Recursive Topography of Uncertainty by Ryota Matsumoto

Matsumoto’s work reflects the morphological transformations of our ever-evolving urban and ecological milieus, which could be attributed to a multitude of spatiotemporal phenomena influenced by sociocultural constructs. They are created as visual commentaries on speculative changes in notions of societies, cultures, health, and ecosystems in the transient nature of constantly shifting topography and geology.

Our sociocultural constructs focus on daily practice and the embodied experience of places of social memory. This is observed and reflected in the artwork so as to recreate states of intensity along the spectrum of the collective affect between the human body, the nonhuman agents, the urban artifacts and all the infinitesimal steps in between as visual schemas. Consequently, the transduction process of these intensities as a time-image is transcribed in the artwork as a hybrid interface between the necessary actual and the possibilist virtual within a spatiotemporal continuum.

The posthumanist approach to the health system acknowledges the implication of humans in the context of diversity-dependent meshwork, while also engaging with recent developments in the NIBC suite of technologies. On this basis, all manners and forms of contingent material relations in the biophysiological system are taken into consideration for the public health in the age of emerging biotechnology. The enactment for posthuman pathology is predicated on multiagent interactions between the human body and nonhuman entities in the meshwork of social and material assemblages.

The artworks explore the hybrid technique, combining both traditional (ink, acrylic, and graphite) and digital media (algorithmic processing, data transcoding, and 3D scanning). The adaptive multiagent approach allows the work to transcend the boundaries between analog and digital media as well as between two- and multidimensional domains. The varying scale, juxtaposition of biomorphic forms, intertwined textures, oblique projections, and visual metamorphoses are employed as multi-layered drawing methodologies to question and investigate the ubiquitous nature of urban meta-morphology, the inevitable corollary of techno-economic disruption, and their visual representation in the context of non-Euclidean configuration.

Matsumoto’s process-oriented compositional techniques imbue the work with what we see as the very essence of our sociocultural environments, beyond the conventional protocols of architectural and artistic formalities; they conjure up the synthetic possibilities within which the spatial and temporal variations of existing spatial semiotics emerge as the potential products of alchemical procedures.

Ryota Matsumoto is an artist, designer and urban planner. Born in Tokyo, he was raised in Hong Kong and Japan. He received a Master of Architecture degree from University of Pennsylvania in 2007 after his studies at Architectural Association in London and Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow School of Art in the early 90s. Matsumoto has previously collaborated with a cofounder of the Metabolist Movement, Kisho Kurokawa, and with Arata Isozaki, Cesar Pelli, Peter Christopherson, MIT Media Lab ,and Nihon Sekkei Inc. His current interest gravitates around the embodiment of cultural possibilities in art, ecology, and urban topography. You can find Ryota’s work on his website and on Facebook and Instagram.