Stewart and Bobby have returned to ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany to continue their collaboration with the Global Art and the Museum on a new data animation piece. The work will exist as a panoramic projection--opening this September at the museum. The two are constructing the animation in their own Bronson framework, initially developed for their work on the Exit (Terre Natale) collaboration in 2008 and incrementally enhanced and refined for later works such as Under Vine.
According to SFMOMA curator Harry Urbeck, our new data piece—titled Under Vine—has greeted over 50,000 museum visitors since the new exhibition How Wine Became Modern opened a month ago. Physical visitor numbers can seem strange in our cultural bubble dominated by web visitors. (For example, Browser Pong reached 50,000 unique visitors within just twelve hours of posting the URL.) We are very pleased with the physical foot traffic and wish everyone the happiest of holidays.
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.
New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is planning a new exhibition for summer 2011 titled Talk to Me which promises to be nerdtastic. The exhibition team, lead by senior curator, Paola Antonelli, is sifting through an ever-mutating list of potential pieces for the show. This queue of artworks currently includes two Stewdio pieces: the collaborative Exit (Terre Natale) data animation and our Jed's Other Poem music video for the band Grandaddy. Some friendly faces appear in the queue as well: studio mate Jürg Lehni and recent studio guest Jaakko Tuomivaara.
Next Tuesday Jürg Lehni and Stewart are conducting a workshop for Sara De Bondt's masters class at the Royal College of Art in London. The pair will introduce themselves and talk a bit about their separate practices before giving a design brief to the students. The results of this brief will be examined the following Tuesday.
Under Vine, the latest collaboration between Robert Gerard Pietrusko of Warning Office and Stewart Smith of Stewdio will premiere this evening at the VIP opening of SFMOMA's autumn 2010 exhibition How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now. Read more about this data visualization piece here.
Next Wednesday, November 10th, Stewart will give a short lecture titled Code Play: The Value of Play in Coding at the Creativity and Technology conference in London. The theme of Code Play will be illustrated by way of some favorite projects from around the web as well as some Stewdio work--primarily Browser Pong, Jed's Other Poem, and a sneak peek at a new collaboration with Robert Pietrusko titled Under Vine which opens at the SFMOMA later this month. Stewart was interviewed by Creativity Online last March in a piece called Face to face with the brains behind iQuit, Browser Pong and other experiments in digital fun.
Here's the schedule and a list of speakers for next Wednesday's conference. If you plan on attending drop us an email (just replace the "A.T" with "@" in the email address) or come up and say hello after the lecture.
Bobby and Stewart are currently revising new data visualization animations of the global wine market for inclusion in SFMOMA's exhibition How Wine Became Modern opening next month in San Francisco. The two are building out the graphics using Bronson--their custom animation framework originally created for the Exit piece in 2008 and now two years evolved. Also next month, Stewart is giving a talk about Stewdio at the Creativity and Technology conference in London on the 10th. Further down the road? More collaboration with ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. A workshop for Sara De Bondt's students at the Royal College of Art by Jürg and Stewart. And perhaps a holiday present for the Internet to follow up last year's Browser Pong. There's always more around the bend.
Hello World. Again. We've rebooted a bit. Update your bookmarks to the new http://stewd.io. Double website all the way. So intense. This is our first major overhaul of the internals since 2008--when we replaced the Google Showcase (Beta) hoax. Some features and content are temporarily offline while we clean up and rebuild (where did those old blog posts go?), but these will certainly return in time. Felt it's best to launch the scaffold early than to wait indefinitely. You can still catch Stewart on Twitter and watch Stewdio videos on Vimeo. Cheers from our new studio in London (just a door down from the old one) with special shout outs to our space mates Jürg Lehni and Nazareno Crea.
- Wolves. Phosphorescent.
- Figure 8. Elliott Smith (covering Blossom Dearie).
- Paranoid Android. Radiohead.
- Going to Georgia. The Mountain Goats.
- Everytime I'm with You. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse, featuring Jason Lytle.
- Drift. John Larsen.
- Falling Man. Blonde Redhead.
- So. Central Rain. R.E.M.
- Hated Because of Great Qualities. Blonde Redhead.
- For the Damaged Coda. Blonde Redhead.
- World Leader Pretend. R.E.M.
- Hairshirt. R.E.M.
- Tonight. Sibylle Baier.
- Lizzy. Ben Kweller.
- Soothe. Smashing Pumpkins.
- Two-Headed Boy Part 2. Neutral Milk Hotel.
- Famous Blue Raincoat. Leonard Cohen.
- Mill Town. Bob Martin.
- Do Re Mi. Nirvana.
- Figure 8. Blossom Dearie.
Today we are very happy to release the video for Tomas Halberstad's new single The Pendulum Swings Again. Have a listen as you journey to the far reaches of the universe to meet some new (non-human) friends. Inspired by The Last Starfighter, WarGames, the original Tron, various others.
Last week Stewart gave a small talk titled Code Play at Wieden+Kennedy’s London office. They’ve posted a short text and images about it on their blog here: Code Play with Stewdio
The Setup has just posted an interview with Stewart about hardware and software. But the actual content veers off topic a bit. (Easily distracted?) See for yourself: http://stewart.smith.usesthis.com.
Stewart is speaking about Stewdio today at renown branding agency Landor Associates in London at 4pm
This week Stewart will be guest-posting on design blog It's Nice That. Here's a brief interview and links to the posts.