To tell the story of CreateScene, I have to go back over a decade. I had moved to London to chase my dream of becoming a professional artist and grow Art Is The Cure. I was living in a warehouse with no hot water, no shower, graffiti on every square inch of the walls and I was struggling to find momentum. Opportunities were hard to come by and creative friends were hard to find. Being an artist is a lonely existence and I had to think outside the box to find ways to connect with people.
Art Is The Cure was my passion. I would run workshops from the studio, inviting teenage cancer charities down to have a day of making art and they would go home with canvases and memories and it kept me going. We had our community on social media which helped us get noticed but with Myspace fading from existence and the community slipping away, I did what I always do and thought outside the box.
What if Art Is The Cure WAS a social network?!
A place for people like me to connect, share stories, support and inspire each other. A platform that wasn't built to sell advertising space but one that was built to inspire and offer hope.
Enter at this point in the story, Frazer.
We connected through mutual friends due to being 'the nerdiest people they knew' and we would get on well. You don't get many introductions like that and I was curious. Turns out, they were right and we clicked right away. Frazer is for lack of a better term, a genius. A guy who had built an entire social networking platform on his own as a way to distract himself from health struggles. In the world of nerds, that scores highly. We shared stories about our journeys, hurdles we had to go through and why we were so intent on building something from nothing. Frazer with his social network platform and me with my paintings and Art Is The Cure. We were both driven to build things and make the world a better place. Maybe it's because we had both been through dark times and had our own struggles, physically and mentally, that we understood the importance of creating something that would leave the world in a better place in the future.
This is where our separate, but similar journeys would come together. Frazer had a platform to house a community, I had a community that was losing its Myspace house and needed a new chapter.
So why not merge our shared visions into one?! Like Power Rangers taking their power morphers out and forming a Megazord, we would take the form of a new vehicle that would allow us to take on the world together. (See, I told you we were nerdy... are nerdy... will forever be nerdy)
In 2011 we began planning our ideas and our vision and by 2013, we were Beta testing with hundreds of people from the Art Is The Cure community and we were even finalists at the HP Smart Business Awards in the social media category. We were talking to investors and I was desperately learning about the business side to keep up with them but we kept pushing until disaster struck.
Frazer disappeared for a week, no response to texts or calls. It turns out, his health had deteriorated and he was in the hospital without his phone waiting to hear if he needed emergency surgeries. Ulcerative colitis was the prognosis and this would put everything on hold. We didn't know the extent of it or what medical journey Frazer would have to go on but it was clear that the social network had to be put on hold. Would it be for a few weeks? A few months? Well, as it turned out, this would derail us for years while Frazer put his health first and would need multiple major surgeries, months of rehabs between each one, rendering him unable to pursue our social network dream until he had it under control, however long that would take.
I did what every good friend would do and focussed on supporting Frazer's recovery. It didn't feel right taking what we had built together and doing it with anyone else. This was our dream and we would do it together, however long it took.
I focused on my art career again and pushed forward with bigger opportunities to exhibit with galleries in London and then New York. As the years went by and Frazer racked up the surgeries, I racked up the gallery shows. I continued to learn more about the business side of the art industry, spending time in every gallery show I had talking to curators, sales teams, collectors and press people. I wanted to absorb as much information as I could with the goal always in the back of my mind that it would one day help build the social network site again.
Fast forward a few more years and we crash headfirst into a global pandemic. Gallery shows are all cancelled and I am alone in the studio, social distancing and social reminiscing. Without the deadlines and pressures of gallery shows, I was able to experiment again, explore new ideas and revisit old ones. There are now conversations about new technologies, blockchain and NFTs. New ways to market and sell art. New ways to build a community away from galleries. Everything I had been learning about for years with my parallel passions came together and it felt like the world might be ready for art and technology to come together with the social network project.
Frazer, I am pleased to say, was on the mend. Successful surgeries and rehabs had got his health struggles back on track and was feeling stronger and ready to entertain the conversation again. Years of me asking how he was and being met with the answer of 'not great, need another surgery' were now becoming conversations about 'how do we rebuild that vision we used to have?'
The problem we faced is that the technology we were developing in 2013 was now obsolete. We would have to start again and recapture the essence of our old vision and use new advances in code and software to build something fresh.
We also realised that as much as Art Is The Cure was a worthy concept and community to build it around, it limited our ability to reach a wider audience. Was the platform a charity thing? A therapy thing? A support system? It was all of those but it could be so much more if we refocussed and thought about what other creatives needed. Opportunities. A place to share their talents and find people to book them or commission them. Maybe we could help the creative community by building something more focussed on opportunities and rebrand it under a new identity.
How do we connect people from the art scene to people in the fashion scene to collaborate? How does someone from the modelling scene network with someone in the photography scene to book a photoshoot? How do we give artists of all kinds a space to share their creative scene and get found by people who need their particular talents?
We need to give them a platform to create a scene and get noticed. And thus, CreateScene was born.
We didn't want to disregard everything we put into the previous platform, especially since we were being noticed by awards and getting positive feedback from Beta testers. Art Is The Cure was an important ingredient and will become CreateScene's social conscience and remain a part of the company's DNA. We share the same key values; Inspiration, Community and Movement.
Art Is The Cure can find new ways to inspire our new community under the umbrella of CreateScene.
Two years of back and forth conversations, designs, prototypes built on Adobe XD and reimagining what this particular phoenix rising from the Art Is The Cure ashes would look like later and we are now able to show what we have built.
Ten years after being recognised and highly commended at the HP Smart Business Awards in 2013, me and Frazer are back and proud to showcase our new platform CreateScene. Something that we can use to benefit the creative community and provide the tools and inspiration to shape the next generation of artists.
We haven't had a social network that embodies the creative spirit and energy since Myspace in its prime. The 2010s were void of a creative energy in social media. Bland, wordy, advert-crammed platforms have dominated the space for over a decade and I have spoken to hundreds of creatives around the world who all say with the same wistful tone...
'I miss the Myspace days when social networks were fun.'
CreateScene will do everything the other big platforms can do and more. Network, search, befriend, message, chat, share, doom scroll through content in three different kinds of newsfeed. But maybe the thing that CreateScene has which other platforms don't is the proverbial soul. An underlying energy and purpose that elevates it above the alternatives.
Maybe Art Is The Cure needed to fail as a platform in order for it to become the soul of CreateScene.
I have always struggled to fully explain what Art Is The Cure is but maybe CreateScene is the missing part of the equation. Art Is The Cure is an energy, a catalyst that tries to educate and inspire people to take their struggles and channel them through art. It is a message, a story, a community. Always trying to become a movement but never quite getting enough of a push to achieve its potential. The last ten years have been difficult, not just with having a dear friend struggle with their health or battling to succeed in a volatile art market, but feeling like there's an unfinished chapter hanging over us that stopped Art Is The Cure going in a new direction. Once I got the vision in my mind of having our own platform on which we could provide the tools and inspiration for our community on, I could never shake it. Now, I am excited to say, that vision is back and the dream lives on.
Then... Art Is The Cure in 2013
Now... CreateScene in 2023
If you would like to join us in this new chapter and Beta test CreateScene to help us develop new features, play with the site and be one of the first people in the world to use it, please fill in a quick survey and provide your details so we can send you a sign up code. survey.createscene.com
