Ides of December
A rather good day to pause and review. In November Robert Gerard Pietrusko and Stewart unveiled their latest collaboration, Under Vine, for the SFMOMA's new exhibition How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now. Under Vine is a data animation describing a modernized view of wine production and export.
Last week Jürg Lehni and Stewart visited Sara De Bondt's Design Without Labels class at the Royal College of Art to conduct a workshop. The two gave a "subjective and fragmented" history of programming (beginning with punch card looms and largely avoiding actual computer languages all together) and then delivered an assignment brief challenging the students to create their own language and example applications for the following week.
The nature of the language was left to the students—digital, acoustic, visual, textual, kinesthetic, etc. Yesterday Jürg and Stewart returned to RCA to critique the entertaining results. (Thank you to all the students who participated in the experiment.)
In between the two workshop days at the RCA, Stewart was at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany working with the incredibly talented Global Art and the Museum team on a new data-driven piece for an upcoming exhibition illustrating the expansion of the global art market following the cold war. This exhibition piece will serve as the next collaboration between Stewart and Bobby and they will both be on-site at ZKM next month (so please be aware of timezone differences when anticipating request responses).
On a more nostalgic note, we're coming up on the one year anniversary of Browser Pong, released on 18 December 2009. What a difference a year makes. Then: Stewart Avenue in Brooklyn, teaching at ITP. Now: Shackwell Lane in London, with quite a few hours logged at ZKM. So the year MMX is nearly over. On to twenty-eleven then?