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

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: 1. Paper.js: Juerg Lehni and Jonathan Puckey 2. Charlotte Taylor’s Spring / Summer 2012 Lookbook Film: HarrimanSteel 3. The Cat Scan: Jonny 4. Portal—No Escape: Dan Trachtenberg 5. Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies: Gallant Lab —Stewart

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

Our 2008 collaboration, Exit, has been included in MoMA design curator Paola Antonelli's article on data visualization in the English / Italian design and architecture journal Domus (issue 946). Page 114 features our “Carbon Emissions Responsibility” map. For a description of, and videos from the Exit project see http://stewd.io/work/exit. Update: The article has now been posted online. You can read it at http://domusweb.it/en/design/states-of-design-01-visualization

Code Play is a small talk about the intersection of art, design, and software illustrated through Stewdio works. Stewart was invited to speak about his work at the Creativity and Technology conference (CAT) held in London, November 2010. Stewart's talk, titled Code Play, focussed on playfulness as the unifying theme of the Stewdio portfolio. For more information and the full 20 minute video see the Code Play project page.

It's spring. And that means design thesis shows. Below is the invite text for the Yale School of Art 2011 Graphic Design MFA show. http://yalegraphicdesign.info/.

As both noun and verb, book and exhibition, CATALOG recasts the deconstructed components of finished design projects as new work. The result is an exhibition that is an exploded book, and a book that is a collapsed exhibition. CATALOG represents the work of Yale School of Art MFA candidates Lauren Adolfsen, Juan Astasio Soriano, Keri Bronk, Benjamin Critton, Lauren Francescone, Brendan Griffiths, Bona Han, Sara Hartman, Hank h. Huang, Zeynab Izadyar, Zakary Jensen, Zachary Klauck, Michael Mikulec, Mylinh Trieu Nguyen, Lindsay Nordell, Ji−Eun Rim, Sally Thurer, and Brian Watterson. CATALOG will show from May 9−15, 2011 in the Green Hall Gallery of the School of Art, located at 1156 Chapel Street in New Haven, Connecticut. The Gallery is open daily, 10AM−6PM. A closing reception will be held from 6−9PM on May 14. See you there, YALE G.D. MFA 2011

Thanks to everyone at ZKM for a fun and productive two weeks. I will return on Wednesday, first of June along with Bobby for another round in the panorama lab. For now, I'm back in London. Sketching. Coding. Rendering. —Stewart

Recently I've become re-obsessed with The X-Files. (My last bout of this ended around 1998 or so.) I strongly believe a second movie should be made—there's just so much potential there. (Yes, I realize there have already been two movies, but let's just pretend that absolute rubbish sequel was never made.) I've been watching the series in order, taking notes on arc themes and character introductions, cinematography, etc. It's like homework. But fun homework. These X-Files triptychs are a scatterbrained byproduct of my obsession. Have a look here: http://stewd.io/xfiles —Stewart

One week down and one to go here at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany. To recap, I'm here working with Bernd Lintermann, head of the Institute for Visual Media, and the Global Art and the Museum team lead by Andrea Buddensieg on a data visualization exhibition piece for The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 exhibition opening this September. Storyboarding. Coding. Bumping along to an odd mix of the instrumentals-only version of Dr. Dre's 2001 and the first three records from Squirrel Nut Zippers. Not to mention the two minute trailer for the Beastie Boys' Fight for your Right—Revisited which seems to have the most incredible cast list ever, including what appears to be a DeLorean time machine. ("Sense is something you can't even make sense of until you've been to the future and spent time there.") So much more coding and sketching to do. Back at it now. —Stewart

It's that time again. Stewart is currently at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany working with Bernd Lintermann, head of the Institute for Visual Media, and the ever-sharp Global Art and the Museum team. (Bobby will return to ZKM in June.) The result of this collaboration will be an immersive data animation of the art market—a strange and sometimes illogical economy of artists, curators, biennales, fairs, auction houses, and collectors—on display as part of the The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 exhibition opening this September. But for now, it's springtime. Trees. Leaves. Rain. Breezes. Sunshine. Bunnies. Storyboards. SQL. OpenGL. And so on. Unrelated: Seventeen years ago today there was an unhappy kid in Seattle. And then there wasn't. How time passes.

