Christian Marc Schmidt

Schema opens its doors. We are a creative design studio focusing on the intersection of data visualization and interaction design. October 1, 2012

Tue, 3 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EST

Illuminating Data, curated by Chris Ault. Invisible Cities exhibited among twenty data visualization projects. College of New Jersey, Ewing, NJ. March 14—April 18, 2012

Tue, 3 Apr 2012 00:00:00 EST

Net Works: Case Studies of Web Art and Design by xtine Burrough. Contributed chapter “Pastiche” describing the project and its process. Published by Routledge, 2011

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 00:00:00 EST

TEDActive. Presented “Metacities”, featuring Pastiche and Invisible Cities. Palm Springs, CA. March 2011

Thu, 3 Mar 2011 00:00:00 EST

Invisible Cities

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST

Invisible Cities, a project named after the novel by Italo Calvino, aims to provide insight into the composition of urban social networks by surfacing data from online services, geographically mapped, in order to identify the areas of high and low activity. The visualization thus reveals emerging social themes, presented in a three-dimensional spatial environment. It displays individual Twitter status updates and Flickr photos on a geo-registered surface reflecting aggregate activity over time. As data records are accrued, the surface transforms into hills and valleys representing areas with high and low densities of data. Data points are connected in chronological order by paths representing themes extracted from status updates and image metadata.

Copyright 2010–2011 Christian Marc Schmidt & Liangjie Xia. All rights reserved.

Parsons Journal for Information Mapping. Invisible Cities published in Volume 3, Issue 1. January 2011

Tue, 18 Jan 2011 00:00:00 EST

Invisible Cities debuts in alpha at TEDx Taipei. July 24, 2010

Sat, 24 Jul 2010 00:00:00 EST

mondocane.com

Mon, 24 May 2010 00:00:00 EST

Tribeca furniture showroom Mondo Cane carries inventory for the period 1880-1980. The website and identity for the gallery reflect its unique vision and modernist sensibilities. The graphic identity acts as a frame for the content, providing a space for a dynamic, constantly changing inventory exhibiting Mondo Cane’s unique perspective on design. Built in Ruby on Rails, the site is maintainable by the showroom via an admin tool.

Subcurrents

Sat, 27 Mar 2010 00:00:00 EST

This project explores the cultural significance of data frequencies. Four projection surfaces display data feeds describing the intersections between seemingly mundane aspects of our collective everyday experience. Numbers, colors, and complementary word pairings are scraped from Twitter, isolated from their original message context, and displayed in real-time, generating visual and temporal patterns intrinsic to the data. Each display represents a single dataset, juxtaposing past and present, the individual and the multitude, the frequent and the infrequent. The outcome is a conversation, and a space for contemplating the connections that may emerge from the overlooked moments in our lives.

Installed at Project No.8 and Project No.8b through March 2010 as part of the Mannam exhibition series, organized by Hoon Kim and Andrew Sloat.

Copyright 2010 E Roon Kang & Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Parsons Journal for Information Mapping. Pastiche published in Volume 2, Issue 1. January 2010

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

makitsuchiya.com

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:00:00 EST

The portfolio site for Maki Tsuchiya Schmidt, interior architect and environmental designer, deconstructs her work in terms of its descriptive categories on the one hand, and project images on the other. Images are extracted from their related projects and displayed as a single pile, while project metadata is presented as an alphabetically-sorted list that filters the pile, while images in turn filter the list. Selecting an image ties related project images together in a linear slideshow format.

Mondo Cane

Mon, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

Mondo Cane is a Tribeca-based 20th century furniture dealer started by Patrick Parrish. The new store identity is founded on an adaptive logo mark both referencing the store’s dual ownership and bracketing content between its two halves. The logo is set in Tungsten, a typeface by Hoefler & Frere-Jones.

projectno8.com

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

The web site for Project No. 8, concept store and project space in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, combines products, designers, and categories in an alphabetized index. The Browse section visualizes products as tiles, their texture changing based on the number of click-throughs an item receives and reflecting the changing patterns of items people are interested in.

Print Magazine. Look Up: The Life and Art of Sacha Kolin featured in the 2009 Regional Design Annual. December 2009

Tue, 1 Dec 2009 00:00:00 EST

CNN. Pastiche is featured in “A new way of looking at the world” by Manav Tanneeru. November 2, 2009

Mon, 2 Nov 2009 00:00:00 EST

Camera/Chimera. Curated by Ethan Ham, at Gallery Aferro. Newark, NJ. September 12—October 3, 2009

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:00:00 EST

sugarlabs.org

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EST

While the Sugar Labs wiki addresses the needs of the developer community, it proved difficult to access for teachers and parents interested in the Sugar platform. The Sugar Labs static website primarily serves as an entry point and information source for these audiences. Conceptually, the website aims to be an extension of the wiki and incorporates a “wiki-aesthetic”. Keyphrases, highlighted in the text, are alphabetically aggregated on an index page to provide a bottom-up method for browsing content on the site, also acting as a metaphor for the decentralized network structure of the Sugar Labs project. A constantly changing color palette extends the visual language introduced with the logo, and a visual narrative, illustrated by Dongyun Lee, communicates key aspects of the Sugar experience.

