Big excitement in downtown Beloit
The School of Media & the Arts, one of five schools created at Beloit College to bring career pathways to the center of the college experience, is embracing innovative instructional practices in a space now home to a next level arts community in the making in the Hendricks Center for the Arts in downtown Beloit.
Credit: Trevor Johnson ’08
The new space, featuring upgraded video screens, editing bays, sound-treated rooms, and professional equipment available to students, is an opportunity for the integration of audience and performance, for learning and doing side-by-side. Cullyn Murphy, Director of the School of Media & the Arts, introduces an apt metaphor for the move into Hendricks Center for the Arts: the temp track. A temp track, he explains, is an existing piece of music or audio used in the editing process to guide choices and provide inspiration and structure. As he describes the new space, it is evident success in media and the arts requires both.
“We have myths about creativity and collaboration that you know when it’s working, but you can’t fix it when it doesn’t. Yes, you can (fix it). And, when you create a space that is relevant and responsive, its activities will be able to change in ways that we don’t know about yet.”
Community begins in shared spaces. Sustaining community requires shared language, experiences, ways of being. Murphy, also an assistant professor of music and media studies, shares an example from his teaching that feels personal, demonstrating how the most important aspect of the school’s move to Hendricks is not the space exactly, but how it is shared, between people and equipment, passions and skills.
Murphy’s sound and film class and the directing fiction film course will use the same equipment to work on crossover projects. Collaboration and communication in the instructional space spark ideas and skills through intentional coursework. This new shared understanding follows the students, first in clubs, and then to the point where students are able to sustain the plans they choose for themselves.
Credit: Maurice Lea ’29
The move to Hendricks is part of the School of Media & the Arts response to an uncertain future for the arts, a way to stay ahead, to keep doors open, and always be listening. Musical elements influence emotion and the learning dynamics and tempo in the new space will impact students’ feelings, specifically about success.
“Beloit College attracts students for whom a hang out space is a place to be inspired. They get excited by each other’s work,” says Murphy. “My big excitement is the different, effective, and organic collaboration that can happen, between faculty and between students beyond discipline.”
He believes students will experience their own and each other’s success more often, increasing their desire and ability to repeat those successes. They will ultimately become a maker community who leave Beloit College with a career-ready mindset and portfolio.
Throughout the building, the temp track of the School of Media & the Arts plays loudly for students and faculty. Not an end, but a means to an end, each addition resonates and builds into the next. While the arts commonly identify with their expression of the intangible, the building establishes in concrete ways, paths that the School of Media & the Arts and the other schools strive to make visible for students.
“The move to Hendricks ushers in a new era for Media Studies at the college. It’s still a work-in-progress but we’ll be continuing this work into the future! It’s exciting to build something new and to be part of an increasingly focused arts community at the college,” adds Joe Bookman, Associate Professor of Media Studies. Inspiration ripples over structure, intentionality vibrates outward from brick, beams, screens, and wires — Beloit College’s soundtrack for success in the arts.
