When I talk to friends who are christians and designers I often here them say stuff like “There should be something like a christian network or alliance of designers.” And then I wonder about why not leaving the christian ghetto and join something like the GraphicAlliance.
The Graphic Alliance is a network of graphic designers, web developers and related workers who promote fundamental social change through their work.
We are committed to helping build a new social order based on direct democracy, communal economics, human rights and ecological sensibility. We believe that design and technology are important aspects of the struggle for freedom, peace and social justice. We stand united in our opposition to concentrated power, discrimination and oppression in its many forms. We promote social ownership and democratic control over information, ideas, technology and the means of communication.
We join together in the spirit of autonomy, mutual aid and open collaboration.
Four Eyed Monster is a feature film and videopodcast by two young creatives, Susan Buice and Arin Cumley. They met in 2002. At their first date they set the rule to only communicate through drawings, written messages and video. By this they hoped to develop a deeper emotional connection and be challenged to explore the language of art. They kept this rule for four months. The feature film is based on this experience. The videopodcast features the process and is doing this painfully open.
In November 2005, Arin Crumley and Susan Buice, released 3 video podcast episodes, to
promote their feature film Four Eyed Monsters. Using myspace.com and itunes.com, the video podcasts received 60,000 downloads. In doing so, Arin and Susan began amassing an army of citizen marketers, who now promote them, Four Eyed Monsters, and their video podcasts, on their MySpace profiles or show the video podcast to friends on their iPods.
The video podcast is an online episodic series detailing Arin and Susan’s relationship with each other, the struggle of their creative process, and their quest to get their film released so that they can get out of debt and make their next film. People have been subscribing to the video podcast in droves, using iTunes, which allows them to automatically get each episode as it’s released.
This is the perfect example of what is going on with all the grassroots media production in the creative class. These are people who are engaging with their lives in a creative way and don’t care about mainstream media. The digital revolution makes it possible to easily produce a high-class videopodcast which spreads like crazy through the internet. And this time it is not an other videopodcast about gadgets or web 2.0 or technical possibilities. Its about people, their relationships and art.
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Well, wouldn’t it be cool to have a coffeehouse as the main place where we can meet, hang out and have church? That is what we thought at Kubik when we started the café a few years ago. We were thinking about the whole third place thing. Having a third place with work and home being the first and the second. This is were we spent our free-time, hang out with our friends, talk about our lives, create stuff, love God and enjoy really good coffee. As we have done it with many other situations we jumped right into it. God opened one door after the other and now we have this room packed with people every friday night for our alt.worship-services and enjoying an organic brunch on sunday. The café opens also monday night for ‘WortSport’ where we dig into the bible and challenge what we believe with what we read. On tuesday and thursday nights the café is open without a special program or event.
We now want to take the next step and open the café for the public. This is very important to us because we don’t want to be an other christian ghetto with the café being a safe haven for us to flee the bad world. We want to engage with the culture around us which we are a part of. We want the café to become not just a third place for us and for the people in our neighborhood but a place where we all can be inspired by creativity, challenged by ethical thinking and involved with spirituality. This is not about ‘us for them’ but ‘us as a part of the culture doing something’ if you know what I mean.
So we gathered a bunch of people in a competence center to kick-start this phase and met yesterday for the first time. As it turns out Germany might be the least favorite place to start something like this because there are tons of restrictions and laws you have to keep in mind. But with the people we have on this team who have some experience and know how to handle things like this it could become reality to have the café open by summer which would be awesome and a dream come true.
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