Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Everything I Know I Learned from Comic Books
So is Luke Wilson's Super Ex-Girlfriend. The X-Men have come and gone. Spiderman 2, too. And, earlier this year, Frank Miller's "Sin City" blew the lid off what we expect from film noir.
Why do these men and women in tights continue to burst into the public imagination?
By the age of four, I was already addicted to comics. So much so, that my mom had to ration them. And I was strictly forbidden to read them before bed due to horrific nightmares.
What is it about this visual language that perfectly mesh the latest pop culture with the primordial ooze of our mythic imagination?
Whatever it is, comics continue to grow in popularity around the world, and at least for us adolescent-boys-at-heart, they continue to express a yearning for clarity between right and wrong, as well as a dark dread of a world gone mad.
I hope the articles and podcasts below give you an excuse to rediscover this rich world of visual storytelling at it's best (and weirdest).
Evolutions at Alphachimp Studio Inc.
Congrats to graphic facilitator John Colaruotolo and his wife on the birth of their second child and first son, to whom they gave the sexiest Italian name ever: Luca Giovanni Colaruotolo!PHOTOS: http://www.angularliquid.com/luca/
MissingLink made its debut in Baltimore at the International Association of Facilitators (IAF). It is set to launch to the public on August 1st.
MissingLink was designed by a team of artists and facilitators who have worked with collaborative teams focused on global strategies. For years, we have been frustrated by the amount of work that seems to evaporate as soon as a meeting concludes. MissingLink brings together the power of browser-based software, file management, keyword tagging, podcasting and even video broadcasting. There is no software to download beyond your web browser. Find out why this easy-to-use web-based tool is the missing link between ideas and implementation.
For a sneak peek at its capabilities, visit:
http://www.missinglink.biz
Shout Outs
Welcome to new subscribers!
- Wendy Hanson in Rhode Island
- Michelle Golden in Missouri
- Lenny Diamond in Conneticut
- Stephanie Krause in New Jersey
- Dr. Wayne Peck in Pennsylvania
- Sammy Dellicour in Brussels
- Morgan Windsheimer (with a cricket in the library)
- Erin McDonough in Boston
- Kathleen Kern in Illinois
- Teresa Lax in Arizona
- Gina Hillier
- Jody Lentz
- Sally Murfitt
- Fred Chao
Articles
This is a visual learner's digest from The Center for Graphic Facilitation
Images + Ideas + Methods + Tools = Visual Learning
http://www.graphicfacilitation.com
PODCASTS OF NOTE
Launch of Social Innovation Conversations
As series producer for Globeshakers, with host Tim Zak, I am excited to introduce you to the Conversations Network's new podcast channel: Social Innovation Conversations.
Our goal is to create a popular channel on the Web, a place that provides an engaging and provocative dialogue about the most effective ways we can improve society and the environment. We'll do this by recording conferences, speeches, and interviews from around the world, to bring you the voices of those at the forefront of creating social change.
The Conversations Network has grown out of the explosive response to Doug Kaye's IT Conversations, which now continues as a channel on the Network.
LINK: http://www.siconversations.org/index.html
Rick Lowe - Urban Villages
Rick Lowe who has given all new meaning to the phrase "artist-in-residence". This Heinz Award winner and former Loeb fellow at the Harvard School of Design is the founder of Project Row Houses, an organization that merges art and architecture with social activism. Lowe describes how this experiment in "social sculpture" is redefining the role of art and artists in society. Tim Zak, host of Globeshakers, interviews this artist-turned-urban-revivalist.
PODCAST: http://www.siconversations.org/shows/detail1100.html
Dean Kamen - Inventor of the Segway People Mover
Dean is an American original, a worthy 21st Century successor to the likes of Edison and Westinghouse who literally changed the world by turning their breakthrough ideas into practical products. An inventor, entrepreneur, and a tireless advocate for science and technology, Kamen is the founder of DEKA Research & Development Corporation where he develops internally generated inventions and provides R&D for major corporate clients.
PODCAST: http://www.siconversations.org/shows/detail1059.html
Biology of Creativity
From Studio 360, broadcast Friday, June 30, 2006. Kurt Andersen looks deep in the brain to find the human impulse to be creative: madness, mirror neurons, creative genius and animal artists.
A must listen for those of us struggling to understand what happens when the brain lights up with the creative process and tips over into mad genius.
This podcast explores Eduard Munch, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, The Creating Brain, the biological roots of empathy, animal artists and what deep in our brains when we look at art.
PODCAST: http://graphicfacilitation.blogs.com/pages/2006/07/biology_of_crea.html
Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab -- Participation Revolution
Negroponte wants to give every school child in the developing world a laptop computer. He has established a non-profit organization to design and produce $100 laptops for sale to governments in quantities of no less than 1 million machines on the condition that they are given to school children. In this talk, he describes his and his colleague Seymour Papert's experience with educational computing in developing nations as well as the machine design.
