Grave is a rigidly geometric typeface with a spooky demeanor. We're revealing it today, on what would be Kurt Cobain's 45th birthday. No correlation, really. Check out the Stewdio Grave project page.
Some projects in our queue are massively long-termed. Some are rapid-fires. Here's a quick link to the Bloomberg article Apple Bites Into Core of School Textbook Monopoly by Byron Brown, complete with Stewdio illustration.
Today Wikipedia is blacking out its entire english catalog (aside from the following links) to protest SOPA and PIPA. This is a worthy thing for Wikipedia to do, however, it can leave us information seekers in the lurch. We wrote this quick bookmarklet to unblock Wikipedia and we hope you find it useful. Just drag the following link to your browser's bookmarks bar:
Unblock Wikipedia
Now load up any "dark" page on Wikipedia—for example, Devo's discography—and click your new Unblock Wikipedia bookmarklet. You will see the black overlay disappear and the original content restored. (Tested in Chrome, Safari, Opera, and Firefox for OS X.)
How does it work? Wikipedia is still serving up its content, but it's configuring those content pieces to be invisible. When you load up a topic page you'll actually see the content payload appear for just a fraction of a second before it realizes it should be invisible. Here's the code that the bookmarklet uses to hide the dark overlay and reveal that content payload:
javascript:(function(){$('#mw-sopaOverlay').hide();$('#mw-page-base,#mw-head-base,#content,#mw-head,#mw-panel,#footer').show();})();
If you found this post useful give us a retweet on Twitter. You can also live chat about the Wikipedia blackout in the Chatttr: Wikipedia Blackout room. Please note, the Wikipedia blackout protest is not a strike in the traditional sense. (How could it be when the majority of Wikipedia's essence is the result of free crowd-sourced labor? Are you personally on strike right now as a Wikipedia contributor? If you are on strike, what does your strike entail?) The protest is a grab for media attention (one that we support) in order to alert and educate as many people as possible about the dangers of SOPA and PIPA before these measures can be snuck into law. Finding a way around the blackout is not "being a scab" or devaluing the protest.
Wikipedia agrees: Our purpose here isn't to make it completely impossible for people to read Wikipedia, and it's okay for you to circumvent the blackout. We just want to make sure you see our message. This is why they honor a page request by sending the actual content, superficially marked as "invisible" rather than send a page with no content other than the protest message. As a result of their protest's architecture a user can disable JavaScript or merely hit Escape before the protest script loads, bypassing the blackout overlay altogether. But you have to be quick. If you forget to hit Escape, or if you're just not fast enough, you'll have to reload the page and try again. As that's all a bit annoying anyway having the above bookmarklet is still helpful.
Warm regards to the following sites for linking to this blog post: Gawker. What Even Non Nerds Need to Know About SOPA. Print Magazine. Black Out. Poynter Institute. How to access Wikipedia during Wednesday’s SOPA blackout.
Word-a-coaster is a New Years fortune dispenser created by It's Nice That and Stewdio for the main window display of Selfridges' flagship store in London. It contains 30,000 unique fortunes for 2012 randomly assembled from a collection of typefaces, phrases, and thousands of choice adjectives. The printed fortunes will be randomly dispensed to Selfridges customers from a custom-built roller-coaster beginning on Thursday, January 12th. Visit the Word-a-coaster project page for more information.
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.
Print Magazine has uploaded their brief profile of me here: Unmooring—Stewart Smith’s quiet critiques. Penned by writer and musician Justin Sullivan, the article first appeared 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. —Stewart
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