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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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!