Alphachimp Studio, Inc.

Art (I Want You)

2009-03-11T14:50:00.001-04:00

For all of your artists or artistic types wondering if what you make, makes a difference. You are not alone.

Music video for Tanya Davis' song Art by Andrea Dorfman.

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. --Carl G. Jung

(PS. Thanks to Nellie Durand for the link. Nellie makes LOTS of art. Check it out: http://nelliedurand.blogspot.com/)

Primates on Facebook

2009-02-27T16:55:00.004-05:00

IMAGE: http://carrollina.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/

What is the cost of emotion, time and energy do you spend in your social networks “grooming”?

From Feb 26th 2009 | SAN FRANCISCO | The Economist print edition

Even online, the neocortex is the limit

That Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks will increase the size of human social groups is an obvious hypothesis, given that they reduce a lot of the friction and cost involved in keeping in touch with other people. Once you join and gather your “friends” online, you can share in their lives as recorded by photographs, “status updates” and other titbits, and, with your permission, they can share in yours. Additional friends are free, so why not say the more the merrier?

In the wild, grooming is time-consuming and here computerisation certainly helps. But keeping track of who to groom—and why—demands quite a bit of mental computation.

FULL ARTICLE >>

In Blindness, a Bold New Artistic Vision

2009-02-17T11:52:00.003-05:00

Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York Times

STILL PAINTING John Bramblitt, an artist, became completely blind in 2001. “It wasn’t until I lost my sight that I became brave enough to fail,” he said.

From NYTimes.com - Determined to get his vision back in some way, Mr. Bramblitt picked up a bottle of white glue and began to draw outlines that he could feel with his fingers once the glue dried. He soon switched to a paint product that dried more quickly, and he learned to distinguish between different shades of oil paint based on their texture and viscosity.

Calma

2009-01-11T21:48:00.008-05:00

My new favorite artist: Stephan Doitschinoff of Brazil!

See a video of the young artists as he composes spectacular murals and applies his extraordinary talent to emblazon houses, churches and walls in rural cities in his South American homeland. You can see his process, involving stencils, religious iconography, and styles referencing folk art, wood cuts, computer-generated gradients and comics.

Subaquita has a great interview with the artist on his childhood in San Paulo, anchored on one side by a strict religious upbringing and on the other by the skater punk underground comic scene.

TEMPORAL : The Art of Stephan Doitschinoff (aka Calma)

from Jonathan LeVine Gallery on Vimeo.

From Gestalten Press:

Stephan Doitschinoff’s street alias is Calma. This book with the same name documents the emblematic and spiritual paintings and murals that the Brazilian painter has emblazoned on houses, churches and walls in rural villages in his South American homeland.

Calma introduces the visual language of Brazilian painter and illustrator Stephan Doitschinoff, who finds his creative cadence in the realm between authentic urban art and rural spirituality.

The title Calma is not only Stephan Doitschinoff‘s alias as a graffiti writer, but also the abbreviation of “con alma” (c’alma) in Latin, meaning “with soul”. His emblematic metaphoric imagery feeds off Afro-Brazilian folklore, pagan and alchemistic symbolism and contemporary pop culture.

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

2009-01-10T23:12:00.001-05:00

Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

It is shiny. And made by Apple. I must have it.

CommonCraft: 18 Lessons Learned in 2008

2009-01-06T17:44:00.003-05:00

Build Foundations. Care About Contracts. Always Test Business Models. Constantly Build Brand. Know What Business You Are In. Start Now. Have a Positive Impact. Be Good to Those Doing Good. Small is Still Beautiful. Assume Positive Intentions. People Want To Do The Right Thing. Every Contact is an Opportunity. Consider Community Instead of Competition. YouTube Creates Brand Awareness. Video Licensing Works. Own The Supply Chain. Listen to Twitter.

2008 was a great year for Common Craft, who produces videos that are short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand. They use a whiteboard-and-paper format they call Paperworks that is "designed to cut out the noise and stick to what matters."

(Like this one about social networking.)

