Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

More my style this oddball surrealist painter John Wotipka is. I might go to the upcoming opening, but then do I really want to meet the weirdo who did these paintings? He could be onto something: rendering the mystery of insect thoughts, with the nanotechnologists studying how their tiny brains operate.

Web sightings found while admiring the fine paintings by Yoon Lee. One link took me to a calendar at Fecal Face.

Who would name a web site Fecal Face? Probably some wise guys in San Francisco, and this is an very unique and fun web experience indeed.

Fecal links you to further weirdness, such as humus which is an edgy online magazine composed in Flash. “Humus is a territory where images, creativity, thoughts and expressions have no border line or demarcation line. Feel free to contribute with: Graphic design, Motion design, Photography, Drawings, Illustrations, Poems.”

Back to Yoon Lee. I like the way she uses 3D software to simulate giant brush strokes. If only one could actually control that kind of gestural painting by hand. I’d have to see these up close and in person to further understand these, but they remind me of a controlled Jackson Pollock travelling through hyperspace.

On the subject of blending computer graphics and painterly techniques, I blogged about the tedious rotoscoping of A Scanner Darkly which has finally reached theatrical release, and not surprisingly received numerous “style over substance” reviews.

This Mister Borat dude is one crazy TV reporter man from Kazakhstan in this fall’s movie Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. See the funny video trailer online here.

It’s hard to know Sacha Baron Cohen‘s true identity: Borat, Ali G, or what? He also is the voice of King Julien in Madagascar and the upcoming Madagascar 2.

Back in the Reagan era, in order to reduce “Big Government” the President made a call for new volunteerism, and soon after, President George H. W. Bush advised America in his 1991 State of the Union Address:

“We can find meaning and reward by serving some purpose higher than ourselves — a shining purpose, the illumination of a thousand points of light.”

Not to be outdone by dad, playing the faithful optimist in his January 2002 State of the Union Address, President George W. Bush called on all Americans to dedicate at least two years—the equivalent of 4,000 hours—in service to their communities, their country and the world. Yeah right!

If it can be agreed that much of U.S. government and politics has been corporatized, then recent developments point out that corporations have taken on more of the tasks that governments are failing at. Most people are working hard to make ends meet, but those who have succeeded at the capitalist game realize that it’s no fun being rich if the world is rapidly filling up with poverty, disease and weapons. They are successful thinkers and doers, who are on the forefront of new social activism and venture philanthropy.

For example, Ben & Jerry’s ice cream is kicking off a national Federal Budget Priorities Campaign calling on Americans to reconsider spending priorities. The goal is to heighten awareness of the billions of dollars the Pentagon spends on nuclear weapons vs. a shortfall of spending on basic unmet needs of children.

Then of course there are the billion points of light emanating from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with the added 31 billion dollars recently committed to the foundation by their friend, legendary investor Warren Buffett.

Other successful investors are giving back and working towards positive change, such as George Soros Open Society Institute and James Simons’ Math For America.

Jeff Skoll made millions as the first President of eBay, and is founder and CEO of Participant Productions using the power of media for social change. A recent feature film release produced by Participant is Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which is a tremendous statement of scientific concern for the future of planet Earth.

Craigslist.org is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and helps to organize non-profit leadership through the Craigslist Foundation and their Bootcamp programs.

For additional information, the American Institute of Philanthropy has an online ratings list of many top charitable organizations, their categories and how to contact them.

ClassWar 1

Originally uploaded by Greg Palast.

Why does Yahoo Finance insist on publishing Robin Leach type articles about lifestyles of the rich and famous, and have the audacity to call these people, the other half? Come on now, it’s the upper crust of 5% they are flaunting in the rest of our faces. If you really care, then that is sad, since you probably also wish you could have attended Ken Lay’s funeral with all the trimmings.

Viewing activity on TheBroth.com is sort of like watching a bunch of ants moving grains of sand… are they intelligent ants who will next create a Tibetan sand painting? Check it out and see what they are up to. The site appears to be new as of around May 2006, so you can get involved and make an early impact. I just “wasted” about 30 minutes there… must get away!

Later that day…

In a nice follow up to the Timothy Leary theme… Neuroscientists Probe Psychedelic Psilocybin.

Neuroscientist Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues tested the effects of psilocybin–a drug derived from certain mushrooms that appears to mimic the effects of serotonin in the brain–on 36 middle-aged Americans who had never tried psychedelics before.

More news coverage about the psilocybin research.

A recent New Yorker book review of Robert Greenfield‘s biography of Timothy Leary, aptly titled, Timothy Leary: A Biography, got me thinking about when I saw Leary speak at a computer graphics conference.

SIGGRAPH 1990 could have been virtually anywhere. As the primary conference for computer graphics and interactive techniques, since its first meeting in Boulder, CO, 1974, it’s a pixel pow-wow, a gathering of minds comparing their renderings and notes. My first SIGGRAPH was 1983 in Detroit, not long after the movie TRON was released. I had worked in traditional animation in the 70’s with Steven Lisberger and Eric Ladd in Boston. Taking breaks from tedious hand rendered in-betweening, inking and painting chores, we wondered when computers might come to our rescue. SIGGRAPH was the tribe with the best possible solutions.

So, SIGGRAPH90 was pretty amazing, because computer graphics had advanced into Hollywood’s visual effects, and the world was buzzing about the potential of a big new mind blowing idea: Virtual Reality. VR promised to take elements of what SIGGRAPH CSE’s did best: 3D graphics and intractivity, and enable “realities built for two.” But the truly amazing part was a panel session including Timothy Leary, “Hip, Hype and Hope: The Three Faces of Virtual Worlds.” This link provides a PDF of the entire transcript and some slides from that exciting event.

Even though Timothy Leary had been far ahead of the curve in his explorations of expanded consciousness through LSD, it was refreshing to me as a graphic designer and devotee of Marshall McLuhan to hear Leary speak this way…

“I’d like to make a comment about SIGGRAPH. I’ve not been a regular visitor to these conferences. To tell you the truth, I’m such a slow learner, it took me a long time to figure out that graphics are the key to the whole communications business. The key to the new global language.

Then I recalled the advice of a great prophet who had been babbling to me for years about graphics! Graphics! Graphics!

I am talking about Ted Nelson who patiently tutored me about the importance of eye-balling and rendering and optical realities. I thank you for that, Ted.

During that talk, Leary nearly coined the name iPod:

“But the eye is the pod of the naked brain. It’s spooky when you think of it. We walk around with our moist binocular brains bulging out of our faces.”

Because Leary was not a computer graphics geek or a VR advocate, he added a charming simplicity and unpretentiousness to the panel of sophisticates. Professional turf wars arose during the Q & A session, when Myron Kruger and one of his buddies pitched their pioneering ownership of VR under the name artificial reality. The incident is included in the panel PDF transcription, and is one of those cases of a disgruntled creative coming to grips with what might be called traction. Myron’s term artificial reality did not catch on, and virtual reality somehow captured the zeitgeist of the idea. Imagine the frustration of someone claiming to have invented Google 15 years ago, but gave it an unattractive name like fistulinks or altavista. Ew!

The New Yorker article is an excellent read, and is a fine reminder of Leary’s trippy times, in which he hoped to solve the world’s problems by coaxing our leaders to drop acid. Perhaps today they could fight out their conflicts through a VR interface into a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Game (MMORPG). Far out man!

Additional related readings and listenings:
Erowid Timothy Leary Vault
A recent article by Jaron Lanier
The RU Sirius Show, If You Meet Timothy Leary by the Side of the Road
Timothy Leary: A Biography