Mondolithic Studios

I just got off the phone with a fellow by the name of Rod Rigole – a lawyer for Blizzard Entertainment.

In a nutshell, Blizzard considers the paintings an infringment of thier intellectual property, so we have pulled them from the site. Another interesting point brought up by Rod was that even if we do not sell the portraits, they consider keeping them in a professional gallery a violation of IP as we are ‘technically’ using thier IP to promote our commercial ventures.

Taking commissions for fine art portraits of online characters seemed like a harmless AND practical way to help ’bankroll’ the Avatar project and the ’stop’ request came as a bit of a surprise. Looking back now, I am kind of surprised that I was surprised by this turn of events. The WOW pieces were intended as ’a portion’ of an on going series of paintings on this subject.

While I personally have significant issues with thier legal policy in the context of our Avatar series from a fine art/editorial perspective - Rod’s courteous and professional manner definately influenced my decision to accomodate the request in an equally friendly and professional manner. The request was a huge disappointment, but Chris and I do not feel that this turn of events will adversly affect the long term goals of our project.

 The Avatar gallery will hopefully be back up in the next month or two when we have completed the first couple of non-WOW portrait pieces currently in progress.

The universe does not look right. That may seem like a strange thing to say, given that cosmologists have very little standard for comparison. How do we know what the universe is supposed to look like? Nevertheless, over the years we have developed a strong intuition for what counts as “natural”—and the universe we see does not qualify.

Make no mistake: cosmologists have put together an incredibly successful picture of what the universe is made of and how it has evolved. Some 14 billion years ago the cosmos was hotter and denser than the interior of a star, and since then it has been cooling off and thinning out as the fabric of space expands. This picture accounts for just about every observation we have made, but a number of unusual features, especially in the early universe, suggest that there is more to the story than we understand.

Among the unnatural aspects of the universe, one stands out: time asymmetry. The microscopic laws of physics that underlie the behavior of the universe do not distinguish between past and future, yet the early universe—hot, dense, homogeneous—is completely different from today’s—cool, dilute, lumpy. The universe started off orderly and has been getting increasingly disorderly ever since. The asymmetry of time, the arrow that points from past to future, plays an unmistakable role in our everyday lives: it accounts for why we cannot turn an omelet into an egg, why ice cubes never spontaneously unmelt in a glass of water, and why we remember the past but not the future. And the origin of the asymmetry we experience can be traced all the way back to the orderliness of the universe near the big bang. Every time you break an egg, you are doing observational cosmology.

The arrow of time is arguably the most blatant feature of the universe that cosmologists are currently at an utter loss to explain. Increasingly, however, this puzzle about the universe we observe hints at the existence of a much larger spacetime we do not observe. It adds support to the notion that we are part of a multiverse whose dynamics help to explain the seemingly unnatural features of our local vicinity.

To continue reading the rest of this article – pop over to Scientific American Magazine. 

Todays illustration was commissioned by Scientific American Magazine.

Who needs a Wii when you have a monkey….

The quarter page info-graphic shown on the right was commissioned by Focus Magazine, Italy to accompany a brief article about a researcher using a monkey’s brain waves to control a robot.

The 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity.

She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan.

It was the first time that brain signals had been used to make a robot walk, said Dr. Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University whose laboratory designed and carried out the experiment.

These experiments, Dr. Nicolelis said, are the first steps toward a brain machine interface that might permit paralyzed people to walk by directing devices with their thoughts. Electrodes in the person’s brain would send signals to a device worn on the hip, like a cell phone or pager, that would relay those signals to a pair of braces, a kind of external skeleton, worn on the legs.

“When that person thinks about walking,” he said, “walking happens.”

‘Hollow Earth’ was a fun assignment to work on despite the crazy quick turnaround time – as always seems to be the case in our industry . This 2 page opening spread was commissioned by Focus Magazine for an article on the various ’Hollow Earth’ Theories.

Hollow Earth is a belief that the planet Earth has a hollow interior and, possibly, a habitable inner surface. The hypothesis of a Hollow Earth has long been contradicted by overwhelming evidence as well as by the modern understanding of planet formation, and the scientific community now dismisses the notion as pseudoscience.

An early twentieth-century proponent of a hollow Earth, William Reed, wrote Phantom of the Poles in 1906. He propounded the idea of a hollow Earth, but without interior shells or inner sun.

Marshall Gardner wrote A Journey to the Earth’s Interior in 1913 and an expanded edition in 1920. He placed an interior sun in the hollow Earth. He even built a working model of the hollow Earth and patented it (#1096102). Gardner made no mention of Reed, but did take Symmes to task for his ideas. In the same time Vladimir Obruchev wrote a fiction novel Plutonia, where the hollow Earth’s interior possessed one inner (central) sun and was inhabited by prehistoric species. The interior was connected with the surface by a hole in the Arctic.

