On the origins of an idea
Hello! This is your very first email from Lost Arts. A small but growing community focused on creativity.
Hello, and a very warm welcome to the very first in what I hope to be a long-term series of essays about creativity, entrepreneurship, and the act of pushing up against the status quo as a means to push oneself to push culture forward.
To kick things off, I felt it appropriate to share a bit of my personal story that led me to the ideas behind Lost Arts — both the physical studios I instigated in 2015 and 2016 and now the evolution into software.
This is the story of how Lost Arts came to be.
The story of Lost Arts
I grew up a confined kid. My adventurous spontaneity and desire to tinker was never encouraged. If anything, it was stifled.
Eventually, through the freedom college can bring, I began my creative explorations. DJ'ing and electronic music led to building Subsystence in the mid-1990s — an online streaming platform and arts publication. The DJ scene in Chicago at the time was flooded and frankly intimidating. This was my answer to create space for me and my music friends to reach an audience beyond Chicago.
Fast-forward to 2001. I had the motivation to build a piece of furniture to hold my turntables, mixer and record collection. To grow out of the detritus of my collegiate past — wires everywhere, records on wire shelving. I had something specific in mind. I just needed to build it.
The problem was I had no peers, community or experience in this territory. Woodworking.
With a simple sketch and little else, I bought a beautiful sheet of veneered plywood, borrowed my father-in-law's circular saw, and set up in their backyard in December. In Chicago.
Failure was immediate. As the blade tore through the 4x8 sheet, I tried to keep the line, but — you can use your imagination. My half-baked engineering degree did me no good.
For a while I told myself it was the tools. The space. My lack of experience. All of those things were true. None of them were the point.
The missing element was people. Community. Folks to ask for guidance, advice or a helping hand. And perhaps to be around others feeding me inspiration and motivation simply by seeing the work they produced.
That absence — between your own experience and that of others more versed than you — is a quiet, persistent problem. Solitude and the lack of space to be vulnerable to the learning process.
I've been trying to solve it ever since.
Fast-forward once again, to 2007, the early days of our building Kickstarter, a company I co-founded with Perry Chen and Yancey Strickler.
Kickstarter came out of a version of the same instinct — giving creatives a way to fund projects through community. Different problem, similar gap. Lost Arts is the most direct answer I've found. Not a publishing platform. Not a funding mechanism. Just people — designers, artists, musicians, architects — working alongside each other, sharing what they know, paying attention to what the person next to them is building.
In 2015, upon returning to Chicago after leaving Kickstarter, I started with physical spaces in Chicago. Invite only. Intimate. A village, not a platform. Now I’m building software, and opening a new physical space in the near future.
I still think about that turntable stand I tried building (hint: I've still not built it. Still DJ'ing though). And I think about that solitude. The lack of network. Community. Organization.
That's the gap I’m working to close. And over the coming months I'll share more about how — the thinking, the history, and eventually an invitation to build with us.
— Charles
Lost Arts is a small community of artists, designers and engineers exploring ideas together. Working through physical objects and experiential projects. We share work-in-progress, ask hard questions, and build things we couldn’t easily build alone.