Apprentices collaborating with interdisciplinary professionals are the heart of our model for higher education.
BUREAU of CHANGE is an education-centric digital media laboratory. We bring together artists and non-artists to create community engaged media projects using an atelier-style model that employs student-apprentices and recent grads.
Our objectives are influenced by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project implemented during the Great Depression. We harken a bygone era when the government stimulated jobs in the arts by employing artists and subsidizing community education centers that offered training in arts skills applicable to industrial jobs of the time. Government subsidy for arts now diminished and digital media skills in demand, BUREAU emphasizes new market making for digital media artists and access to technology-based public service opportunities for creative practitioners.
Student and post-bacc apprentices who work with us are fully integrated into our creative team and create real world projects from start to finish—concept development, research, production, critique and revision, publication or exhibition, and promotion. We facilitate young artists in applying their talents and perspectives to hit the ground running as they absorb professional experience while working in a tight-knit community of peers and mentors.
We like to work with students and recent grads who share goals to:
Acquire and refine skills in creative production, progressive communication structures, civic entrepreneurship, industry-standard software and programming for digital media.
Learn by working in collaboration with digital media artists, advocacy organizations and scholars to tackle problems via art, design and technology-based interaction.
Create and distribute real-world projects that interface with the public.
Work toward a sustainable career progression for creative practitioners interested in art and design as a form of public service.
“Rather than authoring and proliferating discrete images and objects, more artists should use their talents, imaginations, ideals, and understandings to become communication analysts, communication framers, communication enablers and communication inspirers.”
/// Margot Herster, Co-Founder & Administrator of Ideas, BUREAU of CHANGE
Read more: Media-N, V.08 N. 2 “Found, Sampled, Stolen: Strategies of Appropriation in New Media”