I just drew this wee picture for you. Feel free to pass it around, download the high-rez version, print it out and hang it on your wall etc etc.
Yes, it’s a social object. Designed to continue a conversation that I already started online. [Yes, if you know somebody at Intel, please send this link along to them, thanks].
Whether you manufacture microprocessors, or draw cartoons like me, the question, “What is human potential?” never gets old.
Of course, you’ll never find the definitive answer. But you still have to ask the question.
And keep on asking it. Again and again.
Or else life dries up. And microprocessors and cartoons don’t get made.
A silicon chip as blank artist’s canvas, as it were.
i.e. What the processor can do is not that interesting. What THE USER can do with it, well, that’s far more interesting.
It’s not enough to just shout out at the top of your lungs, “More speed! More power! More performance!”
Because that is not fundamentally resonates with us as human beings.
Then again, yakking endlessly on about “Human Potential” also gets old really fast. You start sounding like one of those new-age gurus in no time. Yuck. Dreadful.
The simple fact is, as divine creatures as The Creator might have made us, we still have to live in the real world. We have the inner world to navigate (“Human Potential”, “Spirituality”) and the outer world (“Performance”, “Results”).
This intersection between our inner and outer selves is what it means to be human. Whether we’re talking about spiritual quests– finding God– or something more prosaic, like just trying to execute a marketing plan– Intel, in my case– the interesection remains. It never goes away.
And Thank Christ for that.
[PS: I’m hoping that people at Intel read this. If you know anybody there, please send them to this link, Thanks!]
[Alan Weinkranz- an old Texas connection of mine– and myself at CES last Saturday etc.]
“Intel Processors are smaller than a postage stamp. Intel has 80,000 employees. How do you fit so many people into an object so tiny? That’s what amazes me.”
I am writing this from home in Miami Beach, a day after returning from the Consumer Electronic Show in Vegas. Here are some notes:
2. Alan Weinkranz also made videos at CES. Here’s one he did of me. Excuse the sound quality etc:
3. My time at CES was spent pretty much exclusively at the Intel stand, signing prints. It was great. Just… great. I turned up in Vegas with over 500 of them. By day three we had run out. We took a lot of pictures– a couple of hundred of them. You can see them on Flickr here.
4. Intel was at CES, of course, to introduce their new 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processor. It’s smaller than a postage stamp. Intel has 80,000 employees. How do you fit so many people into an object so tiny? That’s what amazes me. That’s what I kept thinking about the whole time I was there. We live in incredible times…
5. Yes, I’m exhausted. Yes, I’m a wreck. Yes, it was worth it. Intel was an fabulous client. A special thanks to Marcia Hansen for getting me involved.
I’m here for CES, on behalf of my client, Intel, who are launching their new the 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ processor.
Like I said on my last post, I’m here to sign prints new Intel limited edition prints (suitable for framing yak, yak, yak). We editioned only 50 of each image for the show, and when they’re gone, they’re gone etc.
To kick things off, we’re going to offer you free CES swag! It’s not just a t-shirt, magnet, or coffee mug. It’s high quality artwork with key themes from Intel and CES. Check out the images we’ve got for you below. (click on any image for the full-size version).
Throughout CES this week, not only will we be showcasing the visibly smart technologies from Intel, we’re going to be working with GapingVoid, otherwise known as Hugh MacLeod. You probably already know Hugh. He’s famous for creating cartoons on the back of business cards. Plus, he authored Ignore Everybody, a book about creativity that was a Wall Street Journal best seller.
Hugh is going to be at the Intel booth several times each day creating live artwork and signing prints for you. If you’re at CES, stop by the Intel booth, look for Hugh, and you can get an autographed cartoon. If you miss him, or you’re just going digital this week, check back every day here at Inside Scoop for digital versions of Gapingvoid cartoons that speak to CES 2011 and Intel technology.
I’m excited about lot of things this week.
I’m excited to be at CES– I’ve never been before.
I’m excited to have Intel as a client. A huge company doing interesting, world-changing stuff from the very heart of Silicon Valley.
I’m excited about the idea I created for Intel- the idea of a processor being akin to a painter’s blank canvas (see the drawings above). I’m also excited about the line I wrote for them, “The processor is an expression of human potential”.
The hard part is being human. The hard part is being mortal.
[For more CES/Intel updates, keep checking back here, or over at Intel’s site at http://scoop.intel.com. I’m hoping to be blogging a lot in the next 72 hours etc. Thanks!]
So this was my idea for my client, Intel. You know, the big microprocessor company. “Silicon Chips” etc.
First I drew a wee doodle of a microprocessor, like the one above.
Then I added a tagline to the image. “The processor is an expression of human potential”.
This was my “blank canvas” to start with, as it were.
And then I started to fill said blank canvas with images. As demonstrated below:
The images themselves don’t matter per se. The fact they were drawn by me doesn’t matter, either. That’s not the point.
The point is, as always, human potential. And what Intel can do to help said human potential reveal itself.
“The processor is an expression of human potential”. Exactly.
Then I added the Intel logo and their tagline, “Visibly Smart”.
We printed these up as fine art prints. I’ll be signing them and handing them out at the Intel stand at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) this week in LAs Vegas.
Please check out scoop.intel.com for more info. I hope to see you there. Thanks.
In the old, pre-internet days, if you were a cartoonist like me and wanted to be successful, you pretty much had to be famous.
Not hugely famous necessarily, but somebody with a pretty major publishing gig. Like Peanuts, Doonesbury, Dilbert, Garfield or Bloom County, or some of The New Yorker heavyweights like Steinberg or Ronald Searle.
And those gigs were hard to come by. You needed a big time publication syndicate or media company to back you. And then the newspapers, the advertisers and the media landscape in general had to be on board as well.
And of course, all this required a VERY large audience. Millions of people, literally. Just so you could make an OK living.
As we all know, the more people you need to keep happy, the less likely that’s going to happen, or at least, the less you can control. Mass audiences are a fickle, unpredictable bunch. And they have a nasty habit of ignoring people like you completely, and going for people like Justin Bieber or Paris Hilton instead.
Which is why I never took this route. Too many variables I couldn’t control. And my work was never mainstream enough, anyway.
Thank God the internet came along and changed everything. Suddenly I found myself making a damn good living, without having all those mainstream hoops to jump through first. Just by doodling wee, non-mainstream cartoons all day, to what by old mainstream standards would be a TINY audience that I reach via this blog, Twitter and my newsletter.
This is made possible because the web, as we all know, is a SUPERB way to sell relatively high-end products. In my case, private, client-based commissions are worth THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS of times more than the advertising eyeballs that ultimately pay for the newspaper cartoonist’s mortgage. Of course they are. Not to mention, the commissions are fun and intellectually interesting to work on.
Which is why my advice for anyone trying to succeed on the web is, make the highest-end product you can, and then target the tiny handful of people– the microaudience- who are likely to buy it. Forget the masses. Targeting the latter is too much like trying to win the lottery– though great when it happens (however unlikely), there are just too many damn variables outside your control.
Ken Kaplan brought this to my attention: One of my little blue critters hanging on a wall inside Intel Corp.
“The processor is an expression of human potential.”
