A new livestream is pairing electronic music with live art creation and your Saturday morning coffee.  

Saturday Cartoons is hosted on the Twitch streaming platform  Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Chang and the artists agreed that the livestream offers something different than most electronic music live streams. 

“I’ve always played more chill music, I don’t really play party music anymore — one of the more difficult things that I’ve had to recognize is I can’t play Friday nights,” said Chang, who is also a DJ. 

Chang is an alum of the University of Minnesota and said the live stream has averaged about 20 viewers each week. He hopes to see numbers grow as the series continues. 

Chang welcomes diversity in the musical lineup — the only stipulation being that the music must be fit for the Saturday morning time slot. Live DJs play everything from funk and jazz to house and techno, and the visual art varies from week to week. 

Artists on the streams create paintings and build crafts from hot glue, beads and other materials. 

Episode One took place May 23 and featured two painters. The first artist, Julia Bevington, fused comedy and art, painting a squirrel holding a piece of pizza. 

Katie Kroeck, a tattoo artist at Jackalope Tattoo in the Midtown area of Minneapolis, was another of the visual artists invited to create at the first livestream. Kroeck often streams her creative process on Instagram or Facebook and has painted during concerts, but she said this was a different experience.

“It felt like I was paying way more attention to the music than I do when I’m just listening,” Kroeck said. 

While the livestream is running, visual artists and DJs have links on the screen that allow viewers to donate as they watch. 

Colin Udvig played on the first livestream and has appeared on other livestreams during social distancing. 

“Coming into this I really didn’t know what it was or what it was going to be,” Udvig said. “It’s kind of cool that it was people painting and drawing from scratch… I hadn’t really ever seen that.” 

In addition to paying out artists who perform on the livestream, Chang is donating his subscriptions to local homeless shelters in need. 

For $5 per month, Twitch users can subscribe to Chang’s channel, PaulChangStreams. This subscription fee is donated toward local homeless shelters, which Chang said he feels have been overlooked amid the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Twitch also has a partnership with Amazon Prime, which allows Prime members to subscribe to one Twitch channel for free per month. “All of my subscription and Amazon Prime revenue go directly toward local homeless shelters. So at the end of the day you can support the local homeless communities who in some ways have been kind of neglected during this COVID-19 crisis,” Chang said.

What: Saturday Cartoons

When: 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. every Saturday

Where: PaulChangStreams on Twitch

Cost: free, donations accepted

Ages: all ages