Stewdio is Stewart Smith's graphic design studio. http://stewdio.org en-us 2009-Dec-18 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Stewdio Syndicator 1.0 Art 1981-2010 Stewart Smith. All rights reserved. http://stewdio.org/med/stewdio.stewdio.01.jpg http://stewdio.org http://stewdio.org/work/pong/ STEWDIO-20091218160000 2009-Dec-18

Browser Pong is a traditional Pong game played not in a browser window, but with browser windows. The typical browsing experience is conducted through a single application window. This is indeed a useful, practical thing. Browser Pong instead exists between a collection of windows. During play the negative space between windows is transformed into a playing field; the abstracted tennis court of Pong. The idea of thinking inside or outside some "box" is of course a dead and beaten horse. Browser Pong attempts to think with the boxes. The audio content was created by sound artist and musician Dominic Matar of Nine Cats Music specifically for this piece.

http://stewdio.org/work/arecibo/ STEWDIO-20090401000000 2009-Apr-01

Short essay describing Frank Drake's 1974 Arecibo Message to aliens as inspiration for a graphic design studio. Stewart writes a humorous (and loose) explanation of the Arecibo Message's context, sophisticated design, and how sending signals into deep space may relate to Stewdio's ambiguous practice. Featured in the premiere print issue of design blog It's Nice That, designed by HudsonBec in collaboration with Joseph Burrin. Excerpt from "Imagine You're ET" section: From one short stream of on/off blips you get the front-page news from planet Earth: Third rock from their star, made of pretty standard atoms, they like to party, and there are a bunch of them. Excellent. But can we really communicate? Get to know the inner them? Sadly, the Hercules (M13) star cluster is 25,000 light years from Earth. That means even light, the fastest thing we know of in the universe, would take 25,000 years to travel from one to the other. Sorry baby, you know how I feel about long distance relationships. And human bodies just don't last that long.

http://stewdio.org/work/options/ STEWDIO-20090310000000 2009-Mar-10

Options is a short visual dwelling on suicide that situates the viewer as protagonist. Each vignette is realized through an unlikely tool: a browser's default scroll bars. Stewdio faces the East River in New York City, just north of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges. Occasionally we're audience to a swarming of emergency lights—helicopters, boats, ambulances—rescue teams hastily assembled to recover those who attempt suicide from these landmarks; the East River Jumpers.

http://stewdio.org/work/gimbels/ STEWDIO-20090304000000 2009-Mar-04

A clockwork disc simulator for designing movements to appear in the hall of Gimbels Passageway in New York City. Ear Studio was commissioned by Vornado Realty Trust to design a public art element for the Gimbels Passageway renovation; the underground pedestrian tunnel connecting Penn Station to Herald Square closed in the 1970s. This simulator, built with Processing and OpenGL, allows Ear Studio to experiment with the choreography of approximately 900 rotating discs and the invisible gearing system that couples them. The simulator exports this choreographic data for use by the team's 3D fly-through mockup designers and will also inform the data driving the final piece.

http://stewdio.org/work/levol/ STEWDIO-20090228000000 2009-Feb-28

Cover art for Le Vol's debut EP entitled Last Day of February. The album art for Last Day of February began as a design charrette involving a projector, a laptop, and bottles of wine. The EP's title was typeset in HTML/CSS and projected onto Le Vol members Dominic Matar (left) and Olivier Bernard (right). Designed in collaboration with Stina Carlberg and Le Vol. Visit Le Vol on MySpace at myspace.com/levolnyc.