Ryota Matsumoto
Artist, Educator, Designer
I am an artist, educator, designer, cultural programmer, urban planner, and architect.
I received a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007 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, I have collaborated with a cofounder of the Metabolist Movement, Kisho Kurokawa, and with Arata Isozaki, Peter Christopherson, and MIT Media Lab.
My sociological insights into new media discourses, which include epidigital theory, hybrid objects, AI and posthumanism, draw inspiration from philosophers of technology, Bernard Stiegler, Michel Serres, and Gilbert Simondon.
I have presented my work on multidisciplinary design, visual culture, and sociology to the 5th symposium of the Imaginaries of the Future at Cornell University, the Espaciocenter workshop at TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes, New Media Frontier Lecture Series at Oslo National Academy of the Arts, UCI Claire Trevor School of the Arts, iDMAa Conference 2017, Network Media Culture Symposium at CCA Kitakyushu, and NTT InterCommunication Center as a literary critic and media theorist.
I curated the exhibition, Posthumanism, Epidigital, and Glitch Feminism at Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts in 2020.
As an academic, I have served as the MFA lecturer at Transart Institute, University of Plymouth. He works as a research associate and senior consultant for the New Centre of Research & Practice and the City of Dallas Office of Art and Culture respectively.
I have been active as a guest critic on design reviews at Cornell University, Cooper Union, Columbia GSAPP, Rhode Island School of Design, and Pratt Institute.
My work explores pharmacological nature of art praxis in our mnemotechnological milieu. In the world of algorithmic governance—increasingly driven by the rapid accumulation and dissemination of information rather than the cultivation of knowledge—it is crucial for the work to reflect the dual nature of technological consumerism.
This is particularly important while addressing the potential instability it brings to ethical life. This context is especially relevant in terms of the evolutionary and co-evolutionary development of humanity: a concept that encapsulates how humans and technology have evolved together over time.
Furthermore, I regard art praxis as a reappraisal of the exteriorization process. This involves noetic activity aimed at overcoming the increasing loss of spiritual individuation caused by successive phases of technological remediation. The shared mnemonic nature of artistic activity can evoke an awareness of time, opening up the possibility for retention and protention. Ultimately, this line of thought enables deep attention to cultural transmission.
Hence, an art object, as a form of knowledge culture, can disrupt the generalized polarization of the consumer’s existence and reinstate humans as autonomous individuals within the contemporary network of inter-objective relationships.
As far as the art, design, and research practice is concerned, I’d like to attain the transversal and multidisciplinary approach that breaks down the boundaries between heterogeneous domains of knowledge and the subject–group in visual semantic context.
The transversal perspective might be required to maximize artists’ creative coefficients by unmooring their traditional roles.
However, it could reveal a path to more open-ended and divergent forms of cultural production.
For me, the whole arc of creativity was the exploration of a correlation between the arts and sciences, encapsulating invention, translation, communication, and metaphor: a voyage that transcends boundaries circumscribed by the entropy of a closed system.
Multidisciplinary project involving time-based media production, interactive/projection mapping installation, and architectural spatial design