Stewart Smith

News

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 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.

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

Because there's really something to listening to the same songs over, and over, and over.

  1. Up the Down Escalator. The Chameleons.
  2. Like a Fool. Superchunk.
  3. Travel as I Wait. Tomas Halberstad.
  4. Lessons Learned. Matt & Kim.
  5. Milk It. Nirvana.
  6. Oh Messy Life. Cap'n Jazz.
  7. Two-Headed Boy. Neutral Milk Hotel.
  8. A Chicken with its Head Cut Off. The Magnetic Fields.
  9. 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.