Maximilian Schich

@schichmax.bsky.social

2319 Followers 1899 Following

Professor for #CulturalDataAnalytics at Tallinn University in #Estonia #complexity #netsci #arthistory #aesthetics #culturalanalytics #compsocsci #infovis "My PhD is in Art History" – Dr. Zoidberg (max/max)

Analog oscilloscope trace of the cover gesture on Lüning & Ussachevsky's "Tape Recorder Music at the Museum of Modern Art October 28th 1952". I'm pretty sure the original is a hand gesture. To avoid harsh harmonics, I have connected the end of the trace back to the beginning with an additional orbit.

The word "BUTTLE", with the "B" induced by a dead fly.
Still from Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).

cf. https://youtu.be/wzFmPFLIH5s?si=8kRo-SCiXGWui131&t=63

A portrait of Bob Moog holding up Theremin antennae to his head like antlers, while staring into the camera, published in Grand Royal, a magazine which Wendy Carlos fittingly diagnosed "demonstrates sexual hangups, and little or no empathy". This essentially sums up the 1990s.

Source: https://archive.org/details/grand-royal-03-1996-dregs-ia/page/54/mode/2up

Parrotfish still from The Octopus Lady (2026)) "Why Researching Parrotfish Almost Drove Me to Madness." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgYMslXhskY

A satellite picture of Iceland from radio.garden, with a station highlighted on the remote East coast. Listen: https://radio.garden/listen/seydisfjoerdur-community-radio-fm-107-1/ZvpDm7A6

[screenshot from https://intheweights.com/p/maximilian-schich] "Maximilian Schich / Art historian and network scientist / 758 strength · Top 4% / GPT-5.5 says / Art historian and complexity scientist known for work on cultural data analysis and network science."

Fingered strawberry looking like a water bear.

Google Trends plot for the search term "umstritten" in Germany 2004 to 2026 rises over time.

ExStra ZellenzTegie des Bundes & der Länder

Screenshot of from Lemmings (Amiga 500 long play)
https://youtu.be/6tQHKbCxnGQ?si=FLHCllr9D3MUfHSA&t=21454

"Fig. 4.2. Colorings of the top 18 eigenvectors..." from Cucuringu, Mihai, Vincent D. Blondel, and Paul Van Dooren. "Extracting spatial information from networks with low-order eigenvectors." Physical Review E—Statistical, Nonlinear, and Soft Matter Physics 87, no. 3 (2013): 032803.

A simple switch the axis of rotation:

In second 29 in today's Artemis II interview, the mic is turned around its roll axis.

This contrasts with the iconic pitch axis turn of the bone in 2001 Odyssey in Space, after it has been turned into a weapon, famously prefiguring a military space station.

At the minute mark of the interview, the mic stands still like a monolith, surrounded by astronauts in meditative silence, sending a wonderful message from the moon.

🎤 🔇 🌓 ⬛ 🌍 🕊️

Trending

1. No Kings
2. Drag Race
3. Queer Writers
4. ICE Protests
5. Legal Counsel Access

Photo from a decade ago: Hungarian far-right Viktor Orban exchanges smiles with Manfred Weber, Member of Germany's "Christian Social Union" (CSU), President of the European People's Party since 2022, and Leader of the EPP Group in the European Parliament since 2014.

Image source: Deutschlandfunk 2015-09-23
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/besuch-bei-der-csu-orban-fluechtlingspolitik-ohne-100.html

"Fig 137. Superimposition of Dürer's drawing (red), Burkmair's woodcut, and Dürer's [later] woodcut (mirrored in grey)" [of the Indian Rhinoceros unicornus, which arrived in Lisbon in 1515 CE]. (Both Dürer and Burkmair copied their Rhinoceros from a visual depiction in a letter from Lisbon, with Burkmair adding ferocious hair on the neck, and Dürer enlarging the horn). The Dürer drawing and Burkmair woodcut are geometrically congruent, and consistent with the animal species. Burkmair's rope binding the front legs is also documented in another depiction in the prayerbook of Emperor Maximilian I.