Check out what they learned in 2008 by reading the full list.

Illustrator's Sketchbook

2008-12-08T23:06:00.005-05:00

If I win the lottery, I'll take the money, travel the world and draw in my sketchbook.

(Oh, wait. I actually already somehow do this with no money.)

Poking around another artist's journal or sketchbook is as invigorating as it is infuriating. But the awe and envy it evokes is worth it. Check out a wonderful "gallery of sketchbook effluvia" posted by Rob Dunlavey on Drawger.com.

Below is an excerpt from a post by Jeffery Smith, one of the best illustrators in the biz and a full time Professor at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He pulls the veil back on his process for finished editorial work. These sketches were done in Los Angeles locations such as Union Station, Philippe’s Restaurant, The Farmer’s Market on Fairfax, and the Santa Monica Pier.

clipped from drawger.com

Sarah with her pants down

The greatest “modus operandi” a narrative illustrator has, and the measure of his/her mojo, is drawing. Drawing is the ability to record life on a visceral level. I learned to appreciate this point of view as a young illustrator in New York. But that’s another story.

The point of this post is to offer up a series of sketchbook drawings, made from real life,

Albeit slightly “set-up.” These drawings were created in 4 hours, and each drawing is approximately 10”W X 14”H. I drew these drawings while teaching at the Art Center College of Design. The hope is that, through drawing, the student will become better able to see, more appreciative of the human condition, and more sensitive to stories, both visual and literary. This is not illustration, not by a long shot. There is no refinement here, nothing but naked. This is an attempt to see life, and to organize and edit what I see, while flying by the seat of my pants.

GOOD Magazine: Hippo Rollers

2008-12-04T12:11:00.001-05:00

From GOOD/Video:

Video by: Yoni Brook, Rus Garofalo, Erik Winkowski, MacKenzie Fegan, Lindsay Utz, Morgan Currie, Michael Schaubach

Music by: Sublime Frequencies

In rural Africa, women spend 26% of their time fetching water, often walking for miles with heavy buckets balanced on their heads. That's time that could be spent going to school, working outside the home, or teaching their children. The Hippo Water Roller eases the burden by allowing women to transport five times as much water with much less physical effort. In our latest LOOK video, we examine the impact of the rollers on one village in South Africa.

LEARN MORE hipporoller.org

Pimp My Moleskin

2008-11-22T00:03:00.004-05:00

Spotted on the Etsy.com blog, an idea for the artist who needs to jumpstart their Moleskin sketchbook: a personalized, laser-etched journal from Modofly.

This slideshow gives a glimpse into the production of the Modofly Moleskins.

Tag Galaxy, a Flickr Mash-Up

2008-11-08T08:14:00.002-05:00

In the pursuit of ever cooler interfaces for trolling the internets, I was excited to see Tag Galaxy (thanks Doug!).

Enter the site, enter a tag, and images are sucked out of Flickr via its API, assembling a planet of images, plus a galaxy of related tag planets.

Project Masiluleke: A case study in user-centered design

2008-11-04T11:40:00.005-05:00

I want to forward you a video from the Pop!Tech conference that is a brilliant case study of user centered design. The presentation describes Project Masiluleke:

"[This project]harnesses the power of mobile devices to help reverse South Africa’s crippling HIV/AIDS and TB crises. Partners from frog design, iTeach and the Praekelt Foundation discuss the program’s breakthrough approach, which endeavors to connect millions to testing and care."

VIDEO: http://poptech.org/popcasts/?viewcastid=209

@ Yahoo! Video

(13:40) Andrew Zolli, Pop!Tech curator, gives a description of the project
(14:30) Zinhle Thabethe, Outreach Director of iTEACH, a South African woman with HIV/AIDS, gives the context of the project
(22:22) Gustav Praekelt, a white Afrikaner and mobile technology entrepreneur
(32:30) Robert Fabricant, creative director of frog design in New York, on their "secret weapon", the design process

It is an amazing story, and a perfect model for telling a complex story involving public health, patient engagement and mobile technology. See information graphic>>

10 Commandments for the President-Elect to Save the US Economy

2008-10-28T15:36:00.001-04:00

Juan Enriquez (2008) Pop!Tech Pop!Cast from PopTech on Vimeo.

