MATT ROBERTS / INSPIRATION
What else
could this be?
A shopping cart. A phone. A bowl of water.
A DeLand artist keeps finding another possibility.
By Rob Urban
A shopping cart is a fairly ordinary object until someone wires it for sound. Then the basket, frame, movement, and touch become material for a performance. Add portable power, a projector, and an inflatable screen, and the whole arrangement can travel through a city.
That was part of a 2013 performance involving Matt Roberts and Stetson students Joe Palermo and Jacob Frisenda. Their Electronic Mobile Performance project used contact microphones and software to turn the carts into instruments, with live audiovisual elements accompanying the sound. The equipment that carried the work also became part of the work.
I appreciate an artist who can look at a shopping cart and see a performance venue. Most of us are still negotiating with the wheel that insists on taking us toward the cereal aisle.
Roberts, a professor of digital arts at Stetson University in DeLand, has made a career of questioning what familiar tools and settings can do. His work moves among photography, video, interactive systems, and augmented reality. A phone can become a way of encountering a poem. A walk can become an image with its own visible route. A data stream from the ocean can acquire a physical presence in a gallery.
A screen
can send you
back into
the room.
The usual complaint about a phone is that it pulls attention away from wherever its owner happens to be. Some of Roberts’ projects use the screen to direct attention more intensely toward that place.
For the Orlando Museum of Art’s 2016 Florida Prize exhibition, he and poet Terri Witek created The Strangers. Visitors could use a mobile device to see altered versions of paintings in the collection while hearing Witek’s poetry. The work asked people to encounter familiar art under different conditions. The exhibition catalog describes images and spoken questions that unsettled the paintings’ usual meanings.
The technology served a specific artistic purpose. A museum object can become so familiar in its frame and label that a visitor stops feeling any uncertainty about it. An unexpected image or phrase reopens that encounter. The original work remains there, while another possibility occupies the same field of view.
Other people
bring the dreams.
The collaboration also included Dream Garden, developed with computer scientist Michael Branton. Participants contributed seven-word dreams that could appear as floating text in a particular space. Instead of treating the viewer as a spectator with a device, the project made contributions part of what other people could encounter.
There is something generous in that use of a shared space. An artist creates the conditions for participation, then has to accept that other people will bring material the artist did not originate. The result depends on a conversation.
WAVES
Ocean. Sound.
Water. Light.
Another work shown in Orlando, Waves, brought information from a buoy off Cape Canaveral into a gallery. As Stetson’s account explains, the data became sound frequencies that vibrated water in a bowl. The resulting movement was projected onto a wall.
The sequence is wonderfully strange: ocean conditions, measurements, sound, a bowl, and light. Each step changes the form of what came before. The work lets a distant process become something a visitor can observe in another setting.
In that same account, Roberts described his interest in using contemporary communication tools for personal expression. That is an important part of the question his work raises. We tend to accept the purposes a device arrives with. An artist can ask what else its capabilities make possible.
For a viewer, the technical explanation gives a way into the piece. It need not replace the experience of watching the water move. Understanding the connection to the buoy can make the movement more compelling: the gallery contains a small, mediated relationship with conditions elsewhere.
What a walk
leaves behind.
Roberts’ Drift began with walks along Canaveral National Seashore during a sabbatical. In a 2018 account of the work, he explained that its lines represented portions of the routes he took. The piece combined large photographic prints with a smaller three-dimensional element and projected light, drawing on beach imagery and debris.
A coastline photograph can appear to offer a place all at once. A walking route introduces time and the photographer’s body. Somebody moved, stopped, noticed, and continued. The route makes those choices part of the image’s meaning.
That is a rewarding thought to take into any familiar landscape. Two people can visit the same shore and bring back radically different accounts because they followed different paths and attended to different things. The camera records a view, but the walk helps decide which view exists.
Roberts’ technical range allows those observations to move into several forms. A physical object and projected light can share an installation with photography. The piece can register both the material encountered and the process of encountering it.
For this one,
you have to pedal.
There is an earlier, wonderfully literal version of that idea. In a firsthand account of Conflux 2007 in Brooklyn, a participant described riding behind Roberts on a tandem bicycle for Cycles for Wandering. A camera, GPS and computer used information about the ride to alter the recorded images.
The street became material through the act of moving along it. I like the physical commitment of that arrangement. The art needed someone to go somewhere. Pedaling, choosing a route and sharing a ride became part of making an image, giving the technology something human to respond to.
Plastic with an uneasy
life of its own.
In Invasive Species, Roberts turns toward the plastic debris entangled with everyday life. The Shiva Gallery’s presentation describes animations concerned with the relationships among people, plastics, and the environment, including the intensified use of disposable materials during the pandemic.
The work leaves room for a difficult coexistence: a material can serve a protective purpose and contribute to an environmental problem. That tension is more interesting than a picture that supplies an instant answer. It asks viewers to remain with circumstances in which usefulness and damage can occur together.
Roberts’ environmental attention has a different form from the community plantings and public interventions of Miami artist Xavier Cortada. One reason to include both in this series is that Florida’s landscape can generate many kinds of artistic response. Participation, animation, photography, and physical action offer different ways of making a relationship visible.
A student
can begin
within reach.
Roberts’ current faculty profile lists training at the University of Florida and the University of Illinois at Chicago, alongside teaching in interactivity, photography, graphic design, and digital art fundamentals. Those subjects give students several entry points into making. The ability to combine them is especially useful when the work does not fit a single established category.
An artist teaching these methods also teaches a habit of inquiry. The tool can be examined. Its expected use can be changed. Another person’s expertise can become part of the experiment. An unfamiliar result is something to investigate.
What I admire is the invitation beneath all that experimentation. An object arrives with a familiar use, but the artist stays curious about it. That is an encouraging example to give a student. Their task can begin with something already within reach, provided they are willing to look at it long enough for another possibility to appear.
Roberts keeps trying another relationship between things. He has done it with paintings and poems, ocean data and water, cameras and walking routes. Sometimes, apparently, a shopping cart is the right place to begin.
About Matt Roberts and his work
What kind of artist is Matt Roberts?
Matt Roberts is a new media artist and photographer, and a professor of digital arts at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.
What was The Strangers?
The Strangers was an augmented-reality collaboration by Matt Roberts and poet Terri Witek for the Orlando Museum of Art’s 2016 Florida Prize exhibition. Mobile devices revealed altered paintings accompanied by Witek’s poetry.
How did Waves connect a gallery to the ocean?
Waves used data from a buoy off Cape Canaveral to produce sound frequencies that vibrated water in a bowl. The resulting movement was projected onto a gallery wall.
Sources: Stetson’s faculty profile and contemporary accounts of the 2013 performance, 2016 museum work and 2018 exhibition; the Orlando Museum of Art’s 2016 catalog; Shiva Gallery’s presentation of Invasive Species; and SoundBlog’s firsthand account of Cycles for Wandering at Conflux 2007. Reflections on the works and their possibilities are Rob Urban’s.
For more of my writing and approach to consulting, meet Rob.