Continuing to Fund ‘What If’ with Student Seed Innovation Grants (SSIG)
By Kate Carroll
 
The Student Seed Innovation Grants (SSIG) wrapped up another successful academic year, with Creativity & Innovation awarding 16 grants to 21 students for a total of more than $95,000. Student Seed Innovation Grants are an idea accelerator; the grants push students to be creative problem solvers, embrace ambiguity, and iterate projects/ideas forward. An independent committee reviews and discusses each application. They then vote to determine which applications are funded in each round. In addition to demonstrating a passion for exploring a question, seeking a solution, and/or solving a problem, successful applications display a professional level of writing, rigor, thought, and thoroughness.  
 
Recent SSIG recipients Marco Barracchia (’22) and Finn Mott ('24) have been highlighted by Colorado College Communications and Marketing for their achievements related to their SSIG work.  
 
Marco recently won the Erasmus Mundus Excellence Scholarship, which will help fund his Europubhealth+ graduate program. His SSIG project objective was to develop a cross-cultural guide on HIV prevention strategies for public health workers in Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Italy. His graduate work will support his long-term goal to become a public health expert committed to increasing health access worldwide. More about Marco’s success can be found here 
 
Finn Mott was awarded a Student Seed Innovation Grant in Block 7, 2022. His project explored LGBTQ+ communities in Europe and the U.S. and culminated in a poetry collection titled “his salt and her flowers.” Finn’s collection will be published in March 2024 by Lethe Press, one of the largest LGBTQ+ publishing houses in the country. More about Finn’s work can be found here 
 
If you want to learn more about the SSIG program or have questions about applying, please contact Kate Carroll at kcarroll@coloradocollege.edu. 
Where Art Meets Science
By Sophia Hartt
 
Biohacking 101–Kitchen Sink Science and Theatre–is anything but a normal science class. CC professors Sara Hanson (Microbiology) and Ryan Platt (Theatre/Dance), as well as artist and Innovator in Residence, Kathryn Hamilton, work together to teach a unique class that combines elements of creativity, scientific reasoning, and performance to provide an interactive learning experience for students of all academic backgrounds. 

 
Kathryn Hamilton is a performance artist, filmmaker, and self-taught biologist who finds inspiration from science to inform her artistic process. She contributes a unique perspective to teaching the class and is used to thinking and creating unconventionally. Hamilton wants students to engage in science creatively and find answers to questions through discovery. Her fascination with science began when she was handed an old, never-washed hat from the 1930s. From there, she began her journey of using a community science lab to investigate the genetic materials on this hat, later continuing to use science to inform her art. She hopes that students in this course explore how thinking creatively can benefit the scientific process. 

Fear, Creativity, and a Love of Acting

By Lucy Kramer

During the last semester of her senior year, History-Political Science major Grace Wade-Stein was looking to take classes like Acting 1, an art she had been interested in but had never pursued. She did not feel like acting was “her,” even when the class rolled around and she began actually acting. Her self-perception did not change simply by joining the class. “I felt an inability to access the space of being an actor or wrap my head around that mindset.”

What she had been doing for the past four years was writing History-Political Science papers. Asking the right questions to better understand a problem was something that Grace constantly employed intellectually. So, for her acting class, Grace began asking others one question: “What do you love about acting?” She asked a panel full of professional performers, interviewed close friends who are pursuing acting, and texted strangers who had an interest in the activity—people who act in any capacity.

The question is deceptively simple. After a performance of Aubergine at UCCS, Grace stayed for the artist panel discussion. She asked her question, but many on the panel misinterpreted her question as asking for advice on how to act or how to overcome fear. But Grace already had her method to overcome fear: asking the question of why people love to act. “I am a person who tries to combat anxiety with information.” Exposure therapy is a method Grace has used with anxiety previously. Here, she designed her own exposure therapy; the overarching exposure was the acting class. Each conversation was an exposure.


Her question starts from the assumption that the person does love acting. By asking the question of why they do, she hoped to uncover the way people give themselves over fully to craft and use that in her own ability to act. The process of asking this question and writing it in her notebook was a way of testing this hypothesis.


First, she jotted down responses in her notebook without names attached. It was only after the class that she turned the responses in her notebook into a visual display. Did she read her display for reference? When I asked about this, she said that the process of asking and writing these responses allowed her to internalize the idea—acting is joyful. Anonymizing the quotes allowed Grace to imagine herself in a positive relationship with acting. It was a way to actively reform how she thought about acting in relationship to herself. “I also simply enjoyed the class more,” she said.


The last thing that Grace mentioned was how grateful she was for each of the various actors with whom she connected in the process. This project underscored the power of communication. Even if it was personal, even if they didn’t understand why she was asking, people were still willing to help. Through her persistent willingness to ask, Grace was granted access to the resources of each actor’s lived experience, emotion, and community.
Analogue Social Media
By Robert Yan
 
I’m working on an interactive art project highlighting the problem of loneliness, which has become an issue of concern for college students. A 2017 survey by the American College Health Association indicates that among the 31,463 respondents, 63.1% have felt “very lonely” in the past 12 months, while 29.3% have felt "very lonely" in the past two weeks. 

My installation addresses the issue by contemplating the minimum conditions for establishing a connection and dissolving loneliness. It includes two pairs of light bulbs and buttons. Each half of the pair is put in a different building. When the button on one of the light bulb stations is pushed, both light bulbs in the pair will light up by 30%. When both buttons of the light bulb stations are pushed, both light bulbs light up by 100%. In other words, if one person pushes the button, waits, and sees the bulb light up 100%, they know a stranger is connecting with them through the other light bulb station in the other building. This moment of connection sheds the baggage of language, social etiquette, or cultural expectations, allowing the two strangers to meet each other in the purest form. Through the installation, I hope to bring attention to the problem of loneliness and create a gesture toward its solution. 
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