PODCAST: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail777.html
ALPHACHIMP WeBLOG
BLOG: http://www.alphachimp.com/clients/blog2.html
East vs. East: China's Anti-Japan Posters
EastSouthNorthWest has been documenting the Chinese graphic design focused on reminding the populace of Japanese humiliations during World War II and encouraging citizens to "castrate Japanese" through boycotting their goods and services.
Translation of one poster at:
Everyone loves the country
Don't forget the national shame
Boycott Japanese goods
Beginning with myself
Ann Marie Healy of Z Plus Partners interviews Jonathan Spence, one of the foremost scholars of Chinese civilization from the 16th century to the present and Sterling Professor of History at Yale University, about the historical context behind these most recent eruptions of anti-Japanese fervor.
ARTICLE: http://www.alphachimp.com/clients/2006/07/east-vs-east-chinas-anti-japan-posters.html
POSTERS: http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20060117_1.htm
Mucha Lucha Libre
You would think that the genre of crime-fighting masked men wouldn't be so odd. There's Batman and Robin and Daredevil... and the Blue Demon.
Wait!
The Blue Demon? Why that is not a member of the Hall of Justice! No. He is a member of the pantheon of Mexican wrestling (Lucha Libre) and suave personality.
STORY: http://www.alphachimp.com/clients/2006/06/mucha-lucha-libre.htm
Mentos Bellagio Fountains
The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments. What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It's amazing and completely insane. The first part of this video demonstrates a simple geyser, and the second part shows just how extreme it can get. Over one hundred jets of soda fly into the air in less than three minutes. It's a hysterical and spectacular mint-powered version of the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas, brought to you by the mad scientists at EepyBird.com.
LINK: http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html
Pittsburgh Business Times: Getting Down to Graphics
Tracy Carbasho of the Pittsburgh Business Times did a great job of turning our excited ramblings into a cohesive story about what we do.
"It's not your old corporate meetings where employees listen to the same person drone on,'' said Tim Zak, CEO of the South Side-based Social Innovation Accelerator, a private foundation that supports innovative nonprofit organizations in southwestern Pennsylvania. "Time goes by faster because the events are more engaging with auditory, visual, mental and physical stimulation through team-building exercises, so participants get more involved, more ideas are developed and this results in more productivity.''
We paid him to say that! The photo op in our garden was especially fun--even though the paper chose not to print my awesome karate kicks captured by photographer Joe Wojcik.
http://www.alphachimp.com/clients/2006/06/pittsburgh-business-times-getting-down.html
Super Seventies Stereophonics
This is a fun article from CreativePro.com that brings me back to 1975 when I bought my very first own turntable and stereo with all my summer earnings. I can't remember if it had a cassette deck in it -- I know I still had an eight track player back then because there was one in my '62 Cadillac!
~ from Leah Silverman
LINK: http://www.creativepro.com/story/feature/24352.html?cprose=daily
Piggly Wiggly Goes Biometrically
Should you find yourself shopping for bacon at the Piggly Wiggly on Hilton Head Island (South Carolina) and to your dismay, you should also find yourself sans wallet (but slathered in sunscreen), do not, Gentle Reader, be afraid. Many things have evolved at this grocery chain which stands tall as the quintessential store synonymous for both its cheerful porcine mascot (Mr. Pig loves kids!) and democratic selection of Southern food (ribs, anyone?).
Namely, the chain now offers the option to purchase your pork rinds using only your index finger and a smile. Biometrics have broken the bargain shopper barrier.
Since June 2005, Piggly Wiggly shoppers across Georgia and South Carolina have been able to pay for groceries with the touch of a finger.
ARTICLE: http://www.alphachimp.com/clients/2006/06/piggly-wiggly-goes-biometrically.html
EVERYTHING I KNOW I LEARNED FROM COMIC BOOKS
Superman: American Icon
Part of Studio 360's American Icon Series, Kurt Andersen explores why "The Man of Steel" remains as popular and elusive as ever.
Clark Kent is Jewish? Who knew? Novelist Howard Jacobson explains why the essence of Superman may lie in the ruins of his homeland, exploring the similarities of Superman's origins to the stories of Moses and the Nazi Holocaust. Learn about the comic's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster. They were just teenagers when they sold the rights to Superman to DC Comics for $130. Biographer Gerard Jones and cartoonists Jules Feiffer and Art Spiegelman recall how the boy wonders from Cleveland were partially to blame for their own downfall.
Novelist Michael Chabon, author of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" looks at how Superman reflects a particularly American desire to merge astonishing power with good intentions and basic decency.
PODCAST: http://www.studio360.org/americanicons/ai_show070706.html
SERIES: http://www.studio360.org/americanicons/
Roadstrips
This is a collection of American artists, who illustrated their childhood memories and adult-oriented antecdotes, illuminate the great American roadtrip.The essayists and artists comprise a veritable Who's Who of American comics and an excellent primer on delievering powerful and whimsical visual narratives through storyboards.