At the 2008 Pop!Tech conference, best-selling author and debt crisis expert Juan Enriquez catalyzed a vigorous debate on the impetuses of the current American economic meltdown – and the immediate actions the country and next U.S. President will have to take to address the situation. Combining information and ideas from many sources, Juan enumerated an urgent, non-partisan10 point plan, to be implemented during the next administration’s first 60 days. Enriquez posited that failure to act – or, in his view, further misguided efforts – run the risk of triggering an irreversible economic collapse that could plague the American economy for decades.

Join the conversation at http://www.poptech.org/juanenriquez/

Alphachimp @ Pop!Tech

2008-10-26T10:15:00.003-04:00

Peter Durand from Alphachimp @ Pop!Tech from Poptech on Vimeo.
Peter Durand from Alphachimp illustrates Stephen Badylak's lecture on regenerative medicine.

From Pop!Tech Blogger Michelle Riggen-Ransom:

If you’re with us in Maine, you’ve probably noticed the colorful illustrations hanging on the walls of the third floor break room. If you’re not, you can take a look at them here.
These illustrations are the work of artist Peter Durand of Alphachimp Studio. Peter has set up an easel on the balcony of the Opera House, where he busily creates illustrations that capture the key elements of each presentation.

Peter let me peek over his shoulder while he illustrated a session. It happened to be Stephen Badylak’s talk on The Edge of Medicine. While images of exploded horse faces and dismembered fingers flashed on the screen, Peter managed to turn Badylak’s fascinating lecture on regenerative medicine into the illustration above. Watch a short video of his process here and see how language becomes visual art.

Pop!Tech: Whattzon?

2008-10-23T16:46:00.003-04:00

I asked a newcomer to Pop!Tech if the event was delivering on the hype. He replied that the first session had caused his TMJ to flare up from the stress of confronting a dying planet. But thankfully, for every blame-laden finger pointed at my energy-consuming face, there are more digits pointing towards solutions.

Saul Griffith of Whattzon.com breaks down his carbon footprint
with beautiful (and terrifying) information graphics.

clipped from www.poptech.org

For starters, you can measure what your personal energy consumption is using the tools at wattzon.com to set a baseline and see how you compare against others. Wattzon says about its “embodied energy calculator”:

Every purchasing decision you make has consequences… a significant amount of energy is required to make and deliver to you the stuff you buy and use. This tool allows all WattzOn users to estimate the embodied energy of all of the consumer items in modern life. With this tool well populated, people will be able to see how different products and lifestyle purchasing choices impact their power consumption.
It’s a small step, but it’s in the right direction. If you know what you’re mistakes are, you at least have a shot at correcting them.

The Hillbilly Movie

2008-10-14T20:02:00.004-04:00

Many family and friends continue to ask: "Whatever happened to that Hillbilly Movie?"

Whelp. Here 'tis! Created for the '99 West Buena Halloween Party in Chicago, this has been floated around for years.

Diane (Cross) Durand stars as June, the damsel in distress, who has a very big problem. She's got hillbillies (Jarrell McAlister and Peter Durand) and she can't make'em go away!

Moleska's Moleskin

2008-10-14T17:57:00.006-04:00

Beautiful moleskin journal from "Moleska" in Kiev, Ukraine.

http://moleska.livejournal.com

http://www.behance.net/moleska

Found through Behnace.net, a social networking site for professionals
to profile their work.

Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home and School

2008-10-03T16:34:00.004-04:00

The brain is an amazing thing. Most of us have no idea what’s really going on inside our heads. Yet brain scientists have uncovered details every business leader, parent, and teacher should know.

Dr. John Medina is a developmental molecular biologist and research consultant. He is an affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine. He is also the director of the Brain Center for Applied Learning Research at Seattle Pacific University.