Other writers have proposed that “ascended masters” of esoteric wisdom inhabit subterranean caverns or a hollow Earth. Antarctica, the North Pole, Tibet, Peru, and Mount Shasta in California, USA, have all had their advocates as the locations of entrances to a subterranean realm referred to as Agarttha, with some even advancing the theory that UFOs have their homeland in these places.

A book allegedly by a “Dr.Raymond Bernard” which appeared in 1969, The Hollow Earth, exemplifies this idea. The book rehashes Reed and Gardner’s ideas and ignores Symmes. Bernard also adds his own ideas: UFOs come from the interior, the Ring Nebula proves the existence of hollow worlds, etc. An article by Martin Gardner revealed that Dr.Walter Siegmeister used the pseudonym `Bernard’, but not until the publishing of Walter Kafton-Minkel’s Subterranean Worlds: 100,000 years of dragons, dwarfs, the dead, lost races & UFOs from inside the Earth, in 1989, did the full story of Bernard/Siegmeister become well known.

The pages of the science fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories promoted one such idea from 1945 to 1949 as “the Shaver Mystery”. The magazine’s editor, Ray Palmer, ran a series of stories by Richard Sharpe Shaver supposedly claimed as factual, though presented in the context of fiction. Shaver claimed that a superior pre-historic race had built a honeycomb of caves in the Earth, and that their degenerate descendants, known as “Dero”, live there still, using the fantastic machines abandoned by the ancient races to torment those of us living on the surface. As one characteristic of this torment, Shaver described “voices” that purportedly came from no explainable source. Thousands of readers wrote to affirm that they, too, had heard the fiendish voices from inside the Earth.

Fantastic stories (supposedly believed as factual within fringe circles) have also circulated that Adolf Hitler and some of his followers escaped to hollow lands within the Earth after World War II via an entrance in Antarctica. [Courtesy Wikipedia]

This illustration was part of The World Without Us series and was also featured just before we took down the site in January.

‘Warsaw Without Us’ was a cover piece commissioned by Focus Magazine in Poland, and represents YET another installment in our global disaster series.

You can check out more of our pieces at writer Alan Weisman’s site ‘A World Without Us’. The set of TWWU illustrations should be up in the next day or two in the Science + Nature section of the gallery.

‘The World Without Us’ is a New Times Best Seller and was voted Time Magazines #1 Non-fiction book of 2007. TWWU is published by Holtzbrinck Publishing, NY and is available at your favourite bookstore.

This illustration was part of The World Without Us series and was featured just before we took down the site in January.

It was commissioned by El Mundo/Expresso Magazine in Portugal and represents another installment in our global disaster series.

You can check out more of our pieces at writer Alan Weisman’s site ‘A World Without Us’.

‘The World Without Us’ is a New Times Best Seller and was voted Time Magazines #1 Non-fiction book of 2007. TWWU is published by Holtzbrinck Publishing, NY and is available at your favourite bookstore.

Full page illustration for an article on the people that make up the supernet and are the driving force behind social and technical development.

The article is not so much about the individuals as it is a study of how these individuals, using various wired technology (cell phones, Pdas, laptops and home computers) link to create a larger entity - a single super organism.

Have no fear….. Netman 2.0 is here….  Ooooooooooooooo….

This illustration was published February 2008 as a full page opener for New Scientist Magazine in London. Like the cover art featured in an earlier post, the article in question deals with new theorys on the concept of time travel and just how far back we can theoretically travel – which would only be the exact time at which the time machine was created.

To sum it up simply, if time travel does become possible, 2008 may be the destination of choice. New Scientist writer Michael Brooks gets ready to receive visitors from the future.

Zip on over to New Scientist to check out the archives for this fascinating article…. and subscribe!

The Traveller v2 - was a commission that was originally published on the cover of Scientific American for a special issue on  the future of physics. The second itteration shown here, is Oil on Canvas and is a variation on the original digital illustration.

For any inquiries regarding the purchase of our fine art or prints, you can contact me, Kenn, directly via kennbATmondolithic.com

We are also making slow progress on the gallery but I am still hoping to have the bulk of the material up by the end of the month.

The illustration on the right was commissed by Pearson Publishing to accompany a short story by C. J. Cherryh.

This piece, one of 7, represents the final ‘one-way’ time gate at the end of the universe, beyond which remains a mystery to the well-heeled time travellers of the story.  “The Threads of Time” revisits the Time Gates introduced in Cherryh’s 1976 novel Gate of Ivrel.

C. J. Cherryh is best known for her science fiction and fantasy novels. “Cassandra” won her a Hugo award, was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story and the Locus Award for best short story, and in 1999 was named as one of Locus Magazine’s 50 best science fiction short stories of all time. Additionally, “The Scapegoat” was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novella and “Gwydion and the Dragon” was nominated for the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella.

‘courtesy wikipedia’