Oddly enough, artists. I'm more interested in making and doing things than having things. That's how I define the good life. But most of my projects are more than one person alone can do and so I need illustration to share these ideas and get them off the ground because it's become impossible to communicate with others using the written word. You can't put more text than a tweet in front of people now without them reacting like a fussy child before a plate of asparagus. Want to crowdfund or crowdsource anything? You have to make a video and an elaborate visual presentation. Want to communicate any moderately sophisticated idea? It must now be in comic book or white-board animation form. No pictures, no project. The pros are even worse than the public, always using time as an excuse for intellectual laziness. I'm surprised there isn't already an industry for executive comic books. And, to make matters worse, our culture has conditioned people to equate credibility and plausibility with production value. If images look amateurish, the concept is treated as such. If images are slick enough, you can sell people the most blatantly physics-defying nonsense. Hollywood, with its compulsive antiscience and dystopianism, dominates the cultural discourse on the future simply because no one else can get the art.

I need to find a true collaborator with traditional illustration, storyboard, and/or industrial design skills and a passion for science, technology, futurism, and Maker/Open Tech/P2P culture who can keep up with someone who writes at a college level. That's probably impossible. There aren't many artists in the world with such interests and probably fewer still who have any interest in collaborating with others. That's why traditional illustration is, ironically, such a dying art in the first place. Few still understand it as a fundamental medium of communication. Style is the only content now. Since it was obsolesced for ad-copy by photography, it's been relegated to a few niches like comics and children's books. But there are many people in my predicament now that the written word is dying for mainstream communication. Scientists, futurists, urbanists, new economists, social entrepreneurs, makers, inventors, storytellers. There's a hell of a lot of stuff you can't photograph and still must communicate visually. To paraphrase Terence McKenna, a community can only do what it has the language to describe and that language is being driven toward the visual. But looking at the 'market' it would seem there's a much greater demand for My Little Pony porn...

It seems my only hope is to wait for coming conversationally driven procedural modeling software like that depicted in the film S1mOne. I think one of the overlooked potential impacts of artificial intelligence may be an explosion in pent-up human creativity suppressed by today's visual communication bottleneck.