[MUSIC] Over the years, Matt, you've been devoting your artistic talent, and also your research to this notion of making that a physical, right? Taking big databases, data pools and finding creative ways to manifest that information into giving it a form. A lot of your background actually has been very inspired in composition. So can you tell us a little bit how processes and kind of past forms of composition led you to work with these data pools? >> Sure, yeah, so I was really, initially inspired by the work of Iannis Xenakis and John Cage kind of these avant garde composers who were using algorithms to kind of drive their work. I really liked the idea of being able, not having a kind of set structure. But being able to push either data or an algorithm through a system and kind of create a kind of generative piece. So I started out really in the kind of algorithmic range where I would really take kind of these nodes or voids and kind of throw them into a space, and kind of see what kind of physical structures came out of them. At the time, I was kind of in the area of experimental architecture, experimental form making, not so much in the kind of music realm. But really, yeah, again, really interested in kind of using these algorithms to kind of drive the structure. Algorithmic pieces I kind of I would throw them in, and it was more kind of like an iterative process. So I would stop it when something came out that I found particularly interesting or striking to me. For the data visualizations and kind of sonifications, which I'm sure we'll get into in a second, those were really driven kind of by the concepts and kind of the meat of the data, right? So, for instance, is the sonifcation that I created using 400,000 years of Antarctic ice melt data. And of course we had to shrink that time scale by a huge order of magnitude to be able to fit it into the time frame that people would enjoy listening to. So it's really a kind of playing and exploring. At the end of the day we kind of kept it towards a traditional song, the traditional length of the song, maybe six minutes or so just to keep it in a reasonable time frame. [MUSIC] >> You have this great project with 3-D printing with clay, right, where information literally becomes clay work. Can you talk a little bit more about that project, like what data were you working with? What types of shapes and printings were you after? >> Sure yeah, so that project was working with hurricane data I was collaborating with a professor at Penn State and really trying to capture a wind speed and kind of the movement of these hurricanes as they pass through. And it was really wonderful, kind of both constructing the technology to be able to do that in building the clay 3-D printer. And I'm kind of trying to bring this to life in a more physical way by printing clay. Yeah, so we had the great opportunity of working with Chicks on Speed, and we brought Alex, Mary, and Leslie into the biomechanics lab. And hooked her up with all kinds of sensors. And we were able to kind of track her movements in real time as she kind of kind of moved abstractly through the space. And from there we took the data and then I was able to feed the data into a program we called super collider and sonified that data to be used in the piece. [MUSIC] >> And what was the kind of final performance because there was a public dimension to this too, right? >> Yeah, so the sonification ended up being used in our larger piece I was displaying in Venice. And kind of added another layer on top of their kind of main performance. You could kind of hear the movements of the artist as a extra layer on top of their main performance. [MUSIC] Yeah, so the movement's more abstract but also very physical and athletic, which is something that's not really seen and not really kind of brought into a lot of our practices. So it's a really unique experience for me to capture those movements and then kind of bring another physicality to the project, sonified. >> And I think that's also very powerful about seeing documentation of the performance, that it does connect with dance and more traditional approaches to art making. But it brings in a whole other set of movements. >> That's right. >> Yeah.