Jump Start
First Year Program Jump Start: Currencies
Founded upon the principles of social justice and cultural difference, Jump Start offers incoming students an introduction to the intellectual culture and mission of CCA. This inquiry intersects all Core courses during the first and second week of the fall semester every year.
Jump Start encourages incoming students and faculty alike to engage in a topic with multifaceted possibilities for interpretation -- one intended to foster rich debate. Programwide studio projects, a literary reading, writing, a community event, research, and discussion will converge around the topic of "currencies" in order to acclimate students to interdisciplinary extensions available in their work, expand the field of discussion, and build community.
Fundamental Ideas Around Currencies as a Theme
Sharing ideas is a form of collaboration. Engaging with the creative community at CCA can result in an abundance of exchange wherein basic mathematic principles no longer apply: If these numbers represent ideas, then this equation can easily occur: 2 + 2 = 5. Participate in the community, in critiques, and you will get more.
Intellectual property rights are something to be aware of and beware of: Every creative endeavor occurs in context of identity, culture, and history (no vacuums). When it comes to creative influences, think of “copying” as mindless, but “stealing” as transcendent.
“It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to.”
— Jean-Luc Godard
“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos.”
— Lewis Hyde