Vague Terrain. Pastiche featured in citySCENE. March 6, 2009

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:00:00 EST

NBC New York. John Capone reviews Pastiche in “About Town.” February 27, 2009

Pastiche is featured on Gawker/io9. February 21, 2009

Sat, 21 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST

Pastiche

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:00:00 EST

Pastiche is a dynamic data visualization that maps keywords from blog articles to the New York neighborhoods they are written in reference to, geographically positioned in a navigable, spatial view. The outcome is a dynamically changing description of the city, formed around individual experiences and perspectives.

Copyright 2008–2009 Ivan Safrin & Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Rhizome. Greg J. Smith reviews Compressed Portals in “Out of Context: Artists and Web Inventories”. January 21, 2009

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 00:00:00 EST

Sugar Labs

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:00:00 EST

Sugar is the Linux-based operating system developed at One Laptop per Child and installed on the XO laptop. Sugar Labs is a non-profit foundation that serves as a gathering place for the community of educators and software developers extending the Sugar platform and developing Sugar activities. The logo utilizes a fundamental visual treatment of the interface—the use of separate stroke and fill colors to identify people. The typography is treated in the same way that symbols are treated in Sugar. Alternating between 12 color combinations, the logo represents the diversity of the open-source Sugar community.

All Horizons

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

All Horizons is based on a selection of 150 photographs taken by 127 individuals under a Creative Commons license. I was interested in selecting material that made the horizon the subject of the image. The photographs are ordered serially to form a narrative describing a single, archetypal gesture—told through the lenses of independent agents, brought together by means of a single, external objective and curatorial intent. By treating the horizon as a constant, the work comments on the universally shared perception and experience of space, across cultures and locations, and reflects on how our individual experience at all times is part of a larger continuum.

This work is protected under the Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

SugarCamp. Presentation “Design Opportunities for Sugar”. Cambridge, MA. November 21, 2008

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

Marketscape

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

Marketscape is an experimental data visualization of the S&P500 index, representing daily market activity as a virtual data artifact. It depicts index constituents as individual volumes, reflecting price change through height of extrusion and color, as well as trade volume through size. Following a one-dimensional tabular format, constituents are arranged based on price—the trajectory from minimum to maximum price indicated by a white vector. Clicking on a constituent isolates it along with other constituents related by industry.

Copyright 2008 Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Plug-in Rotary

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:00:00 EST

The city of the 21st century is faced by a unique set of challenges for transportation. Despite a higher proliferation of bike lanes throughout the city, busy intersections are still a danger to cyclists and drivers alike.

Our proposed solution is a separation of both forms of traffic at major intersections. Rather than further segmenting already confined city streets, bicycle traffic is elevated off the street on its own infrastructural layer. The Plug-in Rotary sits atop major intersections as a traffic circle for bicycles, providing recreational park areas and bike rentals at the center. An urban-scale module, the rotary can be used repeatedly throughout the city. At night, a lighting scheme integrated into the ramps and rotary illuminates areas both above and below the structure.

Copyright 2008 Maki Tsuchiya & Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

sachakolin.com

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST

Look Up is the biography of the Paris-born and Vienna-trained artist Sacha Kolin (1911-1981), who navigated the competitive New York art world with talent, charm, and persistence. The design of this website emphasizes the duality of the relationship between the author, Lisa Thaler, and her subject, Sacha Kolin.

Copyright 2008 Lisa Thaler. All rights reserved.

Obama Button

This design was my contribution to the Obama Button Project, produced by Various Projects.

See the other contributions over at Project No. 8. All proceeds were donated to the Obama General Election Campaign.

Japan

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST

The Alexa Country Top 100 measures the most popular websites per country. In an attempt to portray the aesthetic gestalt of the everyday, aggregate online experience, Compressed Portals depicts a country’s most popular websites, compressed horizontally to fit an A0 format.

The data used in this print is for Japan, June 5, 2008

Copyright 2008 Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

US

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST

The Alexa Country Top 100 measures the most popular websites per country. In an attempt to portray the aesthetic gestalt of the everyday, aggregate online experience, Compressed Portals depicts a country’s most popular websites, compressed horizontally to fit an A0 format.

