Matteo Zamagni

artist

London, GB

About

Matteo Zamagni is an artist working across visual arts, multimedia installations, film production, and electronic music. Through these distinct and intersecting creative forays, Zamagni connects an array of contemporary technologies, science and esoteric topics in order to critically explore the complex of crises that characterise a contemporary epoch of planetary scale environmental, economic, and social upheaval.

Zamagni’s practice offers a multi-scalar analysis of the consequences wrought by disaster capitalism and its lasting impact on the planet’s ecosystems. Using analytical geoscientific tools, VR/AR/MR, real-time generative imaging, world-building, photogrammetry, physics simulations, and CGI techniques, his artworks simulate and combine elemental natural forms with immersive media. This has included procedurally generated fractals, local reconstructions of existing terrain via LiDAR point clouds, and macro-scale aerial views of the earth. The resulting works are often stacked composites of recurring patterns in physical and non-physical structures, depicting a complex continuum of local-global phenomena (from densely overpopulated metropolises to climatological models). Crucial to this is the positioning of the human subject in media res: embedded among the complex interrelations of nature, technology, and human politics. This creates an opportunity for the works to contribute meaningfully to the broader field of environmental activism. The modern and evidently destructive disconnect between nature and culture might be patched by re-positioning ourselves and our technologies within nature rather than outside of it; by embedding our critical gaze within the dynamic interrelations of agencies that make this planet the world rather than our world. The result is a simulated altered state engendered by artworks that play with and human-machine perception, tracking the evolution of post-anthropocentric consciousness fostered by an entangled technosphere and biosphere.

While Zamagni’s multimedia artworks create accessible and sometimes interactive entry points into thinking through complex and essential issues, his music production project Seven Orbits provides a further platform for the playful experimentation with audio-visual experiences.

Immersive audio-visual live sets and a recent EP released with the Shanghai- based SVBKVLT label make use of a broad palette of post-club stimuli that play with and confound audience perception. An experimental form of experience-hacking and inducing altered states that reflect the vertigo of Zamagni’s machine-vision driven visual art.

Films

Thödgal

DIRECTOR

Malfunction

DIRECTOR

Horror Vaccui

DIRECTOR