Join us for a full day of workshops led by artist and Near Now Studio member Matt Woodham. Taking place at Broadway, you will learn to use specially designed software and hardware systems to create live video, interactive installations and generative art – utilising technologies such as virtual reality, machine learning and analogue devices.
In partnership with Near Now, Matt presents a series of six creative, DIY workshops over two days, led by expert artists and toolmakers. Participants will learn a cross-section of cutting-edge techniques to create generative and computational artworks.
Book your place now
10.30 am – 12.30 pm
Fragment:Flow with Paul Fennell
1.30 pm – 3.30 pm
Generative artwork in VR with Prefix Studios
4.00 pm – 6.00 pm
Cymatics with Zach Walker
Matt Woodham is an artist, designer and technologist. He creates interactive installations, experimental websites, moving image and graphic design. His practice and research explores system dynamics, informed by his background studying psychology and neuroscience. He investigates the common dynamics between systems of various scales, from quantum mechanics, to human behaviour. He uses hardware and software to harness behaviour such as feedback loops and randomness, to create organic generative visuals. He is particularly focussed on building entertaining, interactive and playful experiences which have underlying theory. He feels that harnessing nature’s mechanisms has the power to delight an audience, acting as a Trojan horse to ignite interest in the laws, rules and biases which govern us.
Join us for a full day of workshops led by artist and Near Now Studio member Matt Woodham. Taking place at Broadway, you will learn to use specially designed software and hardware systems to create live video, interactive installations and generative art – utilising technologies such as virtual reality, machine learning and analogue devices.
In partnership with Near Now, Matt presents a series of six creative, DIY workshops over two days, led by expert artists and toolmakers. Participants will learn a cross-section of cutting-edge techniques to create generative and computational artworks.
Book your place now.
10.30 am – 12.30 pm
Touch Designer with Studio Above&Below
1.30 pm – 3.30 pm
Runway with Matt Woodham
4.00 pm – 6.00 pm
VDMX with Dan Tombs
Matt Woodham is an artist, designer and technologist. He creates interactive installations, experimental websites, moving image and graphic design. His practice and research explores system dynamics, informed by his background studying psychology and neuroscience. He investigates the common dynamics between systems of various scales, from quantum mechanics, to human behaviour. He uses hardware and software to harness behaviour such as feedback loops and randomness, to create organic generative visuals. He is particularly focussed on building entertaining, interactive and playful experiences which have underlying theory. He feels that harnessing nature’s mechanisms has the power to delight an audience, acting as a Trojan horse to ignite interest in the laws, rules and biases which govern us.
Get involved in an afternoon of talks and discussions with leading artists and academics, crossing the boundaries of arts, science, and computing, developed as part of the multidisciplinary exhibition Sensing Systems by Matt Woodham, on view at Bonington Gallery from 15 February to 28 March. Book your free place on this public event, taking placing at Nottingham Contemporary.
Art and science share a common goal: to challenge common views of reality. As a creative crossroad, the contemporary field of ArtScience has been gaining momentum in recent years. Successful ArtScience merges the objective and the subjective with equal voices. It investigates and shapes the intersection between artistic concepts and developments in science and technology; experimenting with new ways of conceiving knowledge.
In this afternoon symposium, a panel of artists, scientists and ArtScientists will share their interdisciplinary research. Experts in systems across scales, from galaxy evolution to molecular nanotechnology, will discuss common dynamics in nature.
Meghan Gray is an observational extragalactic astronomer with interests in galaxy evolution and large-scale structure. She employs tools such as gravitational lensing to trace distributions of dark matter on large scales and uses multiwavelength observations to examine the luminous properties of galaxies. These observations are often compared against supercomputer simulations to understand how galaxies are influenced by their environments. Meghan will provide insight into large-scale structures and simulating the universe.
Ulrike Kuchner is an extragalactic astronomer as well as a visual artist based in the UK. In her research, Ulrike studies how mass is assembled in the universe and how galaxies form and evolve over their lifetime – which is just short of the age of the universe itself. As an artist and curator, she challenges the frontiers between art and science, translating between the fields without imposing a hierarchy. Ulrike’s art often deals with the themes of humanity and imperfections in data, something we tend to strip away from science. Ulrike will provide insight into art and science and chair the panel discussions.
Andy Lomas is a computational artist, mathematician, and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer-generated effects. His artwork explores how complex sculptural forms can be created emergently by simulating growth processes. Inspired by the work of Alan Turing, D’Arcy Thompson, and Ernst Haeckel, it exists at the boundary between art and science. Andy will provide insight into simulating nature, emergent phenomena, artificial life and art.
Becky Lyon is an artist/researcher examining how humans are impacting evolution. Her practice combines scientific research, thinking-through-making, fiction, and participatory research to imagine a spectrum of new hybrid species, materialities, systems, and ways of relating. Explorations include exploring future environments through scent; contemplating the entanglement of our matter through sculpture and sound and modelling lively forms at Fieldnotes from a Technobiocology. Lyon runs ‘Elastic Nature’, an interdisciplinary art research club exploring the future of nature.
Philip Moriarty is a professor of physics in the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. His research interests lie in a field sometimes referred to as extreme nanotechnology; he and his colleagues prod, poke, push, and pull individual atoms and molecules with scanning probe microscopes. He has published 140 papers to date, given over 100 invited talks. Moriarty also has a keen interest in public engagement, outreach, and the arts-sciences interface having regularly collaborated on the award-winning Sixty Symbols YouTube channel. Philip will provide insight into chaos, quantum mechanics, surface physics, and the emergence of patterns.
Sensing Systems is now available to stream online. For the remaining Sensing Systems exhibition dates (until Saturday 28 March), Matt Woodham has re-situated all of the moving image works from his exhibition onto the streaming platform Twitch – allowing for full interactivity. After a quick registration and scan of the instructions, you can type in commands and values via the ‘stream chat’ to adjust the visual effects within the works.
Note: Depending on streaming speeds, there can be a four to five second delay.
Matt Woodham’s debut solo exhibition Sensing Systems will fill the gallery with a composition of connected installations, positioning visitors within a system of light, sound and motion. Visual and kinetic events will be sequenced by a central processing unit which distributes signals around the room. You can interact with the system, which, alongside random data sources and a sensitivity to initial conditions, creates a unique experience for each viewer.
“… It’s all live and being generated in real time… you can control it and you can influence it.”
Artist Matt Woodham speaks about his exhibition, Sensing Systems.
Alongside the exhibition, a number of offsite events have been developed:
Video courtesy of Matt Woodham and Reece Straw.
Matt Woodham is an artist, designer and technologist whose practice evades disciplinary definition. After specialising in visual neuroscience during his degree, he channelled his skills and interests into generating auditory and visual experiences – including music videos, live visuals for club nights, light installations, and experimental websites.
In recent years, Woodham’s research into the complex systems of the brain has evolved into a broader interdisciplinary practice. Inspired by the emergent, irreducible states of perception, he utilises experimental techniques such as feedback loops, generative algorithms and randomness. He employs code and electronic circuits to exploit the liminal space between order and disorder. These processes reflect the common non-linear dynamics which are shared between systems of various scales – from quantum mechanics to the economy. He feels that harnessing nature’s mechanisms has the power to delight an audience.
