Tim Schwartz

This piece simply documents a moment. Hillary Clinton speaks to a nation and concedes victory to Donald Trump. At the same time Americans — or at least identities on social media — activate the digital moment around her.

Society has reached a new plateau in the continuous snowballing of technological progress; we stand at a place where we need devices on our bodies or in our homes. The Echo is an internet-connected device produced by Amazon to be a voice-first virtual assistant that lives in your home, much like Siri on an iPhone. […]

An installation shown at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art from May 16 to May 22, 2016. The text below is by Mardee Goff, Curator of BMoCA. CryptoTherapy is an installation by Los Angeles-based artist Tim Schwartz that utilizes the front windows of BMoCA. Covering each windowpane with a white sheet, Schwartz has created an opaque layer […]

For the last two years I have been experimenting with eInk screens, you might have seen these screens in a Kindle. They are matte, grey-scale, and interestingly only require power to change the image on the screen. For the show Book Futures in Australia I created a new piece comprised of fifty of these screens. […]

By sifting through the digital Google versions of the 400+ books that were purchased for the show Materials On Reserve, I found four pages that depict anomalies or errors in the scanning and digitization of books into ebooks. The prints are complemented by physical copies of the scanned books.

A barcode scanner is attached to two receipt printers. The books in the exhibition Materials On Reserve can be scanned and two receipts are printed. Each receipt contains information on the book and a QR code links to the digital version of the book. One receipt is for the viewer, while the others pile up […]

I recently finished a paper discussing my last series of works in the context of melancholy in the digital age. The abstract is below and the entire paper is available as a pdf: Loss, Meaning, and Melancholy in the Digital Age Abstract As society has absorbed the cornucopia of digital technologies of the late twentieth and […]

A series of 11 prints derived from loss in the digitization process of the famous “The Temple of Flora.” In1799 Robert John Thornton released the first installment of the book, it was the first large color floral volume ever produced. Inspired by Linnaeus, the founder of modern botany, Thornton set out to represent the newly […]

In 2010, I spent six months traveling the United States in a mobile research lab, visiting over fifty libraries, museums, and archives investigating what is being lost as these institutions transition into collecting and storing digital artifacts. Out of this research I created three new artworks (Botanical Loss, Modern Methods of Book Composition, and Reimagining Wild Bill) and […]

Dripping directly out of the structure of the building, this piece is in a continuous state of oxidation. Nozzles at the top of the sculpture spray salt water onto the sculpture which in turn rusts the iron. The piece was first installed at the Oceanside Museum of Art and then shown at compactspace gallery in Los […]

World Conspiracy represents an individual’s conception of the world. This piece was constructed through the analysis of over 10,000 documents saved by an anonymous conspiracy theorist from September 19, 2001 to January 15, 2009. The frequency with which a country is mentioned in these documents dictates the size of that country. For example, Israel and […]

Click here to go to the Data Graphing Interface Last year I wrote a data mining application that can automatically gather term usage data from the New York Times website. I used this data for a number of my projects including Geohistoriography and Command Center. I have just released a public version of the graphing interface […]

This show captures how America views the world as seen through the lens of the American media. All data was collected from the New York Times, namely the number of articles written about a certain country for each year. The two wall drawings are representations of the 2008 state of America’s view of the world. […]

Command Center replays the last 150 years of history, by showing the frequency of terms used in the New York Times. Over a four minute period, the four digit LED display counts the years from 1851 to 2008. At the same time the gauges move to their respective values, each of which represents the number […]

A card catalog designed to hold all of the songs on my iPod, 7,390 songs. Each song is cataloged on a single card. The cards are organized in reverse chronological order, that is the songs I listened to most recently are in the front of the catalog, and the songs I haven’t listened to in […]

The piece is attached via a network cable to the internet where it monitors news and search results for “paris hilton” and “paris france” and displays an average result in real-time.

A collaboration by Fame Theory. While looking through the data collected for famegame.com, we began to realize that some big name artists were turning up in the socialite database. Cross-referencing the artists showing at Art Basel Miami with the socialite database yielded 150 artist matches. Using the data already accrued on these artists, a LED […]

A collaboration with Fame Theory. Fame Game began as an investigation into the growth of celebrity in our media. By analyzing red-carpet events we came up with a map of the socialite/celebrity world consisting of 120,000 individuals and 6,000 organizations. We could intimately understand who scratched who’s back. This raw data eventually turned into a […]

I created a periodic table of elements by taking the first image returned by google when the name of an element was searched for. This piece creates a snapshot of what our culture associates with these particular words. For example, Platinum is associated with a hair color most often, Krypton with Superman, and Lithium with […]