The Monastic Help Desk
/After a year of working on MissingLink with GradientLabs, and trying to introduce it to the larger graphics and facilitation world, I identify with this Old School Brother of the Monastic Help Desk.
[Thanks to Mark Frisse]
The Biggest Valentine: Salvation Mountain
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This pretty much sums up what I plan on doing for my retirement: Making a big, crazy colorful mountain in the middle of nowhere.
Salvation Mountain was created by Leonard Knight, if you would like to learn more go to www.roadsideamerica.com/.
In the mid-1980s, Leonard Knight, with the aim of spreading God's word, began building a hot air balloon from bed sheets. In bold letters, he painted “God is Love” on the balloon’s face. He planned to float it high above the earth where all could see its message. Attempts to get the balloon airborne failed, however, and Knight was left in the Southern California desert with a pile of rotting linen. It was this aborted mission that led Knight to his eventual calling, the 20-year construction of Salvation Mountain. Today, Knight’s mountain is a colorful array on a neutral canvas. Built of adobe and covered in over 100,000 gallons of donated paint, Salvation Mountain forms part of the cultural landscape.
See more at PBS Travelogue.
Chimps in Thailand
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Sita Magnuson sends us greetings (and some stellar pics!) from her scribing gig in Thailand.
Check out some of her fun and exotic photos.
FLICKR SET: http://flickr.com/photos/hoodsie/sets/72157594522832680/
SLIDESHOW: http://flickr.com/photos/hoodsie/sets/72157594522832680/show/
Digital Anthropology's Web 2.0
/As graphic facilitators, the tools that allow us to synthesize ideas into images--whether static or dynamic--are expanding exponentially.
In this video thought piece hosted on YouTube, Kansas State Anthropology professor Michael Welsch uses the simple, cheap digital tools at hand to weave an engaging narrative of the birth of Web 2.0.[ via Jarrell McAlister ]
Welsch expresses the miracle of that birth, writing: "We're teaching the machine, and the machine is us. Time to rethink the world. The network is the machine; the machine is us."Digital Ethnography is a working group of Kansas State University students and facultydedicated to exploring and extending the possibilities of digital
ethnography.
at Kansas State University to examine the impacts of digital technology
on human interaction.
The Future Perfect Sense
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My New Year's resolution is this: To be more observant.
Recently, my family downshifted from living in a city neighborhood behind two national sports team stadiums (oh, the fireworks--they never ceased!) to living in a little house on a 23-acre farm in rural Tennessee.
Now, I find myself walking and listening again in a way that had been degraded by the rhythm of taxi-airport-work-airport-taxi-home. This morning as I walked along a muddy gravel road, instead of the dull thuds of a souped up Lincoln Navigator thumping Hip Hop beats, I heard what turned out to be two teenage boys galloping up the ridge on horseback.
Jan Chip is an extreme observer. As Principal Researcher in the Mobile HCI Group at Nokia Research, Jan divides his time between running user studies and developing new applications, services and products. As he writes, "If I do my job right, you'll be using the product 3 to 15 years from now."
In the majority of culture that his team studied, three objects were considered essential across all participants, cultures and genders were keys, money and mobile phone.
(Read Jan's essay Why We Carry Mobile Phones). 
But his job (and personal obsession) is observing The Now through the eyes of an ethnologist. Whether beer bottles discarded at Tibetan holy sites, playfully designed rat traps in Asian airports, or the menu of a Chinese "greasy spoon" (rats again!), or international rubbish collection norms, Jan's eye catches the easy-to-miss details and strings them into deep cultural patterns.
His blog, Future Perfect, is inspired by the traveling research required by his day job, but Jan admits, "The material that you see on this site is what I do in my spare time - the stuff that inspires or challenges me, helps me understand how the future might turn out."
Make Mag's EduVideos
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Make Magazine brings you weekend projects of stuff you can make at home.
I found this too late for the holidays, but this video demonstrates three techniques for creating small holiday cards: aluminum foil, woodblock prints and writing with light!
[via Blip.tv]
Rushkoff's Reality Tunnel
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This winter, Doug Rushkoff experienced a series of changes, confrontations and revelations that refocused his understanding of "value".
As a media critic and author, he has been writing books for 15 years and has been hosting an online community of one sort or another for nearly as long.
In a short period of time, Rushkoff was challenged to a duel by a member of the “psychedelic elite” and was shaken to learn that one of his heroes of the 60s, Robert Anton Wilson, author of Cosmic Trigger and Prometheus Rising, was near death and near bankruptcy.
In his article, The Light at the End of the Reality Tunnel, in Arthur Magazine, you can read Doug's reflections on the free market ecology based on reputation, the danger of reality tunnels, the power of thoughts, and the value of communities over heroes.
Good News from Kabul!
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(From our friend, world-record holder and former Alphachimp intern, the Jolly Juggler himself: Zach Warren)
The children in Kabul want to wish you Merry Christmas themselves (see video).
A special thanks goes to Jay Cole and the West Virginia Dept. of Education, and to all the individuals whose donations have helped build a new juggling gym for children at the circus in Kabul. The plexiglass structure allows children to play in the light, even during the darkest times of the year.
If you are planning your charitable giving for 2007, please consider a gift to help the MMCC children. I'm making a donation too. Tax-deductible contributions can be made online.
Remembering the blessings of 2006, and wishing you the best for 2007!!
(Click here to listen to a podcast an interview with Zach on his experiences working with the Mini Mobile Children's Circus in Afghanistan.)
Pantone Pen Print
/[submitted by Jim Nuttle in DC]
Daniel Eatock sets his latest pen print experiment in the second ALSO* commission of The Aram Gallery.
Curator Daniel Charny describes the work:
Eatock’s predictive construct removes the artist’s hand from the pen, reverses the role of the paper, and allows its characteristics and positioning to become the most influential aspect of the work. Balanced on their nibs each of a set of 288 felt tip pens releases ink that expands into the layers of a ream of paper, making each layer of this multi-print different. This predicted variety is translated into a gambling tension for the consumer that chooses to purchase an unknown result on an unseen layer.
Dimensions: SRA1 640 x 900mm
Edition Size: 73 original prints
– One complete set of Letraset TRIA Pantone markers
– arranged in the colour spectrum
– left for one month
– resting on their nibs
– on a stack of 500 SRA1 sheets
– 70gsm uncoated white paper
The edition number was determined by the number of sheets the ink bled through from the possible 500.
The numbering of each sheet corresponds to the position it was within the stack and also determined its value.
The final sheet the ink reached, (furthest from the top) was numbered 1 / 73 and valued at £1, the one above numbered 2 / 73 and valued at £2 etc. The top sheet (the sheet the pens rested on) was numbered 73 / 73 and valued at £73 [SOLD OUT!]