Source:
Schich, Maximilian. Rezeption und Tradierung als Komplexes Netzwerk. Der CENSUS und visuelle Dokumente zu den Thermen in Rom. Munich: Verlag Biering & Brinkmann, 2009. open access: https://doi.org/10.11588/artdok.00000700

Portrait of Elisabeth Bik @elisabethbik.bsky.social

A heatmap matrix of highlighting directed "influence" of academic disciplines (rows to columns), replacing discrete Joy Division and Unknown Pleasures of imagined nested hierarchies of domination, as hallucinated by your favourite LLM. The disciplines are ordered top to bottom, left to right: Computer Science, Arts, Literature, History, Economics, Social Sciences, Cognitive Science, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Philosophy, and Mathematics. The hallucinated values range from no influence in black, to strong influence in white. Self-influence on the diagonal is assumed to be strong, which is probably bullshit.

"Seit 1601 nicht lebend gefunden" [picture of a Dodo] "120"
from Heinrich Berghaus: Physikalischer Atlas (1845)

Portrait of David G. Stork

Screenshot from "YoutubeEE / Video unavailable / The uploader has not made this video available in your country / Glenn masters her nerves in Olympics team event free skate / Olympics / 15.9M subscribers."

Screenshot of German Public Broadcasting: "Sportschau / Olympia live / Wiedergabefehler / Das Video kann leider nicht abgespielt werden. / Beim Abruf aus dem Ausland kann Geoblocking die Ursache sein. Mehr dazu: hilfe.ard.de /
Live Eiskunstlauf: Teamwettbewerb Tag 1"

Rosvall et al. 2026 "Fig. 20. Screenshot of Infomap Bioregions. The web application enables interactive exploration of species distribution data and bioregional patterns. The map shows mammal occurrence distributions where white areas lack sufficient data for statistics. Infomap Bioregions is available at https://www.mapequation.org/bioregions."

Full paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/3779648

Putin pretends to care for Eastern Ukraine, which was under-expressed in Soviet Newsreel propaganda!

Detail from Figure 1 in Tamm, Mikhail V., Mila Oiva, Ksenia D. Mukhina, Mark Mets, and Maximilian Schich. "City representation in Soviet propaganda and geographical biases in cultural data." Nature Cities (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00380-1

"Significantly over- and underrepresented cities, insignificantly over- and underrepresented cities and cities which are mentioned roughly as expected are shown with cyan, red, grey-cyan, grey-pink and grey circles, respectively. Cities in Moscow and Donbas regions are shown in smaller circles to reduce their overlap."

Detail from the frontispiece of Hobbes' Leviathan [The sovereign king's body made up of a mass of people]. How it started...

Trump admin clearly think they are a 'sovereign' in the sense of Hobbes:

"The sovereign has twelve principal rights:
1. Because a successive covenant cannot override a prior one, the subjects cannot (lawfully) change the form of government.
2. Because the covenant forming the commonwealth results from subjects giving to the sovereign the right to act for them, the sovereign cannot possibly breach the covenant; and therefore the subjects can never argue to be freed from the covenant because of the actions of the sovereign.
3. The sovereign exists because the majority has consented to his rule; the minority have agreed to abide by this arrangement and must then assent to the sovereign's actions.
4. Every subject is author of the acts of the sovereign: hence the sovereign cannot injure any of his subjects and cannot be accused of injustice.
5. Following this, the sovereign cannot justly be put to death by the subjects.
6. The purpose of the commonwealth is peace, and the sovereign has the right to do whatever he thinks necessary for the preserving of peace and security and prevention of discord. Therefore, the sovereign may judge what opinions and doctrines are averse, who shall be allowed to speak to multitudes, and who shall examine the doctrines of all books before they are published.
7. To prescribe the rules of civil law and property.
8. To be judge in all cases.
9. To make war and peace as he sees fit and to command the army.
10. To choose counsellors, ministers, magistrates and officers.
11. To reward with riches and honour or to punish with corporal or pecuniary punishment or ignominy.
12. To establish laws about honour and a scale of worth."

