Matt Roberts

Breathe the Machine at ELO2020

Breathe the Machine – interspecies morph edition at ELO 2020
A collaborative group composed of a prose writer (Teresa Carmody), new media artist (Matt Roberts), 3-D animator (Dengke Chen), and poet (Terri Witek) enter your personal computers and suggest that in this particularly viral moment, individual breaths + machines may be the closest we get to community touch.

Project Website https://btm19.weebly.com/

Zoom Recording

Breathe the Machine at ELO 2020 from Matt Roberts on Vimeo.

Interspecies video conference

BTM Application

Breathe the Machine &Now Festival

Breathe the Machine was recently exhibited at &Now Festival of Innovative Writing at the University of Washington Bothell

A recent West Volusia Beacon article about the project when shown at Stetson University

Invisible Instruments

Invisible Instruments
A digital microscope and custom video mapping software let participants project microscopic parts of themselves coupled with short poetic text onto large architectural objects. This collective public performance with three layers—edifice, miniature, and wandering signage—-shows what happens when a public space is overwritten by an ephemeral and intimate one.

A collaboration between new media artist Matt Roberts and poet Terri Witek

Dream Garden

Description:
Dream Garden is a site-specific project to gather, graft and nurture a city’s dreams. Each time a city dweller texts a 7-word dream (a poetic form moving private experience into public space), that dream automatically joins others both in a “garden” (a designated physical location in the city) and online at inthedreamgarden.com. The project shows how how some community resources– like citizens’ dreams — can inhabit and expand a space without wounding it, colonizing it or wasting natural resources. As a political space, it’s urban renewal and greening without displacement. As a philosophical space it suggests that dreaming together may change a city and even a country. As a community garden it suggests that our dreams aren’t wasted—they are growable, transplantable, and in the poetic space of the project, both virtual and real.

How it works:
This project uses Layar, a free augmented reality application for mobile devices. Participants can download the Layar app and see their texted dream joined with others in site-specific locations. The international project is designed to adapt to any urban space.

This is a collaborative project with poet Terri Witek and software developer Michael Branton. For more information about the project visit inthedreamgarden.com

Walking the Wrack line

Between January and August, new media artist Matt Roberts and poet Terri Witek traversed Canaveral National Seashore from the north boundary at Apollo Beach (New Smyrna) to the southern boundary at Playalinda Beach (Titusville). Their wanderings covered 24 miles of shoreline and an ever-changing wrack line. Roberts translated their experiences via video and still photography; Witek used text and voice: their collaborative show combines image, text, and sound in a site-specific installation at Canaveral’s historic Shultz-Leeper house (formally owned by artist Doris Leeper). Walking the Wrack Line is a cooperative venture: between Canaveral National Seashore, and Stetson University’s Institute for Water and Environmental Resilience, whose grant funded the project. In environmental terms, Walking the Wrack Line considers the interspecies entanglements we witnessed as both highly problematic and rich in possibilities. Philosophically, the wrack line reads like a long, connected treatise on both beauty and danger. As Dr. Wendy Anderson reminds us: “At a certain size, plastic and silica glint the same.” “Until you eat it,” adds Laura Henning, Chief of Interpretation and Visitor Service for Canaveral, pointing out how ocean and land continue both to toxify and sustain each other. As a visible reminder of how species interact, the wrack line has become, it seems to Roberts and Witek now, an EKG of our time on the planet.

Breathe the Machine

The FaaS were future-oriented. Every day, they contemplated the question: what kind of ancestor will you be?

A collaboration between prose writer Teresa Carmody, new media artist Matt Roberts, 3-D animator Dengke Chen, and poet Terri Witek. In Breathe the Machine, we repurpose computers in an existing university lab to respond to human breath. Blow on the computer; something happens. The computer lab becomes an installation, an archive of a near future where some creatures have learned to morph. With each breath, the individual computers send data to a hub computer, co-creating a story displayed on a larger screen (projected on wall of lab). Simple biological actions momentarily converge human and mechanical worlds.

Invisible instruments at City Unseen

Recent exhibition of Invisible Instruments at City Unseen

Photos by http://www.emilyjourdan.com/

Dream Garden Austin Peay State University

A new garden planted at Austin Peay Department of Art and Design

Dream Garden Summer 17

New Dream Gardens planted this summer

Currents New Media 2017, Santa Fe, New Mexico

ISEA 2017, Manizales, Colombia

Disquiet International, Lisbon, Portugal

ELO 2017, Porto, Portugal

Dream Garden at ACA

Launch of a new Dream Garden at the Atlantic Center for the Arts and an artist talk

ARTBORNE Collaboration

Terri Witek responds to images from Unfolding for a collaboration in ARTBORNE Magazine.

