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
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.