Archive for September, 2011
September 29, 2011
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As followers of my Twitter stream will know, last week I was in Toronto, live-cartooning at Innotribe 2011.
Innotribe happens every year at Sibos, the ENORMOUS international banking and financial conference put together by SWIFT. Chris Skinner wrote a nice overview here, with the gapingvoid photstream over here.
My job was to “live-toon” drawings over the four day event, trying to take it all in while cranking out drawings at the same time, not unlike what I did recently at TED Global in Edinburgh.
The two big themes I took away from the event were “Big Data” and “Social Data”…
There was a guy at the event from McKinsey, towing his employer’s party line, namely, that Big Data is the next frontier of innovation, competition and productivity.
In other words, where is most of the wealth in the next fifty years going to be made? In the Big Data universe.
And what do banks do best? Handle vast oceans of Big Data on a daily basis, of course.
Pinky! Are you thinking what I’m thinking??!!
So, the future of banking will evolve, depending on how the movement of Big Data evolves… what we see as data.
And the people who can keep ahead of the curve will make a killing, of course they will.
This also falls into the interest sphere of Rackspace. They, and their competitors (Amazon, Microsoft, Google etc etc) are busy building all those new server farms for a reason.
Besides the reams and reams of new stuff to think about, I was delighted to see some of my old friends were attending Innotribe as well– Doc Searls, Stowe Boyd, Sean Park etc. Seriously smart people with interesting things to say.
On my last day there, I was talking to somebody about JUST how much more INTERESTING the Internet has made the world, for this cartoonist and a lot of friends of mine. Back when I was just a pup, the most interesting thing that could happen to a cartoonist would be, say, a gig at The New Yorker. Now here I am, hanging out with bankers, talking about Big Data, and drawing cartoons about it.
That’s what gapingvoid’s corporate work is always about– not to make people laugh per se, not for mere entertainment and decoration, but to start conversations. To disrupt. To move ideas forward. Even with a subject as “niche” as Big Data or whatever.
As I’ve always believed; Cartoons are one of the most efficient means of communication on earth. They have the power to transform businesses so elegantly, that ideally, the job is done before anyone even realizes. Rock on.
September 21, 2011
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This was fun: Last week we all attended TEDx Miami. It was held at the shiny new Frank Ghery designed, New World Symphony building, just behind Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. The TED folks were kind enough to invite us along to display the Dewar’s drawings I did at TED Global in Edinburgh, back in July. These were original drawings that I did in marker. The images were presented in clean white frames to fit the venue.
I was a little anxious going into the event because I couldn’t be certain whether what resonated with a largely non-American crowd in Edinburgh, would also work in Miami. Miami is, well, at totally different place. The good news is that the work was well received, and our sponsors, Dewars, were happy. We are told that the work is now going to be installed in the new Bacardi HQ in Coral Gables.
After the talks, people were offered cocktails made of Dewars, Grey Goose or wine. As I looked around, I was surprised to see how many women were drinking scotch. That, and a conversation with our friend, Maria at the event reminded me of her comments when we posted about the scotch market a few weeks back. The surprising news from that post and subsequent exchange was that chicks love scotch. Note to Dewars: Instead of trying to get the guys to switch from another brand, it might be easier to grow your market by appealing to women. Just a thought. Rock on!
September 20, 2011
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It’s always interesting to expand frontiers. The kind folks at SWIFT invited me to draw at their teeming SIBOS conference this week in Toronto. SWIFT has an amazingly interesting business. They have a network of data centers that manage secure messages between 9,500 member banks. These messages transfer 2 TRILLION dollars a day between members. As you can imagine, there are brilliant speakers talking about ‘Big Data’, ‘Digital Identity’, ‘New Economies’, ‘The Future of Money’, etc. Not my usual subject matter, so all very fascinating. Cartoons about banking. Whodathunk? We’ll start posting them tomorrow.
September 14, 2011
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[Buy the print here etc.]
This is a poster I did for Prepara, the cooking utensil maker. They’re a client of my client, Rackspace. Basically, Rackspace was commissioning me to create a little goodwill gesture, a little social object for one of their favorite customers etc.
I was trying to capture Prepara’s schtick in a single drawing. I follow the art gallery scene, I follow the industrial design scene. Pound for pound, the latter inspires me more often, more consistently. The combination of love and utility is a powerful one. Combined with something so basic and primal as eating, even more so.
[The “Commission Hugh” page etc.]
September 12, 2011
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Hewlett Packard is kicking off its cybersecurity conference today, HP Protect 2011, and they kindly hired gapingvoid to design some posters for them.
