SEARCH
Ryota Matsumoto (松本良多) is an educator, artist, designer, cultural programmer, urban planner, and architect. As a media theorist and academic, he is internationally recognized as the iconic pioneer and godfather of the postdigital culture.
Born in Tokyo, Matsumoto was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. He received a Master of Architecture degree from University of Pennsylvania in 2007 after his studies at Architectural Association in London, Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art and University of Miami in early 90’s. He studied with Manuel DeLanda, Vincent Joseph Scully Jr., Cecil Balmond, and Giancarlo De Carlo, among others.
He has collaborated with a cofounder of the Metabolist Movement, Kisho Kurokawa, and with Arata Isozaki, Peter Christopherson, and MIT Media Lab.
Matsumoto has presented his work on multidisciplinary design, visual culture, and urbanism to the 5th symposium of the Imaginaries of the Future at Cornell University, the Espaciocenter workshop at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, New Media Frontier Lecture Series at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts, iDMAa Conference 2017, Network Media Culture Symposium at CCA Kitakyushu, and NTT InterCommunication Center as a literary critic and media theorist. He curated the exhibition, Posthumanism, Epidigital, and Glitch Feminism at Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in 2020.
As a composer, video producer and graphic designer, he has worked with Peter Chri ... view more »
Resume (PDF)
Work Samples (PDF)
Artist Statement of Work
Tell us about your work (style, approach, philosophy, subject and/or theme):
Matsumoto’s work reflects the morphological transformations of our ever-evolving urban and ecological milieus, which could be attributed to a multitude of spatio-temporal phenomena influenced by social, economic and cultural assemblages. They are created as visual commentaries on speculative changes in notions of societies, cultures and ecosystems in the transient nature of constantly shifting topography and geology.
There is a common thread with regard to visual abstraction in his artworks: the multiplicity of hybrid objects that unfold within their own spatiotemporal coordinates of phase space and are transcribed to an image plane. In that regard, his creative process of drawing henceforth can be defined as the swirls of virtual intensities that are reconfigured as the cartography of spatiotemporal reality.
The artwork explores the hybrid combining the algorithmic matrices of transition probabilities and photogrammetry.
Furthermore, the varying scale, the juxtaposition of biomorphic forms, intertwined textures, oblique projections and visual metamorphoses are employed as the multi-layered drawing methodologies to question and investigate the ubiquitous nature of urban meta-morphology, emerging realities of controlsociety, and their visual representation in the context of non-Euclidean configuration. The application of these techniques allows the work to transcend the boundaries between analog and digital media as well as between two- and multi-dimensional domains.
Matsumoto’s process-oriented compositional techniques imbue the work with what we see as the very essence of our socio-cultural environments beyond the conventional protocols of architectural and artistic formalities.
His creative approach conjures up the synthetic possibilities of spatial semiotics that emerge as the potential products of alchemical procedures.
Culturally Specific Art Category
Select Culturally Specific Art Category:: Asian or Asian American