Matt Nish-Lapidus - Art Directors Club of Tulsa

Matt Nish-Lapidus came and spoke with the Art Directors Club of Tulsa on April 11, 2019 at the Living Arts Gallery.

Matt is an independent designer, artist, and musician who is based in Toronto, Canada. He currently teaches interaction design and data visualization at the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design (CIID), is lead curator for the digiPlaySpace exhibition at the Toronto International Film Festival, and works on collaborative projects in the areas of software, data visualization, installation, and audio.

Matt spoke about some of the projects he has worked on in the past including some of his installation projects.  Matt has been focusing on the challenges of living in a networked world.  He has used his audio installations to get people to think about the world around us.  I thought it was interesting as he spoke of one of his installations that worked with "Sound and Light" in a room.  People would come into the room and it was sound activated so that when there was a lot of commotion in the room, the "nature sounds" of birds and wildlife would be quiet, but once the people would be still (like you would in a forest) then the viewers would then be able to hear the sounds as they would get louder.

Matt had also set up some of his equipment for his audio installations.  At the end of his talk and powerpoint presentation, he gave a demonstration of how his electronic audio system worked by dialing the knobs on the instrument panel up and down.  He said he is also in the process of recording some of the electronic sounds and putting them on a CD.

I spoke briefly with him after the talk and asked him if he played guitar, as his electronic equipment somewhat resembled that of a guitarists foot pedals.  He said yes, he had learned to play piano and guitar early in his life and that it was an influence on some of his current work with the electronic installation pieces.

I did also take a few pictures of the event on my phone, however, I am currently having a difficult time trying to get pictures off of my phone.  But if I am able to get them pulled off I will upload them to this blog.