Manifesto

Why Am I Here?

You're a creative person with an itch to work on something cool.

Unfortunately at UCLA, your options are limited:

• Campus groups and school programs are exclusive and narrowly focused, and they're muddled in bureaucracy.
• On your own, it's hard to find like-minded collaborators, the workload is a nightmare to juggle, and each idea has its own specific set of demands that you can't tackle alone.

If Cobble's supposed to be for "everyone," why are there only 6 disciplines?

We are very seriously in the process of modifying the list of disciplines. Consider it a living, breathing entity.

As they are now, however, the disciplines have been very carefully chosen based on two specific factors:

• How that discipline fits within the greater narrative of "the arts"
• How that discipline is proportionally represented within the artistic community at UCLA

With these factors considered, it is currently our belief that there is some combination of disciplines which adequately represents the vast majority of artistic projects being pursued at UCLA. If this is not the case, feel free to yell at us about it and we'll get on it.

Until then, a very basic, very rough, very arbitrary, and very very much not-definitive set of descriptors for each discipline is available for your reference under The Rules. That should help to better situate each discipline in the event that you have trouble categorizing something.

Looking Ahead

Cobble was conceptualized in response to an epidemic of creative drought. Right now, fostering any sort of community is nearly impossible. But, as Justin Timberlake says in The Social Network, "we lived on farms, then we lived in cities, and now we're going to live on the internet"— and Cobble seeks to embrace the infinite potential of online interactions.

The synthesis of creatively frustrated artists and an accessible online community begets, in our opinion, its own artistic movement of sorts. UCLA is full of pretty talented people, and we think Cobble has the ability to bring them together to create something amazing. To put it simply: our "endgame" is connecting the right people together. We want to put some lightning in some motherf---ing bottles.

Once we have the infrastructure and the clout, we plan to expand to other schools and get people collaborating all around the world.

At the moment, there are 6 disciplines under which the various creative pursuits on Cobble can be categorized or filtered:

These are not exclusive, separate, or objective categorizations, nor are they set in stone or rigidly defined, but the distinctions are necessary for projects with specific ambitions. On Cobble, you're free to mix and match the disciplines however you feel best fits what you're working on.

We welcome your stubborn perfectionism and your unruly methods, because we want to completely preserve your integrity and leave absolutely no blemishes on your vision.