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(Hobbes_book)

"Pandora's birth, vase image in Oxford"

Screenshot from https://www.city-data.com/#data featuring a drop-down menu to color choropleth maps of city neighborhoods, indicating the % of "races", here exemplified in "Races – White alone (%)" in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul metro area.

Fig. 3: Systems model of sustainable development illustrating the layering, nestedness and key linkages between nature, economy and society. / The core model is in the center in bold text and arrows: nature forms the foundation, with material contributions (through direct use of NCP (=nature’s contributions to people)) flowing directly into the economy, which generates societal benefits to actors in society. Actors in society hold values that influence the indirect drivers determining how the economy operates, and thus the scope and intensity of direct drivers impacting on nature. The form of the model reinforces concepts of circular economy. The fuller model (normal text, lighter arrows) includes broader values that are poorly addressed in the sustainable development paradigm: intrinsic, non-economic instrumental and relational values, and reciprocity of interactions between people and nature.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-025-00009-3

Photo of a keyboard of an Olivetti Studio 44 typewriter produced in the 1960s: "Italian-made for the Venezuelan market, this typewriter has currency symbols for bolivares (Bs) as well as dollars or pesos ($), and the necessary keys and diacritical marks for typing in Spanish."

Source: https://typewriterdatabase.com/196x-olivetti-studio-44.12441.typewriter

De Ruijter Royaal extra puur chocoladehagel on two slices of bread with butter. The bread is whole grain but does not quite live up to Mandelbrot.

Literal "grotesque horror vacui" in the 2025 Oval Office wall decoration at the White House in Washington, DC. Gold ornament, as available via a Chinese mail order retailer, fills all wall space between gold-framed paintings and around a crammed niche where even the crowning conch is decorated with an additional vase. The gold ornament is clearly cut in arbitrary places and recombined without sense for symmetric composition or even asymmetric organic harmony. Green, magenta, and blue box annotations indicate the arbitrary repetitions. Note that the overall grotesque style of wall decoration seems to be inspired by Emperor Nero's original "Domus Aurea" (literally "Golden House"), which was found resembling a vast grotto under the Baths of Trajan besides the Colosseum in Rome, covered by the latter to officially forget Nero the tyrant, who let Rome burn down to the ground. All that said, even Nero would not need additional food or feather to vomit in the face of such a rampant molestation of classical architecture. [PS: Yeah, nobody needs to follow the rules of classical architecture, unless you're a tyrant who literally demand classical style in public buildings].

Image "100. Woman with microscope." in
Carl Sagan et al. Voyager Golden Record (1977).

[Woman of color in lab coat, headscarf using a microscope, prominently wearing a big golden earring].

Source: https://goldenrecord.org/png/100.png

A woman looking through a binocular microscope performing an "Inspection of the center engraving on the nickel plated mother record" during the production of Sagan et al.: Voyager Golden Record (1977).

Image "60. Jane Goodall with chimps." in
Carl Sagan et al. Voyager Golden Record (1977).

[A group of chimps grooming each other in the foreground, observed by Jane Goodall and an assistant operating a camera on a tripod in the background, all within a scene of forest vegetation].

Source: https://goldenrecord.org/png/060.png

Image "52. Diagram of Vertebrate Evolution." in
Carl Sagan et al. Voyager Golden Record (1977).

[from bottom to top: a shark, a fish, an amphibian, a frog, a reptile, and in top row from left to right: an eagle, a prey gazelle, a man and a woman, the latter two similar to the Pioneer plaque, but now the women greeting); all figures are given in black outline with sketchy light grey pencil filling].

