Phylomon: The Game of Life

Pokemon meets Mother Earth, or what preschoolers have to do with the life of life.

The UN has declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity. And while we’ve seen a number of smart, ambitious scientific and creative efforts inspired by and advocating nature’s bounty, the fact remains that preserving the incredible natural variety of species is in the hands of the future generations. So raising children with a biological sensibility and getting them excited about biodiversity is at the root of any viable effort.

Which is why we love the understatedly brilliant Phylomon project by The Science Creative Quarterly, a wonderful repository for well-written, unconventional scientific literature.

When you have seen one ant, one bird, one tree, you have not seen them all. ~ E. O. Wilson.

Phylomon is a web-based initiative for creating Pokemon-like cards, using real creatures and nature’s own “character design” genius. The project was inspired by a recent study that found young children have the remarkable ability to identify and characterize more than 120 different Pokemon characters, but fail to name more than half of common wildlife species. So Phylomon has set out to broaden children’s natural characters vocabulary, drawing inspiration from the clearly successful model used by “synthetic characters” like Pokemon.

Submissions will be crowdsourced from a variety of creatives, with the scientific community weighing in on the content, game designers invited to brainstorm innovative ways of using the cards, and teachers participating to evaluate the educational merit of the cards.

Best of all, the hope is that this will all occur in a non-commercial-open-access-open-source-because-basically-this-is-good-for-you-your-children-and-your-planet sort of way.

Because Phylomon depends so heavily on the creative community’s contributions, we urge you to submit yours. Use this Flickr pool if you’re a designer or illustrator, this one if you’re a photographer, or this one if you come from the education community.

And if you still have doubts about the momentous importance of biodiversity, take it from Ban Ki-moon, the UNSYG himself — it’s important, alright.

Read up on Phylomon and contribute — why not?

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Curation with a Conscience: The Working Proof

How to cover your causes and your walls, all at the same time.

Given how few and far between life’s simultaneous having-and-eating-cake moments come, we’re taking today to celebrate just such an opportunity. Thanks to a fledgling website called The Working Proof, you can now outfit your walls affordably and in style, while contributing to some great causes at the same time.

Launched in October of last year by design duo (and husband-and-wife team) Anna Corpron and Sean Auyeung, The Working Proof is an online gallery and print shop featuring limited-edition artwork, with 15% of the gross from each sale going to an organization of each artist’s choice. All of the prints sell for less than $100, making for a truly accessible aesthetic and social investment. Corpron and Auyeung, co-founders of multi-disciplinary design studio Sub-Studio, release a new image from an emerging artist each week on Tuesday afternoons, with 13 so far representing a range of charities and social enterprise ventures.

Brooklyn-based artist and wallpaper designer Dan Funderburgh directed the charitable portion of his sinuous letterpress print Optimist Club / Midwestern Can Snake to Transportation Alternatives, an organization that advocates for increased biking, walking, and public transit options in New York City.

Scottish artist Scott Balmer‘s three-color screenprint The Mystical Forest gives its charitable cut to The Kids in Need Foundation, an Ohio-based charity that provides free school supplies nationally to students and teachers. Other charities benefiting from The Working Proof‘s model include Architecture for Humanity, Doctors Without Borders, and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative. The list of recipients is as diverse as the works themselves, each hand-created and -numbered.

Illustrator Jacqueline Kari Bos lists among her artistic inspirations Annette Messager and E.V. Day, influences we admired in the artist’s screenprint Aurora, with its tessellated fields and lovely lace overlay. Bos paired her print with Show Hope, an organization that assists orphaned children financially and in finding families.

The Working Proof blog features interviews with many of the site’s artists, as well as information about other ways to support them and the organizations they represent.

To improve both your life and your walls, visit The Working Proof or follow them on Twitter.

Kirstin Butler has a Bachelor’s in art & architectural history and a Master’s in public policy from Harvard University. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn as a freelance editor and researcher, where she also spends way too much time on Twitter. For more of her thoughts, check out her videoblog.

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Music-Inspired Art: The Hype Machine Zeitgeist

What American girls have to do with beach houses and Scandinavian boys.

Indie music and the visual arts have always had a rich and beautiful intersection — from the best album art out there to the Indie Rock Coloring Book.

This week, the good folks at The Hype Machine are unveiling their annual Music Blog Zeitgeist, where they get 50 talented visual artists to create original pieces depicting the 50 best artists/albums of 2009, based on their blogosphere popularity.

Each day this week, they released 10 pieces of artwork, starting from #50 and ending with today’s #1 — unsurprisingly, Phoenix.

Girls artwork by Zoya Feldman

TV On The Radio artwork by Andrea Foht

Sufjan Stevens artwork by Patrick Moberg

The artists include a ton of our favorites, and some of the albums we were most impressed with this year.

Daft Punk artwork by Lawrence Kwok

The Flaming Lips artwork by Justin Paszul

Wilco artwork by Sergio Serrano

Miike Snow artwork by Blake Suarez and Steph Davlantes

Vampire Weekend artwork by Stephen Olson

Royksopp artwork by Mark Silipo

The Xx artwork by Meredith Gran

Explore all the artwork for more a wonderfully diverse slew of aesthetic styles and creative visions, inspired by the greatest indie talent of our day.

In 2009, we spent more than 240 hours a month bringing you Brain Pickings. That’s over 2,880 hours for the year, over which we could’ve seen 29 feature-length films, listened to 72 music albums or taken 960 bathroom visits. If you found any joy and inspiration here this year, please consider supporting us with a modest donation — it lets us know we’re doing something right.

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