Unfolding

Excerpts from a 45 minute performance (4:40 min)

Unfolding is an improvised audio visual performance featuring Satoshi Takeishi and Matt Roberts. Takeishi performs with a prepared hammer dulcimer to create a mysterious and alluring soundscape, while Roberts accompanies Takeishi’s musical improvisations with real-time animation and video projection.

Full performance (40 min)

Satoshi Takeishi, drummer, percussionist, and arranger is a native of Mito, Japan. His art explores multi-cultural, electronics and improvisational music with musicians and composers from around the world. Takeishi has appeared on over 75 recordings including those by Latin giants Nestor Torres, Ray Barretto, Hector Martignon and Eliane Elias (in the film, “Calle 54”). He has also performed with Laszlo Gardony, Shoko Nagai, Dave Liebman, Badal Roy, Erik Friedlander, Cantor, Sasha Argov, Colombian saxophonist Antonio Arnedo, Paul Winter, Antony Braxton, Theo Bleckmann/Ben Monder, Joel Harrison and Rob Brown.

Matt Roberts is a new media artist specializing in locative media, physical computing, augmented reality, and real-time video performance. His work has been featured internationally and nationally, including shows in Taiwan, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, Italy, Mexico and nationally in New York, San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago. He was awarded the Transitio Award by the International Transitio_MX Festival in Mexico City, and his work has been reviewed in New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Miami Herald. Roberts received his MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is currently an Associate Professor of Digital Art at Stetson University, DeLand, Florida.

The Strangers

Burdened by history and our own expectations, art can become settled in space/place. The Strangers invites Orlando Museum of Art visitors to re-meet some familiar OMA holdings. Museum-goers are invited to download the free Layar app on their smartphones and through brief augmented reality encounters get to unknow the collection.

Dream Garden at Art In Odd Places Orlando

A few images from a recent presentation of Dream Garden at AIOP Orlando. Dream Garden Orlando allows participants to text a 7 word dream, which is collected on the Dream Garden website and planted in a augmented reality “garden” at the Orange County Regional History Center.

Unknown Meetings at ISEA 2015 Vancouver Canada

Documentation of a recent installment of Unknown Meetings in Vancouver’s SkyTrain Metro line during ISEA 2015

Unknown Meetings at xCoAx 2015 Glasgow Scotland

Documentation of a recent installment of Unknown Meetings in the Glasgow Subway for xCoAx 2015

Unknown Meetings

Unknown Meetings is a site-specific augmented reality project that takes as its premise the awkward and surreal encounters that daily occur on commutes. Designed by new media artist Matt Roberts and poet Terri Witek for local transportation systems riders activate via smart phone both an “unknown” object moving over the actual landscape and an accompanying brief poetic audio file which considers such encounters.

These are activated whenever the train approaches a station. Commuters use the free Augmented Reality app Layar on their smart phones to see a floating image—usually an out-of-place object –and hear a brief accompanying text. Stations are nexuses of anxiety when we commute—is this our stop? By floating objects and words that offer still more unexpected juxtapositions, Roberts and Witek try to shift the anxiety of arrival into a consideration of moving “connections.”

Documention of EMP 2014

Documentation of EMP performing at the Creative City Project 2014

Portable NES Controller

8-bit chiptune cart

Miami Herald video of Fire Dreams at O, Miami 2014

EMP Documentation @ Creative City

EMP: Electronic Mobile Performance from Shadee Rios on Vimeo.

Video and photo documentation of our EMP performance at Creative City Project, Oct 25th 2013 in downtown Orlando. Performing Members were be Jacob Frisenda, Joe Palermo, and Matt Roberts. For this performance students Joe Palermo and Jacob Frisenda used contact microphones and custom software to transform shopping carts into musical instruments. To accompany the sounds created by the shopping cart Frisenda and Roberts created a synchronized audio/visual performance. To create the synchronized performance the Palermo, Frisenda and Roberts created their own software instruments and used commercial sound software as well. The shopping carts were also outfitted with portable power and audio/video equipment which enabled the group to move around the city to create impromptu performances in public spaces.