Source: https://goldenrecord.org/png/052.png

The central pediment inscription of New Saint Peter's Basilica in Rome does not mention god, Jesus, or the patron saint, but the name of the grifting nepotist cardinal under which the facade was completed in larger than life letters: "Paul V. Borghese".

Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Basilica_di_San_Pietro_in_Vaticano_September_2015-1a.jpg (detail)

"Times New Roman is narrow-minded" [Always has been]

Density of Population in Europe in a NUTS-3 map with national data from 2017.

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_by_NUTS_3_region_(2017).svg

Screenshot from https://radio.garden/ showing a minimalist satellite picture background of natural earth, centered on Lake Bolsena north of Rome. A green circle (without cross-hairs) indicates the focus area from which radio stations are received, in this case "Trevignano Romano". Browsing stations via moving on the map is as fluid as a large heavy almost friction-less volume knob on a top tier 1970s radio receiver; fine-tuning is possible via channel selection in the focus area using the intuitive controls in the lower left.

"My America
In his latest book, chef Kwame Onwuachi explores the foods, flavors, and family traditions that compose his experience of what it means to be an American.

By Kwame Onwuachi
Chef Kwame Onwuachi
Kwame Onwuachi
Kwame Onwuachi is the chef of Tatiana in New York City and competed on Top Chef season 13. In 2019, he was a Food & Wine Best New Chef, the James Beard Foundation's Rising Star Chef of the Year, and Esquire's Chef of the Year. Kwame's the author of Notes from a Young Black Chef and My America: Recipes from a Young Black Chef.

Food & Wine's Editorial Guidelines
and Joshua David Stein Published on May 17, 2022
Show me an America made of apple pie and hot dogs, baseball and Chevrolet, and I won't recognize it.

My America is a country of countless flavors and endless adaptation. The Bronx, where I grew up, contains multitudes: the Jamaicans of Gun Hill Road, where my father, himself half Jamaican and half Nigerian, lives; the West Indians from Wakefield; the Puerto Ricans and Dominicans of the south side, where I lived with my mother and sister; and countless more. With language, music, fashion, and, most importantly, food, they proudly proclaim that though they belong there, they are from elsewhere."

Source: https://www.foodandwine.com/chefs/kwame-onwuachi-my-america

"Albrecht Dürer's face transforms (1528) were among Thompson's inspirations"
Source: Wikipedia

A pair of Season Eqpt Kin_skis on 5mm of snow on Saturday, November 15, 2025 on a Balcony in Tallinn, before the sun burned away the snow again.

Der Grüne Lars Keitel [der kleine Drache Grisù] hat das Feuer gelöscht und wird vom CDU Fraktionsvorsitzenden Katja Gehrmann [blonder weisser Mann mit Schnauzer] zurechtgewiesen. [Symbolbild]

Sun Ra – Space is the Place (vinyl record cover)

Email text from "Academia": "You read the paper 'Astragal und Eiförmige Motive auf Stuckdekor der Wandmalerei Sirmiums'. We found a related paper on Academia: 'Soziale Veränderung in der ungarischen und östereichischen Gesellschaft der K(reisky)- und K(ádár)-Ära und Danach' Author Photo Valuch Tibor"

@schichmax with the Faun Barberini in the Munich Glyptothek.

Footprints in the morning dew from an intensive "skiing" session on a France Trampoline.

Ein Masskrug als Gastgeschenk: Andreas Scheuer (li.), Dorothee Bär und Florian Hahn (re.) bei Floridas Gouverneur Ron DeSantis.

aus:
"Scheuer kritisiert die 'grüne Gesprächspolizei'"
Süddeutsche Zeitung, 9. Mai 2023.

https://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/csu-desantis-florida-dienstreise-andreas-scheuer-kritik-1.5846982?reduced=true

A Lego sculpture of the orange fascist turd in the signature blue suit, red tie, and golden wig, built and displayed by an unknown customer at the Munich airport Lego store, August 21, 2025.

a cone of delicious black sesame ice cream that looks like concrete at Bartu in Munich.

