Matthew Woodham

Matthew Woodham is an artist who works across disciplines. His practice explores system dynamics in nature through research and practical application. His academic background in cognitive neuroscience has informed an expanded study of the common dynamics and structures described by physical and mathematical principles.

He creates audio-visual works and interactive sculptural installations using a variety of processes such as: programming, electronic circuits and experimental physical techniques. He has a particular focus on spatial interactions, algorithmic models of nature and emergence, or simple components exhibiting complex behaviour.

He aims to create environments which synthesise the abstract and uncanny, appealing to, and provoking universal human intuitions. He uses live settings to create immediate, real-time experiences while integrating scientific theory, and a critical approach to technology.

“We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water … we are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.”

-Norbert Weiner

“The world — at least insofar as living beings are concerned — is made up not of substantial particles or things, as philosophers have overwhelmingly supposed, but of processes. It is dynamic through and through.”

-Daniel J. Nicholson & John Dupré

During studying Information Experience Design at the RCA I dived into the vast sea of complexity. I built five interactive installations as part of the ‘Conditions, 2023’ series (three of which are pictured here). These machines were built with the intention of putting process at the foreground, specifically some of nature’s processes, or dynamics, I find most enthralling and are described in complexity science.

This year has brought together my undergraduate degree studying cognitive neuroscience with the subsequent years working with AV and installations. I realised that my desire to discover the nature of reality through studying cognitive neuroscience was a hubristic pursuit. Since, I have counteracted my previous reductionist approach with a new fascination with emergence, and the isomorphic nature of complex systems.

During my time at the RCA I have incorporated these themes into my practice, communicating the underlying dynamics of processes and complex systems of the physical world; with the aim to encourage realistic and responsible behaviours in my audiences, including an understanding of human impacts on the environment and the consequences of our actions. I have developed my understanding of the current paradigmatic shift, whereby our previous assumption of control, power and dominance over nature is moving towards an understanding of the interconnected nature of reality. Developing my interest in metamodernism and the ‘liminal web’ have provided a framework for my research and practice.

Through the process of building the installations, I have been faced with my personal relationship with nature, science and technology. I have exercised my somewhat obsessive and sometimes slightly unhinged engagement with the making process; it feels as though I am enacting the relationship between humans and nature, and in doing so, echoing the themes the work interrogates. I have let the fierce inspiration of processes unfolding in front of my eyes drive my making, focusing intently on forcing nature to demonstrate itself

"The question of questions for mankind, a problem which underlies all other and is deeply interesting than any other, is the ascertainment of the place which man occupies in nature and his relation to the universe of things."

-Thomas Huxley, or as I would say, ‘the universe of processes’.

Conditions is a network of installations with multiple channels of interconnection. The work oscillates between constructed and emergent, object and process, animate and inanimate, and natural and artificial. The machines see and communicate with each other, and their behaviour is both controlled and unpredictable. The apparatus interface with some of the core processual dynamics of complexity science, which is the study of how individual components interact to form complex, often unpredictable, systems. These processes include self-organisation and emergence and chaos: the same processes that underpin life.

LiDAR sensors measure audience proximity to the installations where, at a certain distance, audience members can stimulate specific conditions for the machines to operate far-from-equilibrium, a term which describes the constantly changing dynamics of natural phenomena in complex systems.

The work explores the complicated relationship between humans and nature, and favours systems thinking in which humans are integrated within the natural world. Through integrating dualisms and presenting tensions between untamed and contained numerosity, the work aims to expose the structures and biases that have separated humans from nature. The vessels enclosing natural processes suggest frictions between control and chaos, and the human endeavour to represent, encapsulate and isolate natural phenomena. Every experiment, action and observation has an effect - even admiration can yield unintended consequences - therefore, by adopting a bottom-up, systems approach Conditions ask audiences to attune to underlying processes and interact with the world through fluid perception and responsible mediation.

View documentation of Conditions here

Launch Project

Matthew Woodham

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Royal College of Art