The data used in this print is for the US, June 4, 2008

Copyright 2008 Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Look Up: The Life and Art of Sacha Kolin

Wed, 14 May 2008 00:00:00 EST

Look Up is the biography of the Paris-born and Vienna-trained artist Sacha Kolin (1911-1981), who navigated the competitive New York art world with talent, charm, and persistence. The design of this biography reflects Sacha’s paradoxical and larger-than-life personality, as a collection of fragmentary images and quotes, brought together in collage-like (even sculpture-like) form to create a coherent picture of her life.“... Thaler’s innovative and tireless research and dedication to bringing mischievous and daring Kolin and her “spare and gestural art” back into the light has resulted in an involving, surprising, gracefully designed, meticulously documented, and picture-rich first biography. Kolin was as eccentric as she was talented, what with her fear of dentists, crazy love for her salukis, and reckless insistence on living far beyond her means. A remarkable artist who worked against great odds, a wildly impractical hustler with chutzpah, Kolin is fascinating and evocative, and Thaler portrays her with precision and sensitivity.” —Donna Seaman, BooklistCopyright 2008 Lisa Thaler. All rights reserved.

One Laptop per Child UI featured in Design and the Elastic Mind at MoMA, 2008

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST

Glowlab. Featured video “Brooklyn Bridge.” October 3, 2007

Wed, 03 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST

Brooklyn Bridge

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST

This piece is part of a series of work dealing with the idea of collective gestalt. It is comprised of nearly 100 images of the Brooklyn Bridge, taken by 74 individual photographers under a Creative Commons license. The images were arranged sequentially to form a single, archetypal gesture that describes the space through a range of vantage points. The result is an assemblage of different perspectives and moments in time. It elevates the meaning of gesture from a singular or disparate occurrence to a multiplicity, a link between individual agents. It raises questions of a universal perception of space across cultures, as well as the collective meaning of place, in particular a place—like the Brooklyn Bridge—of pivotal, even global significance.

This work is protected under the Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

Community Topographies

Fri, 06 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST

Branded communities are the latest chapter in the narrative of the ideal or utopian city. They are also the outcome of a changing relationship between identity and community. Community is a reflexive concept: just as identity is a product of community, communities are a product of identity. Supported by the changing role of location, we are more enabled (and therefore perhaps more inclined) to choose our communities from the standpoint of how they might complement or contribute to our sense of self.

This visualization of 12 communities seeks to address the question of how identity is expressed in the design of the new communities appearing in or adjacent to cities around the world.

Copyright 2007 Christian Marc Schmidt and Maki Tsuchiya. All rights reserved.

Vague Terrain. Grand Central Terminal featured in Sample Culture. June 26, 2007

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST

DesignInquiry. Presentation “Identity and the Branded Community.” Vinalhaven, Maine. June 17—22, 2007

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST

Grand Central Terminal

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST

This piece is comprised of over 100 images of Grand Central Terminal in New York City, taken by nearly 100 individual photographers under a Creative Commons license. These images are arranged sequentially to form a single, archetypal gesture that describes the space through a range of vantage points. The resulting video is an assemblage of different perspectives and moments in time. It elevates the meaning of gesture from a singular or disparate occurrence to a multiplicity, a link between individual agents. It raises questions of a universal perception of space across cultures, as well as the collective meaning of place, in particular a place of pivotal, even “global” significance.

This work is protected under the Creative Commons license: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported

Voids

Mon, 07 May 2007 00:00:00 EST

This print shows lots in Manhattan sorted by their block and lot index numbers, in inverse sequence to mirror the North-South orientation of the island. Lots depicted in white are vacant.

Copyright 2007 Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Arratia, Beer

Thu, 15 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST

The website for Arratia, Beer, a Berlin-based gallery and project space, emphasizes its dual German/American orientation through a filter that switches between German and English without leaving the page, simply by hiding or revealing the selected language.

Copyright 2008 Arratia, Beer. All rights reserved.

The Digital Hub. Projected Weekends, screening of Driving. Dublin, Ireland. March 2—5, 2007

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST

Connections

250 New York City local bus routes are isolated from their geospatial context and organized by frequency of service, low to high. An individual bus route is assigned a single 8.5" × 11" sheet of pastel-tone bond paper—colors correspond to the five borroughs.

Copyright 2007 Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Atlantic Yards

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST

Site: Atlantic Yards, Brooklyn, NY. January 7, 2007, 8:30 AM—9:30 AM
For the series Invisible Borders, I use sequenced still images to trace paths around political and/or historical boundaries within cities—borders which may have had, or will have, a profound influence on the urban morphology of a city.