Alexander Sacharoff, gemalt von Alexej von Jawlensky, Mitglied der Neuen Künstlervereinigung München ab 1909, geboren in Mariupol (in der heutigen Ukraine), Inkunabel der deutschen Kultur.

Bild: Wikipedia, public domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jawlensky_Sakharoff.jpg

Original: Lenbachhaus, München
https://www.lenbachhaus.de/digital/sammlung-online/detail/bildnis-des-taenzers-alexander-sacharoff-30018179

Screenshot from Google Trends showing an exponential rise of searches worldwide for "iphone alternatives", correlating with the US presidential inauguration and the onset of US tariffs.

"Franz Josef Strauß überreicht Joseph Kardinal Ratzinger als Abschiedsgeschenk ein Kruzifix aus Porzellan."

Bild: picture-alliance/dpa
via https://www.br.de/nachricht/inhalt/kirche-franz-strauss-102.html

Pauline Oliveros working with the Buchla 100 system.

Königsplatz (King's square) in Munich after the second World War. The pavement has been replaced with a green lawn, making the square a favorite hangout for a diverse crowd and the location of a great variety of events. Around the square one can see the Propyläen gate, the Glyptothek and Antikensammlung museums, the former Nazi-Party HQ buildings, now the Musikhochschule and Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, i.e. one of the largest art history libraries on earth, originally founded and serving to return artworks stolen by the Nazis. The foundations of the so called "Ehrentempel" (temples of honor) are now a biotopes for local plants, after US soldiers have destroyed them in 1945. In the foreground of the picture you can see the The Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism, which y'all should visit: https://www.nsdoku.de/en/

Screenshot from Google's NotebookLM demo video:
A slide with the title "The World of Surrealism", in a tasteless powerpointy font, above a 1990s web-style-guide-like divisor line, above a Dali-like melting watch in 1990s Microsoft clipart style. Below the caption aims to engage the viewer by saying "Okay! Let's dive in to the wild world of surrealism."

PS: You can tell it is Google, as OpenAI would have said "Let's delve into surrealism".

PPS: There is no need to dive into surrealism, as we are already drowning in it. ;)

Halston throwing a whiskey glass against the television, right after seeing the Calvin Klein jeans commercial.

Still taken from the eponymous fictionalised Netflix series episode S1:E4 "The Party's Over". https://www.netflix.com/search?q=halston&jbv=80245103 from min 28:30

"Marvin Minsky and Larry Page discuss AI" at SciFoo 2009.

"Larry Page hosted a discussion titled 'how do we create AI' that was one of the most talked about sessions of the weekend. [...] As you might imagine, consensus on how to create artificial intelligence, or even on how to define it was impossible. [...] Page and Minsky [...] both argued that creating human level artificial intelligence may not be as hard of a problem to solve as many people think. It seems one of the biggest obstacles to success is not the difficulty of the problem, but instead the simple fact that hardly anybody seems to be working on it."

Image source: Michael Clarke, https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/07/14/sci-foo-camp-day-2/p1000552-2/

Report source: SingularityHub Staff, https://singularityhub.com/2009/07/14/the-hub-goes-to-scifoo-2009-it-was-awesome-scifoo09/

"#881044 Kremer Watercolor Set Blue" (Farbbeispiele)

"Blue is by far the most popular color, both for women and for men. For centuries, blue was one of the most precious colors. With the Blue Watercolor Set, Kremer Pigmente is presenting 14 selected shades of blue around the latest pigment discovery, YInMn Blue. Note: The contained, real Indian Indigo has a typical smell."

Source: https://www.kremer-pigmente.com/en/shop/ready-made-colors/kremer-watercolors/watercolor-boxes/881044-kremer-watercolor-set-blue.html