Apple store talk tomorrow, 6:30pm

I’m speaking about my work tomorrow evening—Monday, May 6th at 6:30pm—at the SoHo Apple store in Manhattan. This is part of the ADC’s Young Guns series of talks (see ADC blog entry). Should be fun. The store’s schedule says I have from 6:30 to 8pm—way too much time. Let’s keep it short and sweet (maybe 1/2 hour?) with some Q&A at the end if that seems worthwhile. The content shouldn’t be much of a surprise: some favorite project highlights, random rants, and so on. Just walk up the glass stairs to the second floor where you’ll find some theater-style seating and a big screen.

Monday, May 6th. 6:30pm
Apple Store SoHo
103 Prince Street
New York NY 10012
212 226 3126

ASCII lyric music videos

ASCII lyric vids are music videos made primarily of a song’s lyrics rendered as computer text and animated over time to pair with the vocals. [What is ASCII?] These pure lyric vids are distinct from representational ASCII art vids which use glyph shapes as abstract textural components, rather than as text meant to be read. These genres are not mutually exclusive, however. [What is ASCII art?] To celebrate being blown away by the new

Petula Clark video, here are a few notches in the genre listed in reverse-chronological order. If you know of more do mention it.

Petula Clark—Cut Copy Me (2013)

Portal 2—Want You Gone (2011). The not-so-surprising sequel.

The Chameleons – Up The Down Escalator (2010). A fan video by Mr. Nicky Ramone using my Jed source code as a base.

Portal—Still Alive (2007). Written by Jonathan Coulton for the ground-breaking game Portal.

Grandaddy—Jed’s Other Poem (2005). A fan vid made-good. By yours, truly.

AIGA BoNE Show 2013

I’m excited to be on the jury panel for this year’s AIGA Best of New England (BoNE) Show biennial design competition alongside Elliott Earls and Lucille Tenazas. The three of us will be milling about—drinks in hand?—for the casual Meet the Judges event this Friday evening. We’ll talk a bit and perhaps even have some fancy objects to share. (So do come down and say hello.) It’s the BoNE Show’s 10th anniversary, after all.

For an added slice of sunshine I’ll be at Boston University meeting with design students in some capacity for the majority of Friday morning and afternoon. You can hit me up with questions (or disenchanted meanderings) via Twitter: @stewd_io. Non sequiturs—if you were curious, this is what Google Glass feels like. And finally, today is Kurt Cobain’s 46th wouldn’t you know.

On exhibit in Berlin: Trans_actions

My 2011 collaboration with Bernd Lintermann and Robert Gerard Pietrusko—titled trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–09—is currently on display at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in the Nothing to Declare exhibition until May 26th. For more information, video, images, and a complete list of collaborators on the original piece see trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–09.

A cleaner grid of time

I declare this day—Wednesday, 12 December 2012—Pythagoras day. As the calendar marks 12-12-12 we ought to reflect upon the majesty of Base 12 as Pythagoreans are wont to do. (Ridiculous / lofty / over-reaching tone is entirely intentional.) To that effect I present a modest manifesto (unfinished and ill-advised) for calendar revision inspired by the beauty of twelve’s divisibility.

Redefining Time

The measurement of time is a human right. Measure itself shapes the experience of that which is measured. It is with these two convictions that we engage our current popular system for measuring time.

It is not the goal of this proposal to be absurdly radical—to propose non-linear measurements of time or uselessly abstract definitions, however poetic. Rather, it is the goal of this proposal to be modest and sympathetic to the current Gregorian system by insisting on simple improvements and even reaffirming aspects of the current system after investigating alternatives.

This proposal is divided into installments of investigation. This current installment in particular investigates the division of a year into both months and weeks. It does not investigate the location and measurement of an epoch nor does it propose a fixed location for the year (for example beginning a year in mid-winter as the current system does versus beginning on the first day of spring.) It does not propose a new system for dividing days into hours, minutes, and so on. More after the jump…

Google Creative Lab, NYC

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

Twitter and Google Talk may be down but there's always Chatttr.

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

Live-Work: Stewdio on the beach

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