Medina's Brain Rules book, DVD and on-line tutorials make the complexity of our individually wired brains both understandable and fun. Lots of content also available on YouTube--including the location of the elusive Jennifer Aniston neuron!

clipped from www.brainrules.net

EXERCISE | Rule #1: Exercise boosts brain power.

SURVIVAL | Rule #2: The human brain evolved, too.

WIRING | Rule #3: Every brain is wired differently.

ATTENTION | Rule #4: We don't pay attention to boring things.

SHORT-TERM MEMORY | Rule #5: Repeat to remember.

LONG-TERM MEMORY | Rule #6: Remember to repeat.

SLEEP | Rule #7: Sleep well, think well.

STRESS | Rule #8: Stressed brains don't learn the same way.

SENSORY INTEGRATION | Rule #9: Stimulate more of the senses.

VISION | Rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses.

GENDER | Rule #11: Male and female brains are different.

EXPLORATION | Rule #12: We are powerful and natural explorers.

Beijing's 798 Art Zone

2008-09-30T06:16:00.004-04:00

View: photos | slideshow

To see that the Chinese don't always take themselves, their culture or their history too seriously, check out the wacky sculptures of this huge site of a former factory, the 798 Art Zone.

Every artist seems to have one thing in common: a mash-up or cultural language and contemporary imagery. Maoist imagery mixed with Warhol love of the icon, but through an asian Jeffrey Coombs filter. (Lots of irony and nudity.)

Tickr = Photos + Flickr + Dipity

2008-09-27T23:43:00.003-04:00

With this great mash-up of Flickr and Dipity, you can check out some of Peter Durand's photos from China. (See bikes, telephone booths, manhole covers, and food, of course!)

The State of Hypercommunication

2008-09-27T20:14:00.003-04:00

This forum on social media was broadcast live from the World Economic Forum in Tianjin, China. see more video

Using only a Nokia mobile phone, the video feed was sent to Qik, a service that enables recording, embedding in web sites and webcasting, plus integration with Twitter and Facebook.

Jimmy Wale | Wikipedia

After being blocked for so long, there may be hope!

Mattias Lufkens | World Economic Forum

Shows us the upside of hyperjournalism, broadcasting LIVE on his Nokia N-series to Qik, Twitter, and Facebook. Follow him! http://twitter.com/davos

Dan Shine | 50 x 15

His daughter has no interest in email, it has no relevance to her: it's all about Facebook. The next generation cares about speed and authenticity of communication. And they are watching what we are doing as leaders. Handheld + Twitter + Facebook + SMS twitter.com/DanShine

Josh Spear | Undercurrent

Tests brands with young people and try to screw up to learn. Twittering an older woman. twitter.com/joshspear

Tariq Krim | NetVibes

Power of these tool shows that we have to understand the power of what we say. The conversation is ever ongoing. When we communicate, we have to understand that everything we say will be public. twitter.com/tariqkrim

Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz | VPOD TV

Suffers from digital schizophrenia. After blogging, videoblogging, he has moved to Twitter for all professional communication, and it doubles as a log of his personal life. Facebook is the personal portable. rodrigo.typepad.com

Aaron McCormack | BT Teleconferencing

An Irish guy with a tie, working for a British company in the United States. We must understand the issues, advantages, and potential "extinction events" that are made possible by this media transparency.

Monkey Public Radio

2008-08-26T15:10:00.002-04:00

Even America's middlest-of-the-road media outlets recognizes the universal appeal of monkey business. NPR's new blog commenting upon pop culture is titled: Monkey See.

clipped from www.npr.org

A Word About Our Name

Why "Monkey See"?

Monkeys: You can study them to learn about human behavior, or you can dress them up in funny outfits and have them deliver telegrams. Which is to say, they lie exactly at the intersection of anthropology and comedy. (See Figure A.)

