Under Vine data visualization at SFMOMA

Under Vine, the latest collaboration between Robert Gerard Pietrusko of Warning Office and Stewart Smith of Stewdio will premiere this evening at the VIP opening of SFMOMA’s autumn 2010 exhibition How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now. Read more about this data visualization piece here.

Under Vine greets 50,000th visitor

According to SFMOMA curator Harry Urbeck, our new data piece—titled Under Vine—has greeted over 50,000 museum visitors since the new exhibition How Wine Became Modern opened a month ago. Physical visitor numbers can seem strange in our cultural bubble dominated by web visitors. (For example, Browser Pong reached 50,000 unique visitors within just twelve hours of posting the URL.) We are very pleased with the physical foot traffic and wish everyone the happiest of holidays.

It's Spring in Karlsruhe

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.

'Exit' cited in Domus article by Paola Antonelli

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

MoMA: Talk to Me

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.

Coming soon: trans_actions

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.

Premiering today: trans_actions

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.

MoMA—Talk to Me roundup

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)’s Talk to Me exhibition is halfway through its run. If you’re in the New York area drop in before the show closes on November 7th. The exhibition includes two Stewdio works. The first is Exit (2008), an immersive data animation created in collaboration with architecture studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Warning Office, et al. (See also Talk to Me: Exit.) The second Stewdio piece included in Talk to Me is Windmaker (2007), an ambient weather widget that applies local wind conditions to live websites. (See also Talk to Me: Windmaker.) More after the jump…

Goodbye 2011

The year is at its end—a moment to reflect upon twelve months of experiments, achievements, and blunders. 2011 opened with multiple trips to Karlsruhe, Germany to collaborate with the ZKM Center for Art and Media on a very early version of trans_actions. In February Stewart served on the judging panel for TED’s Ads Worth Spreading competition and tutoring a month long workshop at the RCA with Jürg Lehni. April was packed: More visits to ZKM, the Creativity and Technology conference posted my Code Play lecture video, Paola Antonelli wrote an article for Domus about data visualization that used Exit as an example, and I posted some odd X-Files triptychs. More after the jump…

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.