Matt Roberts

Glitch is the Soul in the Machine

Dazzle Camouflage, included in the exhibition Glitch is the Soul in the Machine, is currently on view at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Glitch is the Soul in the Machine is an international exhibition showcasing emergent forms of new media art that playfully reveal the way digital technologies influence our perception of reality even as they corrupt the practice of everyday life. If, as conference exhibition curator Mark Amerika suggests in his “Glitch Ontology” manifesto-performance, “Glitch is the soul in the machine,” then how do works of contemporary art reveal what is broken, dysfunctional, hacked and cracked in our information-saturated culture?

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

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.

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.

Waves

This artwork responds to the current size and timing of the waves of the closet ocean of its current location. Every half hour the most current data from the closet ocean buoy station is downloaded. Custom software uses the current wave height and dominant wave period data from the buoy and transforms that information into a low frequency sound wave. As the size and timing of the waves in the ocean change so does the frequency of the sound waves produced by the software. These sound waves shake a bowl of water sitting on top of a speaker. This shaking produces wave patterns in the bowl that are captured by a video camera modified by the software and projected onto a wall. As the waves in the ocean change size and frequency the waves in the bowl will also change. This results in continuous variations of the shapes and patterns that one sees and hears which also reflects the constant changing conditions of the ocean.

Waves can be shown in various forms, below are examples of works driven by real-time wave data

Wind

Wind is a continuation of my interest in visualization of real-time weather data. This work responds to real-time wind data from the National Weather Service to create a moving abstract image.

Waves Walks

I have a solo show coming up at the Duncan Gallery of Art at Stetson University. The show, entitled Waves Walks, features two bodies of work. A series of works that uses real-time wave buoy data as a means for generating sounds and images and a series of work based on walking. The opening is August 27 6:00-8:00pm and runs until the 28th of October. Below are some in progress installation shots.

The two pieces pictured below use real-time wave height and period data from wave buoys off the coast of Florida. Using custom software the buoy data is translated into low frequency sound waves. The sound waves shake objects such as bowls of water, these objects respond to the sound waves by creating abstract patterns.

I created software that abstracts images I took while swimming in the ocean. Each projection has a design element which changes size according to the current size of the waves off the coast of Florida.

New Interface for MPG @ the Intermedia Festival

MPG: Mobile Performance Group was invited to perform at the Intermedia Festival hosted by Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis. I am working on an interface for the iphone/itouch, using the OSC based mrmr app. I developed an interface that allows the public to control the manipulation of live video and send text messages which becomes part of the live video projection. Users are be able to do things such as mix video, choose video clips, apply effects, and use the iphone’s accelerometer to rotate and position the text and image. The festival was a blast and I will post some documentation soon.

CAUTION

This artwork responds to the current networked devices, such as cell phones and laptops, in its vicinity with sounds and imagery of the character Lemmy Caution from Jean-Luc Godard’s film Alphaville. A computer running networking sniffing software monitors the area for wireless data such as bluetooth and wireless internet signals. When a new wireless device enters the vicinity the piece will respond by announcing the wireless device’s name and if it is considered to be a threat. This piece requires one Macintosh computer with wireless and bluetooth, custom software, video projector and sound speakers.