Basically, I wanted to draw something kinda cool n’ fun, something that computer security people wouldn’t mind taking back home and hanging on their office walls.
To the uneducated, the cartoon might seem trivial, but actually, it’s not. Like Lennie Bruce famously said, “Humor is serious business”.
Fred Wilson is right, we are indeed in the middle of a major, long-term, global trasformation, and Obama (or anybody else who wants his job) is NOT, REPEAT NOT going to save us.
So what IS going to save us? The SAME DAMN THING that has ALWAYS saved us:
That’s right. The Play Ethic. Creativity. All that good stuff Sir Ken talks about. All that good stuff that gapingvoid hopefully represents.
All serious work begins with serious play first. AND NOT the night before, but FIRST thing in the morning.You think Jony Ives works for a living? Hell, no, he plays for a living. So do I. So do my friends, Charles Hope, Seth Godin and others like us.
And YES, you can bring that sense of play anywhere– to a conference on cybersecurity, for example. Don’t get me wrong; cybersecurity is also serious business. Our collective safety and our livelihoods as citizens depend on it, and companies like HP work to help protect our culture’s critical infrastructure systems and generally keep us out of trouble.
It’s a nasty, dangerous world out there, after all…
That being said, security nerds are also people who like to play and get paid for it, more than most. They like to have FUN, at conferences and anywhere else, of course they do. Who says the good guys cannot be sweaty and unshaven? News to me. To PLAY means to HACK something. Hacking is INHERENTLY playful. Of course it frickin’ is.
[Note to non-Nerds: the reason that nerds don’t spend a lot of time on their personal appearance is because they’d rather spend their brief time here on Earth, working on something that actually matters to them, not spend it on something that matters to the usual crowd of clueless, superficial, hipster knuckleheads.]
Thanks to Hewlett Packard for giving gapingvoid the opportunity to live in a place it hasn’t yet i.e. the complex and mysterious world of cybersecurity i.e. the world where the hackers live and thrive happily. It’s good to know that some of them are on our side. So far, it’s been a blast. Rock on.
[Bonus Link: The ever-brilliant Ben Hammersley gave a great talk to a bunch of high-level UK cybersecurity nerds recently. A wonderful read.]
[The “Hire Hugh” page etc.]
September 10, 2011
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Voice Of God [Buy the print here etc.]
As an artist, you’re always asking yourself, well, what’s the point?
Decoration? Illustration?
No, it’s something deeper… even if that deeper thing evades us, the VAST majority of the time.
I drew this cartoon to remind me, us, of that deeper thing. Why, as artists, we choose to spend our brief time here on earth.
Exactly.
[This cartoon was sent out yesterday in the newsletter etc…]
September 9, 2011
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Very cool– Socialfresh have a new t-shirt out, based on the cartoon I drew for them recently.
No, sorry, I don’t have any, either to sell or to give away. I believe you have to attend one of their events to get one…
Re. The idea for the cartoon: Inspiration is not something you freebase or download or whatever. It’s something you DO, it’s something you MAKE, it’s something you CREATE.
i.e. Inspiration first requires work on your part. Lots of it.
And no, it’s NOT worth it. Not worth it AT ALL. Not one iota.
Until, of course, it is…
Rock on.
[The “Hire Hugh” page etc.]
September 1, 2011
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[Screenshot of the Rackspace client page etc.]
Now this is exciting: Dedicated gapingvoid client pages.
Here’s the first one: For my favorite Texan client, Rackspace. All the cartoons I’ve done for them on a single page, easy to find at the URL rackspace.gapingvoid.com.
AND… they’re all in high-rez. WHICH MEANS, anybody at Rackspace (or anybody somehwere else), can click on the image, download the high-rez version, print it out and stick it on the wall of their cubicle or office or door or wherever.
Instant cube grenades. Exactly.
And we’ll soon be doing likewise for gapingvoid’s other clients: HP, Dewar’s Whisky, Intel etc etc.
Like I said a few days ago, my work doesn’t belong in art galleries, it belongs in office cubicles. And this makes the latter REALLY easy for people. Sure, if they’d rather have a signed print that cost money, they can do that easily enough, as well… but FREE has its place, too.
Early on, we (i.e. the entire gapingvoid team– Me, Jason, Laura, Sam etc) noticed that a business is only as good as the conversations it has with people, both inside and outside the organization [i.e. classic Cluetrain parlance].
Ergo, that means there MUST be a market for art i.e. social objects that could start these right kinds of conversation. Quod Erat Demostrandum.
To us, this wasn’t rocket science, this was ALL common sense. And so we built a business around it…
So now the next question is, of course, how are YOUR conversations coming along? How can they be improved? CAN they actually be improved? Serious question.