Copyright 2007 Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

In the Country of Last Things 4-Ever. Curated by Emma Wilcox, at Gallery Aferro. Newark, NJ. October 20—November 11, 2006

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST

New York

Sat, 14 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST

San Francisco

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST

Los Angeles

Fri, 13 Oct 2006 00:00:00 EST

Entropia

Wed, 06 Sep 2006 00:00:00 EST

Entropia is a typeface that responds to sound. Sound makes Entropia increasingly agitated, and the more agitated, the more illegible it becomes. Yet, the more illegible, the more unique it is: absorbed sound from the environment translates into modulations of the letterforms themselves, leaving behind an imprint of activity. Entropia can be set to various states of sensitivity, determining the speed of its growing deterioration. Based on single-stroke letterforms derived from the lettering at the base of the Trajan Column in Rome, Entropia is constantly changing, always in a state of becoming.

Copyright 2006 Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Glossolalia. Curated by Emma Wilcox and Evonne Davis, at Gallery Aferro. Newark, NJ. September 7—October 1, 2006

Driving

Sat, 01 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EST

Constructing narrative from disparate, yet thematically related elements, the basis of this piece is video footage found through Google Video using “driving” as the search query. I chose results which depicted the road from a first-person perspective. Footage matching this criteria was edited and sequenced to create a narrative spanning various locations around the world, different weather and traffic conditions, highways, country roads and city streets, as well as different times of day. The result is a commentary on the construct and use of space as defined by the path—told through the lenses of individual agents, acting independently, yet brought together by means of a single, external objective and curatorial intent. The final piece was re-uploaded to Google Video.

2006 Copyright Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

1833

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 00:00:00 EST

For the series Invisible Borders, I use sequenced still images to trace paths around political and/or historical boundaries within cities—borders which may have had, or will have, a profound influence on the urban morphology of a city.

The site for this piece was Chicago, IL, tracing the original 1833 city limits. Series shot on March 19, 2006, 8.00am—10.00am

Copyright 2006 Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Loop

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 00:00:00 EST

For the series Invisible Borders, I use sequenced still images to trace paths around political and/or historical boundaries within cities—borders which may have had, or will have, a profound influence on the urban morphology of a city.

The site for this piece was Chicago, IL, tracing the Chicago Loop community area boundaries. February 4, 2006, 7.30am—9.30am

Copyright 2006 Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Chicago

Sun, 29 Jan 2006 00:00:00 EST

String City

Mon, 01 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EST

Connections are the foundation of String City. A call—the prelude to a personal meeting. Intimate, direct, intangible, choreographing the movement of bodies within the infrastructure of the city. An extension of the self, mobile phones allow us to feel the pervasive presence of others. Those, whose names remain in our portable memories, forming personal, curated, virtual communities.

Enveloping existing buildings, String City creates a contextual relationship between buildings by connecting them across liminal areas. Inclusive and parasitic, this network is the architecture of a new city, built over the past, organically articulated. And while the urban environment is a container for collective memory, a growing aggregate of historic artifacts, String City refreshes itself constantly—through our interactions, and through the continuous process of urban sedimentation.

This is a city of intersections. Our movements form invisible patterns. A call makes them visible. Showing points of origin, and the traces that connect them. Their intersections linking people whose paths may never cross. In String City, we create patterns by our collective activity, modulating the urban fabric around us.

Copyright 2005 Maki Tsuchiya, Christian Marc Schmidt. All rights reserved.

Homage to 140 Squares

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Composition inspired by Joseph Albers. Each print is computationally generated with a unique composition and color palette.

Copyright 2005 Christian Marc Schmidt

Chicago

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Land-use data for Chicago is visualized by means of textures created from satellite imagery.

Copyright 2005 Christian Marc Schmidt

New York

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 00:00:00 EST

Land-use data for in New York City is visualized by means of textures created from satellite imagery.

Copyright 2005 Christian Marc Schmidt

40° 47' N/73° 58' W 1975—2004

Fri, 07 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Visualization of monthly average highest and lowest temperatures recorded for New York City from 1975 through 2004.

Copyright 2005 Christian Marc Schmidt

41° 59' 10" N/87° 54' 51" W 1975—2004

Thu, 06 Jan 2005 00:00:00 EST

Visualization of monthly average highest and lowest temperatures recorded for Chicago from 1975 through 2004.

Copyright 2005 Christian Marc Schmidt

Reading the Future: Experimental Books From Yale, San Francisco Center For The Book. San Francisco, CA. June 11—August 13, 2004

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 00:00:00 EST

Resfest Digital Film Festival, film short entry “Geographic Illiteracy.” 2003

Sun, 01 Jun 2003 00:00:00 EST