I've just wrapped up my week as a guest curator on AIGA's Design Envy blog. It's been a fun week. Here's a list of of the posts with links:
For a few months now we've been kicking around a hobby project called Chatttr—located at http://chatttr.com. It's a free-for-all chat room that allows users to create and share simple line drawings. But that's just the surface of Chatttr. From the foundation upward we built Chatttr as an experiment in anti-social networking. What happens if there are no accounts? No login? What if multiple people can have the same username? Or change their username between each post? What if there's no permanent archive?
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s Talk to Me exhibition is halfway through its run. If you're in the New York area drop in before the show closes on November 7th. The exhibition includes two Stewdio works. The first is Exit (2008), an immersive data animation created in collaboration with architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Warning Office, et al. (See also Talk to Me: Exit.) The second Stewdio piece included in Talk to Me is Windmaker (2007), an ambient weather widget that applies local wind conditions to live websites. (See also Talk to Me: Windmaker.)
Writer and musician Justin Sullivan has penned an article about me titled Unmooring—Stewart Smith's quiet critiques in Print Magazine's Identity Issue (Volume 65.5, October 2011, page 85). This special issue of Print was guest designed and coedited by the superb Dutch design studio Metahaven who also contributed several articles on the theme of Identity. You can order a physical copy, download the PDF version, or visit your local magazine shop. —Stewart
Studio Music is a blog that "provides an insight into the creative process of visual practitioners, through the music that they listen to whilst working." (Text from their About page.) And today they've posted my current top ten countdown complete with little anecdotes per song. (The direct link is http://studiomusic.fm/_smith.html.) Because a lot of these tracks have a nice music video visual component I've posted YouTube embeds here along with the original text. —Stewart
Our new collaboration with Robert Gerard Piertrusko and Bernd Lintermann premieres today at the opening reception for The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 in Karlsruhe, Germany. trans_actions is a panoramic data visualization that illustrates the dramatic increase in the number of biennales of contemporary art and the rapid expansion of the art market following the end of the cold war. Visitors enter a large panoramic projection room bathed in animated data representing artists, curators, biennales, and market fluctuations. (Panoramic video projection, 8192 × 1024 at 25 fps. Approximate running time twenty-five minutes.) Click here to view the trans_actions project page.
Miguel Neumann has just posted his interview with me (translated into spanish) titled Stewdio: teletransportación bovina desde Londres. Very excited to be included. —Stewart
Just a quick post to point to an interview: Stewart Smith on Afterword.
Our latest panoramic data animation—titled trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–09—premieres next month in a new exhibition titled The Global Contemporary. Art Worlds After 1989 at the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe, Germany. The piece is a collaboration with Bernd Lintermann and Robert Gerard Piertrusko, and was made possible by the Global Art and the Museum (GAM) department of ZKM headed by Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg. More details to follow.
This year the Royal College of Art's catalog for graduating Communication Art & Design (CAAD) students was composed of responses to three different conversation prompts. (See catalog for full descriptions: Fact and fiction in a digital context; The value of things—Material artefacts in a digital world; New models for publishing.) Respondents to these prompts included students, RCA staff and external designers, critics, architects and artists. And of course, your humble, X-Files obsessed narrator—having previously participated as a visiting critic for the How-to How-to workshop and the Blackberry workshop. And so this strange little X-Files tribute series has now spun off a small printed piece entitled Trust No One. The beautifully designed catalog is of course full of CAAD creativity and if you have the opportunity to acquire one (or better yet, meet with the graduating CAAD students) I strongly suggest that you do. —Stewart
Hey everyone. Last night I gave a small talk called Advice to Young Makers at the Space Between exhibition here in London. Thanks to everyone who crammed into that little room to sit on desks for half an hour. —Stewart
Later this month New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) will unveil Talk to Me, a new design exhibition curated by Paola Antonelli. We're excited to announce two Stewdio works will be included in the show. The first is Exit (2008), an immersive data animation created in collaboration with architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, et al. (Exit will be represented through video documentation as the actual piece is physically far too large to be included in this particular showing.) The second Stewdio piece is Windmaker (2007), an ambient weather widget that applies local wind conditions to live websites. Talk to Me will run from July 24 through November 7, 2011.
Next Tuesday the London College of Communication (Design for Interaction and Moving Image BA students) and Nexus Interactive Arts will open their collaborative exhibition titled The Space Between. Stewdio's own Browser Pong will be among the exhibited works. Look for it on the ground floor.
Please come to the opening party (open to all) on the evening of Thursday, 14 July, 18:00–23:00. In addition to drinks there will be some short talks: At 7:00pm Chris O'Reilly will discuss Nexus. Next up, at 7:40pm Stewart will deliver a quick talk titled "Advice to Young Makers" for the exhibiting graduates—but it applies just as well to those of us who've put a few years between ourselves and uni. Finally at 8:35pm Johnny Kelly and Matthew Cooper will share their I am not an artist project.
The exhibition's peculiar venue is a disused 1980's office building that's just a walk from the Canary Wharf tube station: Create House, 2-4 Heron Quays, London E14 4JB. See Transport for London for help getting there.
This Thursday Stewart will be speaking at the sold out On Digital Experience event in London organized by It's Nice That along with Ross Phillips and Daniel Brown. Back in 2009, Stewart contributed an essay for the premiere print issue of It's Nice That on the 1974 Arecibo welcoming message to aliens. And then moved across the Atlantic to the UK, becoming the alien in need of welcome.
Last week was "workshop week" at the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (ÉCAL). Selected practitioners from various fields within art and design were invited to the school to conduct five day workshops with the students. Stewart was invited to work with the Media & Interaction Design students and posed to them the following group-based assignment: 1. Design a language or system that accepts input and transforms it into a new output. 2. Select 'found' inputs to be processed by the system. 3. Design an input that hacks and extends the original design of the system. (No actual programming required, though of course some groups did choose this route.) Special thanks to assistant Mathieu Rudaz for his help and insights during the week and to Jürg Lehni who collaborated on an earlier form of this experiment—challenging design students to imagine new languages of design. And finally, a very warm thank-you to the ÉCAL faculty and staff who were incredibly generous hosts. Below are brief descriptions of the students' final results.
Next week I'll be conducting a workshop for students in the Media and Interaction Design department at the University of Art and Design, Lausanne (ÉCAL) in Lausanne, Switzerland. —Stewart