Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

A truly moving and inspiring speech, and fun too.

SvmNDym6CvQ

This video tune was performed at the first 2007 TechCrunch Crunchies: “The 2007 Crunchies is our first annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.”

I can now say that I have worked at two Silicon Valley start-ups and witnessed the hype and the reality. It is a tough way to prototype and serendipity should never be expected.

The Internet and its millions of searching eyeballs is full of surprises. Today I received an e-mail from a publisher requesting permission to use an image Social Networking developed for this blog in a previous article, Hobnobbery 3.0.

My image will appear in their book, The Emergence of the Relationship Economy. The image (left) shows up on Google “social networking” image searches, and it’s an indicator of a visual theme enjoying some success. They also pitched the idea of using a still from one of my recent eyeball animations to illustrate the not so new concept of “owning eyeballs”, as in media marketing. Get their attention, grab their eyeballs, and then subject them to advertisements, be it television or computers.

So, who knows? Many of my opportunities spring out of the Internet, whether it is responding to an ad on craigslist.org, posting a resume online, or someone finding me and my work on my web site. Last April I received an inquiry about my animation of the five senses of the human body. This led to a six month production of a new and improved set of narrated animated 3D sequences, “The 3D World of the Five Senses”, to be published by Roadkill Science, a division of Teachers Discovery. Depending upon the success of this first venture with Roadkill, there may be more titles to come.

Meanwhile, despite all the social networking via the Internet, there’s nothing better than real, live parties. This is the end of the year holiday party season, so get out there and meet people and make new friends eyeball to eyeball.

‘Tis the Season for gift giving, and perhaps a little bit of global, spiritual consciousness in the positive direction. The following is a list of books and DVDs designed to enlighten your friends and family, an update of the list posted well over a year ago on this blog, Education In Terrorism.

It’s been a good year. Thank you to everybody who’s been nice to me…

and for Christmas I’d like a Taser.

What is art? What is fine art? Are the visual fine arts at opposition with visualization? If a picture communicates, provides information, tells too much of a story, is to be cast out from the fine art museum?

This argument is not new to the modern world, and covered well by blogger David Apatoff’s Fine Art vs. Art That’s Mighty Fine. Another excellent analytical article by Donald Pittenger compares the commercial illustration work of N.C. Wyeth with his fine art paintings. This article explains why I tend to imagine myself someday painting fine art pictures in the far away Elsyian Fields of retirement.

Recently when exploring UC Berkeley’s MFA program I was advised by one of their faculty members that my work in medical illustration was too much in the visualization category of art, and that I would have to undergo a “transformation” to fit into Cal’s MFA in Art Practice program. Since I believe I have already achieved a high level of practical art practice, I take no interest in this transformation. Imagine the remolding of an artist into the university’s image. Would I emerge as a UC Berkeley artistic Frankenstein?

Agreeably, my medical animation is not fine art, and yet I see no strict borders, and I am open to exploring and experimenting with a wide range of visual styles and techniques. Picture a lordly professor advising a young Leonardo da Vinci, “Stick with those religious portraits, and forget about those anatomy drawings. Take it from me kid, there’s more money in the Church anyway.”

Back to illustration, take for example The New Yorker’s Covers. You will find an excellent mixture of medium and message. I tend to enjoy this kind of picture making, going back to my early appreciation of the art of Mad magazine. The blog article, Illustration is to Fine Art as Poetry is to Prayer provides additional illumination on this topic.

I recall seeing a retrospective exhibition of the works of “bad boy painter” Peter Saul at the Madison, WI Art Center’s Swen Parson Gallery. Shocking and perhaps lacking the craftsmanship required to be a professional illustrator, and yet free and radical. Saul is one of a handful of modern pop art painters whom I admire for their talent for merging the editorial cartoon into fine art painting (George Bush at Abu Ghraib by Peter Saul below).

Enough of this topic for now. I have commercial art to make!

With the lunatics still running the asylum, the film No End In Sight documents the serious missteps of how we have become mired in this long, hard slog of a mess in Iraq.

Le Roi de CÅ“ur the French anti-war film, named The King of Hearts in the USA, played for five years at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a short walk from where I lived, and it was a cheerful play on how much fun it might be if the lunatics were released from an asylum to run a small village while World War One combat raged elsewhere in the countryside.

If only No End In Sight could be a light-hearted romantic comedy, but it is real, and the poor deciders for many Americans' futures are stubbornly still at work. Heaven help us all.

Here is an experiment using Slide to build a slideshow from my Photoshop collages posted on this blog.