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.

Talk to Me, MoMA

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.

Yale Graphic Design presents 'Catalog'

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

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.

The Space Between exhibition

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.

Advice to Young Makers

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

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…

Word-a-coaster at Selfridges

Word-a-coaster is a New Years fortune dispenser created by It’s Nice That and Stewdio for the main window display of Selfridges’ flagship store in London. It contains 30,000 unique fortunes for 2012 randomly assembled from a collection of typefaces, phrases, and thousands of choice adjectives. The printed fortunes will be randomly dispensed to Selfridges customers from a custom-built roller-coaster beginning on Thursday, January 12th. Visit the Word-a-coaster project page for more information.

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.