Here’s to a lasting friendship

I’ll start this with a promise: I will post here, and I will post reg­u­larly (if not often). For now, I’ll leave you with a frag­ment of Nudge, an arts pub­li­ca­tion and project of mine that’s lately been tak­ing up a sig­nif­i­cant amount of my thought capac­ity. I started work­ing Nudge back in Octo­ber, when I was try­ing to find peo­ple who would want to make videos with me. This proved obscenely dif­fi­cult, so I set up a Face­book group for an arts pub­li­ca­tion and waited for peo­ple to respond. Long story short, I found peo­ple to make videos with and other things, too.

We pub­lished our first issue, which is more or less a tra­di­tional pub­li­ca­tion with sub­mis­sions and edi­tors, back in Jan­u­ary. Below is my let­ter from the edi­tor. I hope you read it and like it, and then we’ll talk again soon.

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Dear friends,

I’m a big fan of Beck. I can’t think of any artist, musically-inclined or oth­er­wise, who is so suc­cess­fully both plas­tic and gen­uine. Though I adore Beck’s orig­i­nal lan­guage (I like writ­ing; I like metaphors), I also love the lan­guage he fuels. In his most recent album, Beck some­how man­aged to pin down writer Dave Eggers and direc­tor Spike Jonze and make them con­verse on one of the album tracks about the “ulti­mate record that ever could pos­si­bly be made.” One com­ment has remained with me above all:

“[The album] has to tell you how to live. As an instruc­tion guide. It’s sub­tle. It doesn’t push, it nudges. It entices. Or seduces. It has to encom­pass the whole world, every­thing that has been, is, and will be […]”

You prob­a­bly see where I’m going with this.

You’re hold­ing some­thing very fresh. This assem­blage of paper, ink, and metal is called Nudge. The Uni­ver­sity of Washington’s writ­ers, visual artists, musi­cians, and film­mak­ers can sub­mit their work here so other peo­ple can see it and think about it. The pub­li­ca­tion, how­ever, does not stand alone. There is a com­mu­nity behind it. It’s rel­a­tively large, and it gains new mem­bers nearly every day.

This is where the nudg­ing comes in.

Though this beau­ti­ful and hold­able pub­li­ca­tion is Nudge’s most vis­i­ble form, Nudge exists to cre­ate a com­mu­nity where the UW’s writ­ers, visual artists, musi­cians, and film­mak­ers can see who else is cre­at­ing new work, give each other feed­back on that work, meet new peo­ple, get famous, what­ever. What’s impor­tant here is that col­lab­o­ra­tion between peo­ple and artis­tic medias are involved.

Now is the time for artis­tic col­lab­o­ra­tion at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton. There’s a new advis­ing hub for stu­dents of the artis­tic vari­ety, called Art­sLink. The Henry recently estab­lished a stu­dent advi­sory com­mit­tee. Inter­mis­sion has an increas­ingly large num­ber of rest­less jour­nal­ists join­ing its staff. Brico­lage is revamp­ing its mis­sion. An inspired group of poets who call them­selves Stray has joined together to form a collective.

Nudge is for the peo­ple who are will­ing to push them­selves beyond their lim­its and attempt works in forms, gen­res, ideas, and meth­ods that hold the pos­si­bil­ity of incred­i­ble suc­cess (how­ever that may be defined), but also mis­er­able fail­ure. We look to reject art’s obnox­ious ten­dency to be untouch­able. The only thing at Nudge that is untouch­able is our ded­i­ca­tion to risk­ing elit­ism and irrel­e­vance for the sake of our art.

Any­way. Like most dia­logue, the con­ver­sa­tion between Eggers and Jonze con­tin­ues. In the same breath as the quo­ta­tion from above:

“[…] and you could take it into space, and that’s why you need a space­ship. Because that’s ulti­mately what space travel is all about, is send­ing our ship from earth into space. And not just in some, like, space shut­tle that has all the foam com­ing off of it, you need your own, glow­ing, you know, mul­ti­col­ored spaceship.”

Stay tuned. There’s more to come.

Until next time,
Claire