Yesterday Stewart gave a little talk about Stewdio at Rapier London. Because Rapier's website is a live webcam online visitors were able to peek in and comment via Twitter. You can follow Rapier's tweets at @RapierUK.

This evening Stewart will be showing some slides at Nexus Interactive Arts along with Rumpus Room and Quayola. A fun night of interactive exchange. Check in on the Nexus Twitter feed at @NexusLondon.

David Reinfurt, Stuart Bailey, and Angie Keefer are creating a new model of library: The Serving Library. You are encouraged to read their collective Statement of Intent PDF, help with kickstart funding and of course keep an eye on the Serving Library website which will soon flower from its current form of minimalist five-point manifesto into something much, much larger. See also Dexter / Sinister, O R G, and Dot Dot Dot.

Jürg Lehni has been featured in the relaunch issue of Grafik Magazine (issue #188, pp.28–41). The profile includes photos and descriptions of Jürg's work and interview snippets from Jürg, his collaborators, and his brother Urs Lehni. Some projects highlighted in the profile include Scriptographer, Empty Words, Hektor, Rita, Flood Fill, and the Lineto type foundry website. You can read more about Jürg's work on his website, http://lehni.org and watch more video at http://vimeo.com/lehni/videos. Also check out the brand new Things to Say website, a curatorial collaboration between Jürg and Alex Rich, at http://thingstosay.org.

Last September TED announced their Ads Worth Spreading challenge. Now that the deadline for entry—February 7th—is upon us the judging begins. Stewart has been selected to participate in the twenty-four member judging panel for this competition. Stewdio wishes good luck to all the entrants. Stay tuned to TED for the Ads Worth Spreading results: http://partners.ted.com/adsworthspreading/.

Jürg Lehni and Stewart have been invited as tutors to a one month workshop at the Royal College of Art organized by the Helen Hamlyn Centre and sponsored by Research in Motion. As part of the workshop proceedings Stewart will be speaking about his work at the RCA tomorrow afternoon at 13:30 in the Performing Arts Lab (on the first floor of the Stevens Building). Jürg will do likewise the following Wednesday.

Time's up and our visit to ZKM (Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany has ended. So many faces made this three week working-visit feel more like a home away from home. Big smiles to Andrea, Annie, Bernd, Daria, Derek, Dirk, Hans, Heike, Iris, Jacob, Jan, Jens, Julia, Margit, Martin, Matthias, Moritz, Niko, Sarah, Silke, Urs, and Xiaowen.

Following a ten day design charrette at the ZKM (Center for Art and Media) Robert Gerard Pietrusko of Warning Office has returned to Harvard while Stewart continues to construct test animations for the panorama room. At the close of January Stewart will return to London to rejoin Nazerno Crea and Jürg Lehni in Shacklewell Studios.

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.

01. Wolves. Phosphorescent. 02. Figure 8. Elliott Smith (covering Blossom Dearie). 03. Paranoid Android. Radiohead. 04. Going to Georgia. The Mountain Goats. 05. Everytime I'm with You. Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse, featuring Jason Lytle. 06. Drift. John Larsen. 07. Falling Man. Blonde Redhead. 08. So. Central Rain. R.E.M. 09. Hated Because of Great Qualities. Blonde Redhead. 10. * For the Damaged Coda. Blonde Redhead. 11. World Leader Pretend. R.E.M. 12. Hairshirt. R.E.M. 13. Tonight. Sibylle Baier. 14. Lizzy. Ben Kweller. 15. Soothe. Smashing Pumpkins. 16. Two-Headed Boy Part 2. Neutral Milk Hotel. 17. Famous Blue Raincoat. Leonard Cohen. 18. Mill Town. Bob Martin. 19. Do Re Mi. Nirvana. 20. 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.

Stewart and Robert are currently at ZKM (The Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany developing a new data visualization project.

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.

Design journal Core77 has just posted an interview with Stewart by designer / writer Lisa Smith. It's the inaugural piece for a new series called "Starting Out" which profiles designers who have recently struck out on their own.

