Goodbye 2011
A look back at 2011.
The year is at its end—a moment to reflect upon twelve months of experiments, achievements, and blunders. 2011 opened with multiple trips to Karlsruhe, Germany to collaborate with the ZKM Center for Art and Media on a very early version of trans_actions. In February Stewart served on the judging panel for TED's Ads Worth Spreading competition and tutoring a month long workshop at the RCA with Jürg Lehni. April was packed: More visits to ZKM, the Creativity and Technology conference posted my Code Play lecture video, Paola Antonelli wrote an article for Domus about data visualization that used Exit as an example, and I posted some odd X-Files triptychs.
In May I gave a workshop for design students at the ÉCAL in Switzerland, and in June gave a little talk for It's Nice That's On Digital Experience evening. July was another packed month: MoMA opened its Talk to Me exhibition in New York which included Exit and Windmaker. Browser Pong was featured in the Space Between exhibition in London and at the opening I gave a lecture for graduating students called Advice for Young Makers. Still obsessed with X-Files, I managed to sneak some of those triptychs into an RCA graduation catalog. (Meanwhile in the background I started a little hobby project that would later become Chatttr.)
In September our collaboration with ZKM finally came to fruition with the opening of their Global Contemporary exhibition and the premiere of trans_actions. Print Magazine published a profile on me titled Unmooring: Stewart Smith's quiet critiques. Studio Music published one of my playlists. And Muyricotodo published an interview with me in spanish titled Stewdio: teletransportación bovina desde Londres (english version here). Some exciting personal things happened in October which I won't go into.
In November I spent a week guest-posting for AIGA's Design Envy blog and also posted a project page for our budding hobby project Chatttr which uses the new HTML5 framework Paper.js to allow chatters to sketch and post drawings for each other. We launched the new website for Creative Circle (also built with Paper.js) which will continue to evolve as contestants enter the competition into early next year. December has been a blur of meetings, lining up some exciting projects and collaborations for 2012. Looking forward to the next twelve months.
Happy holidays and best wishes for 2012. —Stewart