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Ryota Matsumoto

Artist member since 2023
Toronto, Ontario

Ryota Matsumoto is an artist, educator, and architect based in New York, Toronto, and Tokyo. He is internationally regarded as the forefather of the postdigital art movement. Born in Tokyo, he was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. He received a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania after his studies at the Architectural Association in London and Mackintosh School of Architecture, the Glasgow School of Art in the early 90s. Over the years, he has studied with Manuel DeLanda, Vincent Joseph Scully Jr., Cecil Balmond, and Giancarlo De Carlo, among others. Matsumoto has collaborated with a cofounder of the Metabolist Movement, Kisho Kurokawa, and with Arata Isozaki, Peter Christopherson, and MIT Media Lab. He has taught architecture, art, and interdisciplinary design as a lecturer and visiting critic in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

Ryota Matsumoto has presented his work on posthumanism, multidisciplinary design, and visual culture at the 5th symposium of the Imaginaries of the Future at Cornell University, the Espaciocenter workshop at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts, iDMAa Conference 2017, Network Media Culture Symposium at Machida Museum of Graphic Arts, and NTT InterCommunication Center as a literary critic and artist. As a video producer and designer, he has worked with Peter Christopherson of Coil and Hipgnosis for Japanese Nike commercial and contributed to his first solo album, Form Grows Rampant as Threshold Houseboys Choir.

He has served as the MFA advisor of Transart Institute, University of Plymouth, and is a research associate at the New Centre of Research & Practice. He has been active as a guest critic on design reviews at Cornell University, Cooper Union, Columbia GSAPP, Rhode Island School of Design, and Pratt Institute.

Matsumoto is the recipient of Visual Art Open International Artist Award, Florence Biennale Mixed Media 2nd Place Award, The International Society of Experimental Artists Best of Show Gracie Award, Premio Ora Prize Italy 5th Edition, Premio Ora Prize Spain 1st Edition, Donkey Art Prize III Edition Finalist, Best of Show IGOA Toronto, Art Kudos Best of Show Award, FILE (Electronic Language International Festival) Media Art Finalist, Lynx International Prize Be Art Builder Award, Lumen Prize Finalist, and Western Bureau Art Prize Honorable Mention. He was awarded the Gold Artist Prize from ArtAscent Journal, the 1st Place Prize from Exhibeo Art Magazine, and the Award of Excellence from the Creative Quarterly Journal of Art and Design in 2015 and 2016. His work is part of the permanent collection of the University of Texas at Tyler.

His work, writings, and interviews were published in Kalubrt Magazine, the University of North Carolina Wilmington Journal Palaver, Furtherfield.org, The Journal of Wild Culture, Studio Visit Magazine, Fresh Paint Magazine, H+ Magazine, International Artist Magazine, Made In Mind Magazine, Arizona State University Journal Superstition Review, Creative Review, Creative Boom. Next Nature Network, Rhizome.org, Monoskop, Carbon Culture Review, KooZA/rch, Supersonic Art, Post Digital Aesthetics (Berry and Dieter ed.), Drawing Discourse (University of North Carolina Asheville), Highlike (SEPI-SP editors), and Drawing Futures (The Bartlett UCL), among others.

Matsumoto's multidisciplinary projects have been exhibited recently at Meadows Gallery University of Texas at Tyler, S. Tucker Cooke Gallery University of North Carolina Asheville, Sebastopol Center for the Arts, National Museum of Korea, CICA Museum, Van Der Plas Gallery, ArtHelix Gallery, Caelum Gallery, LAIR Gallery Lakehead University, Limner Gallery, the Cello Factory, University of the District of Columbia, Lux Art Gallery, Studio Montclair, Manifest Gallery, Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, Art Basel Miami, ISEA International, FILE Sao Paulo, Nook Gallery, and Arts and Heritage Centre Altrincham. He had solo exhibitions at BYTE Gallery Transylvania University (2015), Los Angeles Center of Digital Art (2016), and Alviani ArtSpace, Pescara (2017).


Inside the Studio


Q+A

When did you start making art, and why?

I am always aware of incorporating the interdisciplinary approach when visualizing my architectural projects, and that eventually opens up to a broader holistic perspective of the visual media, which encompasses the multiplicity of interconnected trans-corporeality in the framework of the creative praxis.

Why is art important to you?

I explore and am inspired by the role of dissonance and the pluri-dimensional aspect of cacophony as a form of interference in the fidelity of digital communication and a catalyst for undermining the orthographic divide of digital platforms. As probabilistic preindividuation in the form of miscommunication disrupts established patterns and introduces variability, it can lead to the emergence of new images of thought through phase fluctuations in the striated orthogonal system.

Everyone should know about

Considering the progress of our collective individuation as social entities through the technological advances of the last 10 years or so, I believe that knowledge creation and its dissemination will continue to be configured by a multivalent interplay of sociocultural and techno-pharmacological agents through our interaction with technical artifacts.

Favourite medium

My artworks initially started out as several fragmentary variants that were derived from the elements of my previous works. They were then merged into the artwork through algorithmic appreciation and the embedded meta-language of transition probabilities.

I'm really good at making (a) ...

As far as the creative practice is concerned, I’d like to attain the transversal and multidisciplinary approach that breaks down the boundaries between the heterogeneous domains of immutable mobiles and the cascades of subject–group relations in an epistemological context.

Favourite book

Gilbert Simondon, Mark Fisher, William Burroughs, Fernand Braudel, Georges Bastille, Andre Leroi-Gourhan, Louis Althusser, Michel Serres, and Pierre Klossowski

Education
2007

University of Pennsylvania
Architecture

1995

Glasgow School of Art
Architecture and Art Theory

1993

Architectural Association
Architectural Design

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