Matthias Gommel

(Leonberg, Germany, 1970)

Media Art artist, he studied Media Art exhibition design in Karlsruhe and has been linked to the ZKM Institut für Bildmedien since 2000. He has held various exhibitions: the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf or the German pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover. He is a member of the RobotLab group that bases its installations on the programming of industrial robots to execute works of art. For the installation The Big Picture exhibited at the Palais de la Découverte in Paris, they programmed a bending robot to draw portraits and abstract works without end.

He participated in MediaLab with the interactive installation Algorithmic echolocation (2003), a tool that allows exploring the dynamics of signals of many forms and origins. It digests a landscape of data, of micro and macroscopic scales that encompass different magnitudes of space and time, and transforms it into a harmonious analysis. With this, it is possible to establish relationships between knowledge and contexts as diverse as the response of organisms and ecosystems to pollution and environmental changes, the confinement of free radicals in molecular biology processes that occur in thousandths of a second or the analysis of economic data, among others. Its applications range from scientific research and visualization to virtual and interactive installations in the fields of art and communication. The installation presents an analysis of an important trace of global metabolism, the Vostok core series. These data have been obtained from an ice column in Antarctica and contain information on the chemical composition of the atmosphere over the last 420,000 years. An analysis is performed at regular intervals with wavelets that are capable of dealing with data at irregular intervals, and the real and imaginary parts are presented in 3D bar diagram over a frequency range divided into 20 bands. The sound is produced in real time, using the original data and the results of the wavelet analysis, projecting these results into the parameter values of a sound generator implemented in Pd.