Establishing an arts and culture community at a university as large as UBC is a hard thing to do, however it's a challenge that the team at Dive were willing to take on.
Dive is a new online initiative dedicated to promoting UBC’s arts and culture scene. Melissa Monaghan, Maciek Piskorz and Sam Massooleh -- the website’s founders -- are three UBC commerce students with a passion for arts and a distaste for its lack of support at UBC.
The arts rely on a co-dependant relationship. Not only does it require an immense amount of creativity and talent on the part of many artists but it also requires an extremely dedicated and appreciative group of supporters. At a school with an arts community as large and diverse as UBC’s, creating the group of supporters becomes an even bigger challenge. When the support group struggles to thrive, so too does the culture.
There’s a perfectly logical reason for why arts events are so hard to support here at UBC: no one knows about them. Trying to keep track of all the events being put on by all the different arts faculties and clubs is a task all on its own. It's a task that has unfortunately put a large barrier between many students and the arts at UBC, and it's one that Dive has set out to tear down.
“From our experience we’ve been to a number of places and usually what happens is we get there and there are about 20 people sitting in the audience. It’s just a terrible shame to see these artists, they spend six months preparing for those three nights that they are gonna play for and yet no one gets to see them. So that was kind of our inspiration. We came to the realization that it should be made more accessible to a larger number of people,” said Piskorz.
Dive has taken on the job of finding the week’s most interesting arts and culture events and putting them all in one easily comprehensible place.
The simple yet elegant website provides an easy to use platform to locate both the events you wanted to track down and events you never would have heard of otherwise.
They have provided a medium through which the arts at UBC are more accessible and easier to support, bridging the gap between the brilliant artist and the supporters they so desperately need.
“There are two distinct groups of people at UBC: the performers and the spectators. And obviously one can benefit the other and we hope to be the link between the two,” said Piskorz. The arts community is one that can only get stronger with more awareness and support, and Dive hopes to contribute to this.
Check out diveintoubc.com to learn more about Dive and upcoming arts and culture events on campus.