My 2011 collaboration with Bernd Lintermann and Robert Gerard Pietrusko—titled trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–09—is currently on display at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in the Nothing to Declare exhibition until May 26th. For more information, video, images, and a complete list of collaborators on the original piece see trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–09.
I declare this day—Wednesday, 12 December 2012—Pythagoras day. As the calendar marks 12-12-12 we ought to reflect upon the majesty of Base 12 as Pythagoreans are wont to do. (Ridiculous / lofty / over-reaching tone is entirely intentional.) To that effect I present a modest manifesto (unfinished and ill-advised) for calendar revision inspired by the beauty of twelve’s divisibility.
<h4>Redefining Time</h4>
The measurement of time is a human right. Measure itself shapes the experience of that which is measured. It is with these two convictions that we engage our current popular system for measuring time.
It is not the goal of this proposal to be absurdly radical—to propose non-linear measurements of time or uselessly abstract definitions, however poetic. Rather, it is the goal of this proposal to be modest and sympathetic to the current Gregorian system by insisting on simple improvements and even reaffirming aspects of the current system after investigating alternatives.
This proposal is divided into installments of investigation. This current installment in particular investigates the division of a year into both months and weeks. It does not investigate the location and measurement of an epoch nor does it propose a fixed location for the year (for example beginning a year in mid-winter as the current system does versus beginning on the first day of spring.) It does not propose a new system for dividing days into hours, minutes, and so on.
We've closed up shop in London and hauled it all back to New York City, the greatest city on Earth. We fired the fake interns and parted ways with the fake partners. We're not even "we" anymore—or never were as it were. Stewdio will continue to exist as a non-existent entity whilst collaborating with real actual people and organizations, just as it always has.
Beginning next Monday, however, my primary focus will become Google Creative Lab. Here’s to the future.
—Stewart
Google Talk seems to have crashed some time this morning, prompting upset users to take to Twitter for some realtime commiseration. But now Twitter seems to also be down for the count. Fortunately there's always Chatttr to fall back on. (It's like the word Chatter but with the E replaced by a third T.) Chatttr is too small to fail. Or at least, too small to be missed if it does.
No sign-up required, just start typing: http://chatttr.com
Last Friday I gave a quick talk about Stewdio projects called "Live Work" in Google's Creative Sandbox on the beach in Cannes, France during the annual Cannes Lions festival. Google has just uploaded video of the talk:
View on YouTube: http://youtu.be/ZX3CUPSrp_k
Stewart is giving a small Cannes Lions talk called “Live-Work” on Friday, June 22nd at 16:00 in the Google tent. From Google's description: Come and join Stewart Smith—founder of Stewdio—on our beach for an intimate discussion about how he mixes graphic design, art and code to produce some incredible work. For a list of some of Stewart's previous lectures see items tagged with talk.
It’s springtime rainy days in London—as good a time as any for a new playlist heavy on differing versions of St. James Infirmary Blues. Introducing Shale, thirteen songs to brood and sulk by.
01. Knock Knock. The Accidental.
02. Oh My Heart. REM.
03. St. James Infirmary. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
04. Mostly Waving. Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton.
05. St. James Infirmary. Bobby Bland.
06. Western Eyes. Portishead.
07. Life in a Glasshouse. Radiohead.
08. Going to Georgia. The Mountain Goats.
09. So. Central Rain. REM.
10. St. James Infirmary. Snooks Eaglin.
11. What’s a Girl to do. Bat for Lashes.
12. St. James Infirmary Coda. Decembler.
13. Where Did You Sleep Last Night. Nirvana.
Stefan Post of PostWare recently took it upon himself to port the source code for our Jed's Other Poem music video from its original Applesoft BASIC form to Commodore BASIC. This means Jed can now run on the Commodore 64! You can read Post's notes and download his C64 port here: http://www.postware.nl/site/Jed2.html
Mac OS X users can download Vice 2.3 which is a package of several related emulators. When downloaded, open the x64sc emulator and from the File menu select Smart attach Disk/Tape (or hit Command+O). Select Posts's PRG file and before long you will see Jed's blinking cursor. Adjust the emulator's speed as necessary.
Of course you can still download the original Applesoft BASIC code and run it on an Apple 2 emulator. For OS X we recommend Virtual ][ which emulates the Apple ][, ][+, and //e. And if you happen to have an actual vintage Apple laying around you can use the audio file included in the source code package to load Jed onto it via the cassette port—just like the guys at Panic Software! See their blog post about it: An Apple //e, an iPad, and Jed.
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?