That spot — the intersection of high and low — is the territory this blog stakes out. You can, after all, learn a lot about people from what they choose to watch, listen to and read. You can also have a lot of fun viewing YouTube videos of local news anchors sneezing in the middle of a broadcast.

Of course, the name also plays off the famous three monkeys — the ones who see, hear and speak no evil. Because to us, despite a whiff at times of guilty pleasure, there's not much in the pop universe that feels "evil."

The We-Think Generation

2008-08-20T18:13:00.004-04:00

"We think, therefor we are!"

CNN's Becky Anderson looks at how the internet has helped shape a new way on innovative thinking and sharing. This video features our friend Garrick Jones, founder of The Ludic Group and long-time lover of art, innovation and creative business strategy.

It profiles bottom-up communities like Instructibles.com who teach how to make welders from microwave ovens and East German scientists who mash-up physics, mathematics, sociology and technology over coffee.

While a Magician Works, the Mind Does the Tricks

2008-08-15T11:28:00.002-04:00

A painting from the 16th century, entitled "The Conjurer."
SOURCE: The Philadelphia Museum of Art/Art Resource

I often refer to scribing as a magic trick: We watch a human pull images from thin air, grabbing pictures and ideas from the vapor of conversation and giving them physical form.

This NY Times article gives insight on why the physical performance of illusion is so captivating and how the brain uses neural tricks to do this: approximating, cutting corners, instantaneously and subconsciously choosing what to “see” and what to let pass.

The original paper details the mental models that enable magic to be experienced, such as the the cognitive-neuroscience paradigms of change blindness in which people fail to notice that something is different from the way it was before.

clipped from www.nytimes.com

In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, a team of brain scientists and prominent magicians described how magic tricks, both simple and spectacular, take advantage of glitches in how the brain constructs a model of the outside world from moment to moment, or what we think of as objective reality.

For the scientists, Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, it raised hope that magic could accelerate research into perception. “Here’s this art form going back perhaps to ancient Egypt, and basically the neuroscience community had been unaware” of its direct application to the study of perception, Dr. Martinez-Conde said.

One theory of perception, for instance, holds that the brain builds representations of the world, moment to moment, using the senses to provide clues that are fleshed out into a mental picture based on experience and context.

I Want You to Want Me

2008-08-09T23:43:00.004-04:00

Massive touchscreens. Three-dimensional animation. Realistic interaction. Real-time synthesis of expressions of love, longing and loss by real humans looking for love in the ether of the net.

clipped from www.youtube.com

The interactive installation "I Want You To Want Me", by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition.

I Want You To Want Me explores the search for love and self in the world of online dating. It chronicles the world's long-term relationship with romance, across all ages, genders, and sexualities, using real data collected from Internet dating sites every few hours.

The piece is presented on a 56" high-resolution touch-screen, hanging vertically on the wall, and was installed at MoMA on February 14, 2008, Valentine's Day.

TED: Louise Leakey: Paleoanthropologist

2008-08-04T11:54:00.004-04:00

In 1999, I visited the Rift Valley in East Africa and sketched the Olduvai Gorge where Louis Leakey, his wife and family members scratched and dug out the earliest ancestors to humans. It is good to see that the family is carrying on the tradition of asking: "Who are we?"

This video is part lecture on the elements of anthropology, part family slideshow telling the story of a girl who grew up hunting bones with her mom and dad.

clipped from blog.ted.com

Louise Leakey is the third generation of her family to dig for humanity’s past in East Africa. In 2001, Leakey and her mother, Meave, found a previously unknown hominid, the 3.5-million-year-old Kenyanthropus platyops, at Lake Turkana -- the same region where her father, Richard, discovered the "Turkana Boy" fossil, and near Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge, where her grandparents, Louise and Mary Leakey, discovered the bones of Homo habilis.
In August 2007 Louise and Meave, both National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, dug up new H. habilis bones that may rewrite humanity's evolutionary timeline. We imagine that we evolved from apes in an orderly progression from ape to hominid to human, but the Leakeys' find suggests that different species of pre-humans actually lived side by side at the same time for almost half a million years.