Interfaces Montréal

Inside Digital Matter

Matthew Biederman

ARTIST

Artist as Artisan in the Digital Age

The discussion will use early electronic artists and musicians, such as Woody and Stiena Vasulka, Nam Jun Paik and Robert Moog who focused on constructing tools to make their art. Specifically with a focus on the importance of the artist as artisan in the electronic age which carries into the digital age. Matthew Biederman will look at the emergence of specialized software toolkits that allow artists who aren’t computer scientists to be deeply engaged with their medium and how it impacts their work. Specifically he will show examples from his own work relating to image based generative software he has written for his performances and installations.

Matthew Biederman (a.k.a. DelRay), has been performing, installing and exhibiting works which explore themes of cut-up electronic image delivery, media saturation, and data systems since the mid nineties. Biederman was the recipient of the Bay Area Artist Award in Video by New Langton Arts in 1999, First Place in the Visual Arts category of Slovenia’s Break21 festival, and has served as artist-in-residence at the Center for Experimental Television on numerous occasions.

His installations have been exhibited in the US, South America, and Europe, in a variety of festivals and venues such as 7 Festival Internacional (Lima, Peru) As a film and video maker, his works have been included in the FILE festival (Sao Paulo), New Forms Festival (Vancouver), the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Paris/Berlin International Meetings, and the Chicago Underground Film Festival. Most recently, he has begun to work in collaboration, forming an international group called simpel whose work concentrates on social interaction rather than gadgetry whose installations have been part of ZeroOne2006 and the SCAPE Biennial in New Zealand.

As a performer, he has developed his work through developing settings to stimulate new work methodologies, namely through a site-specific work at SIGGRAPH, residencies at the Makrolab as well as the Experimental Television Center, and various other projects. His work as a visual performer allowed him to work alongside musicians since 1999, most recently performing at the historic Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. In 2004 he embarked on a long-term collaboration with Projekt Atol and the rx:tx crew developing the visual display systems of the Signal-Sever! performance series events, including, among others, Futuresonic (UK), ISEA (Helsinki), Nuit Blanche (Paris), and La Batie (Geneva). As a VJ, his performances have been featured at festivals such as MUTEK, Flow (Helsinki), and Version (Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago). Currently, his artistic operation is set up in exile in Montreal, Canada.
www.simpel.cc