summer Term 2013 graduates!

Beijing team’s rubber band-powered car snags grand prize at 8th Annual Formula-E race

Formula-E Best in Show winners, from Beijing University of Technology

Formula-E Best in Show winners, from Beijing University of Technology

Champagne flowed as winners and challengers celebrated after a long road of trial and error in the annual Formula-E race at Art Center on August 8, 2013.

Teams from three Southern California colleges and two universities in China were sweating it out as their remote controlled, rubber band-powered cars zoomed around the tracks for five hours in the afternoon sun.

The top award, Best in Show, was presented to team Final-E from Beijing University of Technology. The talented team members Sui Hao, Xuan Jinran and Zhang Han also placed in three other race categories. The only other competitor to do the same was Art Center’s team Tensegrity, consisting of Renee Mascarinas, Kun Huang and Jecky Chow. (See below for more race results.)

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Transform, Transcend, Transmedia: The Changing Face of Graphic Design

Paul Hoppe’s installation "ECHO: The Fragility of Moments Suspended in Time."

Paul Hoppe’s installation “ECHO: The Fragility of Moments Suspended in Time.”

It’s the final week of the Fall 2012 term and “The Annex”—a nondescript temporary building on the northern end of Art Center’s Hillside Campus—is doing a good job hiding the feats of alchemy occurring within its walls.

Entering classroom A7 on the second floor of this battleship grey structure feels like stepping into Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. In one corner, a student waves his hands to stir into motion a field of floating green particles. In another, students walk through a mirrored passageway that reflects their position in time and space from exactly 10 seconds ago. Elsewhere, two ellipses face one another—one on the floor, the other on the ceiling—as they project images of nature, architecture and words like “renewal” and “emergence.”

What is going on here? These upper-term Graphic Design students are tweaking final projects they created for Advanced Graphic Studio, a class that’s part of an ambitious undergraduate curriculum called transmedia within the Graphic Design Department.

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