Early in his career Schmidt created large-scale commercial art and advertising installations, including work with Universal Studios.¹ By 2006 his generative work was showing internationally: his pieces appeared in “Further Processing” at the Kunstverein Medienturm in Graz, a show curated by Marius Watz that also featured Casey Reas, Lia and Mark Napier.⁴ For the 2009 exhibition “Decode: Digital Design Sensations” at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, he created the show's commissioned graphic identity and, with Sascha Pohflepp, co-created the data visualization piece Social Collider.⁵ He has led creative coding and Clojure workshops internationally since 2009.⁶ Bjørn Staal has called him one of his personal heroes, noting that few people have been as active in writing open-source code and documentation or in running workshops.⁷ Robert Hodgin has named him an early influence alongside Casey Reas and Jared Tarbell.⁸

Schmidt began releasing generative works on fxhash in late 2021 with De/Frag and De/FragV2. The second piece is a study of Voronoi diagrams computed with the Jump Flood Algorithm and rendered with his thi.ng/umbrella toolkit.² Further pieces followed through 2022 and 2023, including Quasiflock, You've Been Liberated, C-SCAPE and Marblemania.^2,9 You've Been Liberated is a generative voxel scene made in memory of the victims of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, with proceeds going to the Ukrainian Emergency Response Fund.¹⁰ A 2022 edition of C-SCAPE, #181, entered the collection of Le Random.¹¹

Schmidt has argued that critique of generative art should start with process rather than appearance, tweeting that “there's more to generative aesthetics than appearance”.¹¹ He describes the constraints an artist imposes on a generative system as “biases” and “subjectivity”.¹²