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Curriculum Vitae

March 1986 — Düren, Germany

Experience

2009 — 2025
Freelance Interaction Designer & Developer

Selected work across data visualization, interaction design, frontend engineering, AI prototyping, and public-facing tools. Clients: New York Times, Zeit Online, Spiegel Online, NZZ, Julian Oliver, OpenDataCity, MIT Senseable City Lab, Nokia, AlgorithmWatch, facts and fiction, Universität Zürich, TU Berlin.

2023 — 2025
Creative Technologist — AI+D Lab, HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd

Interactive installations and AI prototypes including Transferscope, unStable Mirror, Lens interfaces, LoRA training workflows, and local/remote inference pipelines for exhibitions and teaching.

2014 — 2021
Researcher — Urban Complexity Lab, FH Potsdam (Associate)

Cultural collection interfaces, exploratory visualization, OpenGLAM tooling, urban data, and open-source systems including VIKUS Viewer.

Selected Technical & AI Work

2019 — 2025
Custom computational pipelines, infrastructure & inference

Training, deployment, and serving with Stable Diffusion 1.5, SDXL, Flux, LoRA style/object consistency, ComfyUI, OpenWebUI, vLLM, and Hugging Face Transformers; local and remote inference on Nvidia CUDA workstations and A100 clusters, plus AMD ROCm experiments on Radeon MI50 hardware.

2024
Corporate AI prototyping for STIHL

Scribble-to-Concept iPad workflow with Apple Pencil input and custom style LoRA training for corporate-design concept imagery.

Education

2008 — 2014
University of Applied Sciences Potsdam

Bachelor of Arts: Interface Design, specialized in Advanced Media and Information Visualization.

2006 — 2008
University of Applied Sciences HTW Berlin

Applied Computer Science.

2005 — 2006
Civil service

Rurtalwerkstätten Düren (sheltered workshop).

1996 — 2005
Gymnasium Kreuzau

High School Diploma (Abitur) in Maths, Biology, Computer Science.

Exhibitions

2024
Transferscope — Synthesized Reality — KIKK Festival, Namur
Transferscope — Synthesized Reality — IEEE VISAP, Tampa
Transferscope — Synthesized Reality — Correlations Forum, HfG Offenbach
2023
unStable Mirror — KIKK Festival, Namur
2018
cf. city flows — The Art of Networks III, Boston
2017
HARVEST Visualization — Konstmuseet i Skövde
2016
cf. city flows — IEEE VISAP, Baltimore
2015
cf. city flows — Streams and Traces, Berlin
VIKUS: Past Visions — Streams and Traces, Berlin
2014
Beyond Perception — FH Potsdam, Potsdam
2012
Border Bumping — Mobile Republic (Arts Council England)
2011
Brain State Sharing — Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften / Languages of Emotion, FU Berlin

Publications

2024
Transferscope – Making Multi-Modal Conditioning for Image Diffusion Models Tangible

Mensch und Computer 2024. Christopher Pietsch, Aeneas Stankowski.

2022
Von der Wolke zum Pfad – Visuelle und assoziative Exploration zweier kultureller Sammlungen

DHd 2022. Viktoria Brüggemann, Mark-Jan Bludau, Christopher Pietsch, Marian Dörk.

Surprise Machines – Revealing Harvard Art Museums' image collection

Information Design Journal 2022. Dario Rodighiero, Douglas Duhaime, Christopher Pietsch, Lins Derry, Jordan Kruguer, Jeffrey Schnapp.

2017
One view is not enough: High-level visualizations of a large cultural collection

Information Design Journal 23. Marian Dörk, Christopher Pietsch, Gabriel Credico.

Past Visions and Reconciling Views: Visualizing Time, Texture and Themes in Cultural Collections

Digital Humanities Quarterly 11. Katrin Glinka, Christopher Pietsch, Marian Dörk.

Von sammlungsspezifischen Visualisierungen zu nachnutzbaren Werkzeugen

Konferenzband zur DHd. Katrin Glinka, Christopher Pietsch, Marian Dörk.

2016
Staged Analysis: From Evocative to Comparative Visualizations of Urban Mobility

IEEE VISAP / Information Visualization. Till Nagel, Christopher Pietsch, Marian Dörk.

Linking structure, texture and context in a visualization of historical drawings by Frederick William IV

Katrin Glinka, Christopher Pietsch, Carsten Dilba, Marian Dörk.