Matt Dixon

Matt's current research explores the facilitation of a dialogue between ecosystems, with the aim of making the invisible visible, and providing a catalyst for empathetic engagement with urgent stories. Matt is particularly interested in how the absurd and disorientating can heighten questions of meaning in a universe increasingly separate from our conscious experience of it.

Rare_Earth (2023)

An immersive sound and visual presentation for IRCAM, Paris, March 2023. Devised as an Interface of the geological and human-made, and a reminder that technology is that which is made of the raw materials of the earth, this project makes visible the entanglement of technology with the natural ecology which provides its source material.

During the work we witness a real-time mapping of the 17 rare-earth elements; an analysis which, alongside associated data, directly informs a soundscape generated via modular and granular synthesis. This is accompanied by an absurdist narration, informed by consumer reviews from a popular online retailer and generated by a recurrent neural network trained on Tensor Flow.

Where There Are Edges (2023)

This work is the start of an archive and the beginning of a journey from the ethereal toward an engagement with the materiality of the world. Where There Are Edges is a site-specific immersive experience which relays audio accounts from residents of Minster, Isle of Sheppey, Kent, an area noted as suffering severe coastal erosion due to rising sea levels and worsening weather conditions. Despite the dramatic loss of land and an ongoing threat to homes, The Environment Agency has made clear it would not act to stop the cliffs eroding because of a long-standing policy of non-intervention in the area.

The project is both a record of the ‘edges’ which will be lost over time, and a means to highlight the urgent issue of coastal erosion. This is a work about edges, about their shifting and dissolving, about their loss and what remains.