Charis Tsevis

09/10/2026

While building my own mosaic software, I kept going back to the people who worked on these problems before me. Knowlton and Harmon at Bell Labs in 1966. Robert Silvers and the early photomosaics. Researchers experimenting with diffusion models today.
I’ve put sixty years of photographic mosaic algorithms into a timeline. It’s full of clever ideas, difficult choices, and a few things I disagree with. After all these years making mosaics, I still learned a lot putting it together.
https://www.tsevis.com/blog/history-of-mosaic-algorithms

18/09/2026

Study on a future American president.
Pete Buttigieg

14/09/2026

Apple future nostalgia mosaic portraits. Tim Cook, Steve Jobs.John Ternus.

23/06/2026

48 nations. Thousands of players. Billions of fragments of culture, memory, and identity assembling themselves, for a few weeks, into one overwhelming image. I can't watch a single match without seeing it as a mosaic. This has been my obsession for fifteen years. I finally wrote it all down.
https://tsevis.com/the-world-cup-through-a-mosaic-lens

03/06/2026

In 1966, Bell Labs produced a portrait from electronic circuit symbols. Viewed up close, it was pure abstraction. Viewed from a distance, a human figure emerged. The work was controversial enough to disappear quickly, but the problem it revealed would endure: how can meaning arise from the accumulation of discrete, locally insignificant parts?

That question lies at the heart of Computer-Assisted Mosaic Tessellation. More than an art form or a technique, it is a framework for understanding perception itself. Nature continuously invites us to zoom in and out, shifting between fragments and wholes, details and patterns, pixels and narratives. For the past 3 decades, I have explored that territory with a little help from science, math, and technology. Bellow is my eyeCircuit, one of my early multi-layered digital mosaics (circa 1999)

15/05/2026

open house 2026

16/04/2026

There is a principle I keep returning to after thirty years of making mosaics: the meaning of a system is not stored in its components. It emerges from their relationships.
I built Skiagrafia with that principle as a literal engineering rule.
Skiagrafia is a macOS application I have been developing for designers, illustrators, and motion artists. It takes folders of photographs and automatically, in batch, converts them into layered vector graphics and clean, transparent assets entirely on your machine. No cloud. No subscriptions. No data leaving your studio.
The pipeline chains together five specialized AI models, each chosen for one specific job: a vision model that reads what is in an image, a detection model that locates each object, a segmentation model that traces its exact boundary, an alpha matting model that softens the edges, and a vectorizer that converts everything into resolution-independent Bézier curves.
The new article on my blog traces the full story: the first sketch on graph paper, the model selection decisions, the architecture that holds it all together, and the design principles learned across five versions of the system.
The mosaic is never finished. It is always being laid.
Read the full article: tsevis.com/every-pixel-is-a-tesserae
GitHub: github.com/tsevis/skiagrafia

23/03/2026

What is American food?
For this editorial project with Artful Living. I built images from hundreds of small elements, ingredients, textures, and memories.
Each mosaic is made from pieces from different cultures, just as the food itself.

Because in the end, food is not just what we eat.
It’s who we are.

Acclaimed food writer Jeff Gordinier explores a new generation of chefs and cookbook authors shaping the narrative of American food today.

11/03/2026

For more than two years now, I’ve been experimenting with building software tools with the assistance of AI systems.
Many people call this “vibe coding”. Personally, I find the term a bit misleading. For me, the interesting question is not the coding itself, but the systems we try to build and the usefulness they bring.
In this short essay, I reflect on something my father taught me when I was young — the beauty of machines — and on how abstraction has always helped humanity advance technology.
Machine code, programming languages, frameworks… and now AI assistants.
A few thoughts about technology, tools, and the quiet role of simplification in progress.
You can read the article here:

Visual designer living on the sunny side of the planet. Photomosaics, computergraphics, neofuturism, digital art and graphic design

10/03/2026

Dear friends, I want to share my MacWhisperer project, a small tool I built for my Mac.
It helps me turn interesting videos and podcasts into clean, readable text that I can reuse in many ways.
I also use it to quickly record ideas and convert them into editable text right away, for myself, friends, or even machine workflows.
It runs on OpenAI’s Whisper model locally on my computer.
Simple, private, and really handy: no spoken content is uploaded to a web server.
Feel free to whisper anything.
Find it on my GitHub or Gitlab