Stewart Smith

World Wide Web (WWW)

Works composed for, or directly relating to, my favorite medium: the World Wide Web. I was lucky enough to thank Sir Tim Berners-Lee for his invention in person at a 25th birthday party for the Web. There were countless pre-inventors before him, and infinitely more pioneers afterward, but Tim (and CERN) mark a special nexus in human history.
2023
October
2
Monday
Monday, 02 October 2023
2023October02 Monday
2023October02
2023Oct02

Black Swan, three years on

This week makes three years since publishing my (unsolicited) browser-based music video for Thom Yorke’s 2006 track Black Swan. Rather than film footage, video, or pre-composed animation, my music “video” is composed of website elements pushed around in realtime as you watch it via a mixture of style sheet and JavaScript commands.
It was a fairly dark autumn in America, with the presidential election contest between democracy and fascism looming against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic which had so abruptly turned the country upside down half a year earlier. (Not to mention climate change; the hottest summer and autumn on record to date.) Revisiting this old animation idea was a pleasant break from the reality around us—and served as a birthday present of sorts for Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood who share my birth month of October; the best month. Read more about the Black Swan music video here, or visit and execute the animation here.

Quantum JavaScript for JSNation

2022

Black Swan
music video

2020

Handy.js
WebXR toolkit

2020

Quantum
JavaScript (Q.js)
toolkit

2019

Space Rocks:
Technical Deep Dive

2018

Space Rocks
VR game

2017

The Charm
Offensive

2017

Dance Tonite
VR music video

2017

VRController
for WebXR

2017

Day & Night

2016

Beep.js
music toolkit

2015

Airborne

2015

Autocompose
machine learning
patent

2014

Rubik’s Cube
Explorer

2014

Roll It

2013

Chrome Racer
mobile game

2013

Creative Circle
website

2012

Chatttr

2011

Browser Pong

2009

Options

2009

Yale AdSense

2008

Stewdio Draft Mono

2008

Infinite C

2008

Histoface

2007

Windmaker

2007

Asymptote

2006

iQuit

2006

The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want

2006

T-Shirt

2004

Confess

2004

Cellular Automata

2004

SquareFace

2003

Interprint

2003

Tweed Magazine

1997