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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: Fake Love (acquired by The New York Times in 2016) and Cosmic Berlin for Nokia, Kunsthaus Zürich, Zeit Online, Spiegel Online, NZZ, Finanzwende, Julian Oliver, OpenDataCity, MIT Senseable City Lab (Data Collider, Singapore), AlgorithmWatch, Technologiestiftung Berlin, 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. Began with a six-month artist residency in 2023, then stayed on until the KITeGG project ended in December 2025; still affiliated with the lab.

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

2025
unStable Mirror — IPAI Living Room, Heilbronn
2024
Transferscope — Synthesized Reality — Hidden Layers, KISD Cologne
Transferscope — Synthesized Reality — Mensch und Computer, Karlsruhe
Transferscope — Synthesized Reality — KIKK Festival, Namur
Transferscope — Synthesized Reality — IEEE VISAP, online
Transferscope — Synthesized Reality — Correlations Forum, HfG Offenbach
unStable Mirror — KIKK Festival, Namur
2023
unStable Mirror — PUSH UX Conference, Munich
2022
Surprise Machines — Curatorial A(i)gents, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge MA
2019
cf. city flows — .Futuro, Rio de Janeiro
cf. city flows — CityLAB Berlin
2018
Art of the March — IEEE VISAP, Berlin
cf. city flows — The Art of Networks III, Northeastern University, Boston
cf. city flows — Existência Numérica, Oi Futuro Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro
cf. city flows — Politiken des Designs, Kunstraum Potsdam
HARVEST Visualization — The Work of Wind, Mississauga
2017
HARVEST Visualization — Konstmuseet i Skövde
2016
cf. city flows — IEEE VISAP, Baltimore
2015
cf. city flows — Streams and Traces, Galerie erstererster, Berlin
VIKUS: Past Visions — Streams and Traces, Galerie erstererster, Berlin
2014
Beyond Perception — APPLAUS, FH Potsdam
Brain State Sharing — Neurovillage, Freqs of Nature Festival, Niedergörsdorf
2013
Border Bumping — MediaCities, Buffalo
Brain State Sharing — Freqs of Nature Festival, Niedergörsdorf
Fillip — Biennale Internationale Design, Saint-Étienne
Fillip — aveneo Innovation Area, Nuremberg
2012
Border Bumping — Mobile Republic, Abandon Normal Devices, North West England
Brain State Sharing — Freqs of Nature Festival, Niedergörsdorf
2011
Brain State Sharing — Lange Nacht der Wissenschaften / Languages of Emotion, FU Berlin
Brain State Sharing — Urania Planetarium (Powerdome), Potsdam

Recognition

2022
A Visual Exploration of Two Museum Collections — Information is Beautiful Awards, Arts, Entertainment & Culture (Longlist)
2018
Art of the March — Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards, Politics & Global (Shortlist)
2016
cf. city flows — Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards, Dataviz Project (Longlist)
VIKUS: Past Visions — Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards, Interactive Visualization (Longlist)
2015
Visualizing the German Digital Library — Kantar Information is Beautiful Awards, Dataviz Project (Shortlist)
2014
NZZ Wandelhalle — Data Journalism Awards, Journalistic data visualization on a single theme (Shortlist)

Publications

2026

Archivi dei disegni di architettura: Fruizioni contemporanee (Sapienza Università Editrice). Dario Rodighiero, Lins Derry, Douglas Duhaime, Jordan Kruguer, Maximilian C. Mueller, Christopher Pietsch, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Jeff Steward, metaLAB.

2024

Mensch und Computer 2024 – Workshopband (Demos). Christopher Pietsch, Aeneas Stankowski.

2022

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

Information Design Journal 27(1): 21–34. Dario Rodighiero, Lins Derry, Douglas Duhaime, Jordan Kruguer, Maximilian C. Mueller, Christopher Pietsch, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Jeff Steward, metaLAB.

2020

Leonardo 53(1): 6–24 (entry: cf. city flows). Till Nagel, Christopher Pietsch.

2017

Information Design Journal 23(1): 39–47. Marian Dörk, Christopher Pietsch, Gabriel Credico.

Digital Humanities Quarterly 11(2). Katrin Glinka, Christopher Pietsch, Marian Dörk.

Konferenzband zur DHd 2017. Katrin Glinka, Christopher Pietsch, Marian Dörk.

2016

Proceedings of the IEEE VIS 2016 Arts Program (VISAP'16), Baltimore, pp. 23–30. Till Nagel, Christopher Pietsch, Marian Dörk.

International Journal for Digital Art History 2. Katrin Glinka, Christopher Pietsch, Carsten Dilba, Marian Dörk.