Because there's really something to listening to the same songs over, and over, and over. 01. Up the Down Escalator. The Chameleons. 02. Like a Fool. Superchunk. 03. Travel as I Wait. Tomas Halberstad. 04. Lessons Learned. Matt & Kim. 05. Milk It. Nirvana. 06. Oh Messy Life. Cap'n Jazz. 07. Two-Headed Boy. Neutral Milk Hotel. 08. A Chicken with its Head Cut Off. The Magnetic Fields. 09. NYC's Like a Graveyard. The Moldy Peaches. 10. Tightrope. Yeasayer. 11. Sleepless. The Decemberists. 12. Running up that Hill. Kate Bush. 13. Hounds of Love. Kate Bush. 14. Time. David Bowie. 15. All My Friends. LCD Soundsystem.

Stewart will be speaking about Stewdio at the Regent Street store. Monday, 28 June at 19.00 Apple Store London http://stewdio.org/apple

The Scriptographer team has just released version 2.8.050 which is compatible with the all new Adobe Illustrator CS5. (And previous versions too.) Description from the Scriptographer site: Scriptographer is a scripting plugin for Adobe Illustrator™. It gives the user the possibility to extend Illustrator’s functionality by the use of the JavaScript language. The user is no longer limited to the same tools that are used by most graphic designers around the globe. Scriptographer allows the creation of mouse controlled drawing-tools, effects that modify existing graphics and scripts that create new ones. But Scriptographer is also a webpage on which users can exchange scripts and ideas. Scriptographer gives the tool back into the hand of the user and confronts a closed product with the open source philosophy. If that sounds good to you, download it today.

Tonight, Exit (also known as "Terre Natale") opens at the AlhondigaBilbao in Spain. If you're in Bilbao don't miss this opportunity to experience the immersive 360-degree data projection. Exit (Terre Natale) is a 45-minute immersive visualization of human migration data divided into six narratives. Our historical focus is primarily from 1990 through today, augmented by occasional older data points or forecasts into the future. Humans migrate for various reasons. Political turmoil may create refugee migrations. Environmental disasters create refugees of a different sort. Some people migrate to wealthier economies sending micro-transactions, or remittances, home to their native land. We have recently crossed a threshold; 50% of humans have migrated from rural areas into cities. As of 2007 one out of every two people is now an urban dweller. See the Exit (Terre Natale) projection description and links to videos at http://stewd.io/w/exit. Today also marks 30 years since Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis hung himself.

A few weeks ago Stewart happened upon pictures of Panic Inc's new offices. In the shuffle was a photo of their vintage Apple //e computer sitting at an empty desk. Lovers of vintage hardware can't resist. Stewart emailed Panic to ask if they would "do him the honor" of running the Jed's Other Poem music video source code on it. Despite their tight schedules—including the recent release and promotion of Transmit 4—they did indeed get the code onto their Apple //e and even filmed their own version of the video! Have a look at what we're affectionately dubbing “Jed Panic.” Jed's Other Poem is a music video for the Grandaddy song of the same name. And (perhaps) the world's first open-source music video. You can download the Jed source code package to run on your Virtual II emulator or even your own vintage Apple II series machine. To do the latter just play the audio from the “cassette tape” source code file into your vintage Apple's cassette drive port. You'll need an audio cable with male mini-jacks on either end. (Read up on Apple DOS and the “LOAD” command, you'll be fine.) After Panic posted their version of the Jed video other Apple-related sites—such as Daring Fireball, TUAW, and 9to5 Mac—linked to it. The flood of traffic brought down Panic's site temporarily. (We think that's pretty hardcore.)

The design and advertising blog Creativity (formerly AdCritic) has just posted an interview with Stewdio’s Stewart Smith, conducted by Jamie Kim of Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam. The two discuss the intersection of art and software, collaborators, personal projects, and the “fake it ’till you make it” ethos. Read up here: Face to face with the brains behind iQuit, Browser Pong and other experiments in digital fun.

Are you on a Mac? Ten minutes from now you will be running your first Ruby-Processing animation, mesmerized by a color shifting 3D cube rotating in space. It's easy.

What is Ruby?

Ruby is a fairly young programming language, conceived in 1993 and first publicly released in 1995. It was created by Japanese programmer Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto. And if you're running OS X you already have Ruby installed. Yup, it's already there waiting for you. For more historical info see “Ruby (Programming Language)” on Wikipedia. Ruby gained significant popularity with the rise of Ruby on Rails. (Rails is a web application framework written in Ruby.) In fact, web searches for things having to do with Ruby will usually land you on a page that's specifically discussing the Rails framework. But Ruby is good for more than just building Web sites. We're about to make a spinning cube with it, right there on your Desktop!