Together, the stories reveal the bizarre geographies and snarled personal selfimages for every flavor of American: a Mexican-American punk rocker; an African-American working in an international youth hostel; a Phillipino-American kid fretting over nuclear war; a liberal Jew raising a family in Chicago; or a whitebread redneck turned yuppie who is torn between Seattle and New York.
ARTICLE: http://graphicfacilitation.blogs.com/pages/2006/01/roadstrips.html
PODCAST: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail841.html
Time, Space, Physics and Comic Books
Jay Hosler is both a practicing biologist and passionate cartoonist. His work includes, The Sandwalk Adventures is the story of a conversation about evolution between Charles Darwin and a follicle mite named Mara livining in his left eyebrow. This one has it all, including killer zits, extinct monsters, interplanetary beetles and 25 pages of historical and scientific annotations.
ARTICLE:http://graphicfacilitation.blogs.com/pages/2005/02/time_space_phys.html
NPR STORY: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4495248
Social Engineering Soap Opera Style
Population Communications International (PCI) has a very intriguing tagline: "Telling Stories, Saving Lives."
This American non-profit based in New York City, takes on the biggest, hairiest, most intractable problems. These are the issues that are so huge that should really be added to the original Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: HIV/AIDS, women's rights, population control, environmental degradation and global sustainability.
The main weapon in their arsenal is perhaps the most powerful social force in the world today, second only to religion and Hip Hop... the soap opera.
STORY: http://graphicfacilitation.blogs.com/pages/2006/06/social_engineer.html
PODCAST: http://onthemedia.org/transcripts/transcripts_061606_soapbox.html
RadioRadio: An Illustrated Guide
From Kevin Kelly: "It's a small joke, but it works. A graphic artist embedded herself at the legendary radio show 'This American Life' and created a comic book (all pictures) on how to make great narrative radio (no pictures). Well, at least how to make radio like This American Life makes it, which in my opinion is the best radio being made. There's less on recording techniques and more on how radio narratives work (or don't). It's not about news radio, nor talk radio, but story radio. In this respect, this slim, 32-page comic book will help anyone telling stories, and also make you a better radio listener, too."
STORY: http://graphicfacilitation.blogs.com/pages/2006/06/radio_an_illust.html
Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?
Let's say that you are an up-and-coming documentary film artist. What liabilities do you open yourself up to if you catch someone's mother answering her cellphone on video?
In a piece titled, Fair Use Follies, Brooke Gladstone interviews two experts on the fair use issue. What can be freely reproduced? What snippets of song or text need to be paid for? In the case of the documentarian mentioned above, three words can cost upwards of $5000! What tragedy is unfolding in what Lawrence Lessig has renamed the Comedy of the Commons?
A Duke Law professor, Jamie Boyle, one of the leading experts in the creation and usage of ideas and art in the public domain. To help people like us who go cross-eyed when confronted with legal prose, he has put out a graphic novel on the topic: "Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?"
STORY: http://graphicfacilitation.blogs.com/pages/2006/05/tales_from_the_.html
PODCAST: http://www.ibiblio.org/wunc_archives/sot/index.php?p=684
Cool Tools
Submitted by readers. Let us know about cool tools you use and peruse.
cooltools@alphachimp.com
Upcoming Events
Do you know about a great event coming up? Let us know!
events@alphachimp.com
2006 Visual Practitioners Conference
October 27-29, 2006 in Granlibakken
http://www.visualpractitioner.org/
Pop!Tech X
October 18-21 2006 in Camden, Maine
http://www.poptech.com/
Monkey Business
The Make Love, Not War Species
The bonobo is as genetically similar to humans as the chimpanzee. These peace-loving apes live in matriarchal societies and use sex to deal with competition and anger. They reside only in a very small area of forest below the Congo River in Africa and they've been at risk in recent years because of civil unrest, logging, and hunting. The Bonobo Conservation Initiative is creating a refuge for them called the Bonobo Peace Forest. Living on Earth explores the unconventional society of the bonobo, and what it will take to save this make-love-not-war species.
LINK: http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=06-P13-00027&segmentID=2
Contact Us
What's going on in your practice that you'd like to celebrate? Got a cool product or idea? Doing something revolutionary in the field of visual learning? Putting on a workshop in the future? Run across any cool websites?We'd be honored to brag about any of your accomplishments or promote any of your upcoming workshops or public appearances.
Drop us a line
Peter Durand, Creative Director
peter@alphachimp.com | ph: 412-478-1827Diane Durand, Managing Director
diane@alphachimp.com | ph: 412-478-1829Alphachimp Studio Inc.
414 South Craig St. #275
Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA
Studio: 412-322-1418
