1974 (2020)
A blended representation of 2,547 successive screenshots of images from a Google search for “group portrait, 1974”, consecutively ordered last to first.
Still video frames of screenshots. (2019)
AIR DEFENDER (2023)
Patterns with transitions.
ALPHAALPHA B 360 A transparent still image multiplied and manipulated in three dimensional video space (2021). Please click image above for 360 video experience.
ALPHABET FIELD (2024) Generative patterning animated with transitions. (360/8k/60fps/ProRes)
AMARYLLIS (2023) Generative still patterning animated with transitions. (8k/360/60fps).
1a : an unusual or unexpected sight. strange apparitions in the sky b : a ghostly figure. reported seeing ghostly apparitions in the old house
2 : the act of becoming visible. the apparition of sunlight through the window
ASYMMETRONIC (2024) Three generative still patterns, animated. (360/8k/ProRes)
AURORA (2023). Generative still patterning animated with transitions. (8k/360/60fps)
AVIARY (2024) Generative still patterning animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
BETH
ONE (2011-2014)
BETH
TWO (2014)
For more information about this work, please consider reading the following features on Conscientious Photography Magazine, GUP Magazine, Featureshoot, and Fototazo.
BRANCHES (Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, 2021-2024).
Inquiries with trees.
When the woodcutter enters the forest
the trees all murmur
the handle of the axe is one of us.
-- Aesop
I live in Somerville, Massachusetts, one of the most densely populated urban areas in New England. Most days during the pandemic I have calmed myself by walking and looking upward toward the trees.
BRANCHES is an ongoing composite of tree data collected with a variety of camera devices during my morning walks. Each file is built inside Photoshop from composite parts. Dimensions are variable to 40inch widths.
Inside the urban environment it is sometimes difficult to feel the expanse of the forest. BRANCHES is my way of reweaving an imaginary canopy.
CATALOG (2023) Generative still patterning animated with transitions. (360/8k/60fps)
CATHEDRAL (2022)
Generative still patterns with transitions.
CENOTE (2024 Web artifacts animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
CHELSEA (2024) Three generative still patterns, animated. (360/8k/2024)
CHILDREN WITH CANCER
I photographed children with cancer between 1996 and 2000. This work is a collaboration with over thirty-five young people and their families from the Boston area. The young people range in age from ten months to twenty-seven years, and, at the time, they were in treatment for a variety of cancers.My wish has been to create a body of work that will stand in contrast to much of the photographic record of disease. Instead of concentrating on the doctors, the procedures, and the medical technology that surrounds our contemporary experience of cancer, I want to make images that are about these young people and their uniqueness.
CI-ÇA (2022) Animated generative still patterns. (8k)
For 360, please click here.
CITY OF CONCERN
Somerville, Massachusetts, 2014-2024
CLOUD DATA (2008)
Manipulated cloud data from Facebook user photographs.
COBRA (2024). Still frame patterning animated with transitions. (8k/60fps)
COLORADO (2023) Web artifacts with generative patterning in layers animated with transitions. (360/8k/60fps)
For all inquiries: please click here to email me directly.
COPENHAGEN TO OSLO
CORE PATTERN (2020/2022)
Web artifacts with dissolving transitions.
CROSSHATCH (2023). Interlaced transition states of still web artifacts. (360/8k/60fps)
DADA ETCHING (2023)
Generative patterning animated with transitions. (360/8k/60fps)
DAZE (2024) Three generative still patterns, animated. (360/8k/ProRes)
DECEMBER (2022)
Still patterns with dissolving transitions (8k).
DIP DOT (2023)
Animated still images. (5k)
DISSOLVE (2022)
Web artifacts with dissolving transitions. Click here for 360.
DUPE DUPE (2020/2024)
Web artifacts with dissolving transitions. (14min, 8k, ProRes)
EAZY (2024). Still frame patterning animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
EIGHTY EIGHT (2024) Manipulated web artifacts animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
EYEPRINT (2019)
Layers of my eye and fingerprint.
FAUNA (2023) Generative still frames animated with transitions (360/8k/60fps)
FLIGHT (2024). A bird in flight, multiplied. (360/8k/ProRes)
FLOWER STUDIES
FOUR SIXTEEN (2023)
A sequence of still images. 26 minutes (5k/24p).
FOXTROT (2023) Web artifacts and generative patterning in layers with transitions (360/4k/60fps).
FUN ILLUSION (2021) Several layered optical patterns moving in space.
GARDEN (2024). Thirty-four still frames of non-existent, generative fauna animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
GUADELOUPE (2018/2021).
A burning car without humans on the side of the road.
HALF PAST (2023)
Generative patterns with transitions. (360/4k)
HALLOWED (2024) Manipulated digital information.
I use computers to question some of the things I make with cameras.
Click any image to enter full project.
HUICHOL (2024). Generative still patterns animated with transitions. (8k/360/60fps)
HUMMINGBIRD (2024) Still frames animated with transitions. (8k/360/24p/ProRes)
HYMNS (2021) Two patterns in motion.
IMPOSSIBLE (2024). Manipulated web artifacts and generative patterning animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
MATTHEW SWARTS
Scroll index for project information and links.
I use computers to question some of the things I make with cameras.
I believe in photography’s ability to touch truth, but less so in our placing of importance on it having some kind of indexical relationship to what’s “real.”
My work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, WIRED, DEAR DAVE, SLATE, GUP Magazine, FLAK photo, Conscientious Photography Magazine, Doubletake Magazine, Contact Sheet, Afterimage, Fotophile, In the Loupe, and other publications. I have exhibited work nationally and internationally, and I graduated from Princeton University (where I studied Ethics and the Philosophy of Value) and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (where I completed an MFA in Photography and Digital Imaging). I was on the faculty at Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Ramapo College, The University of Connecticut, The University of Massachusetts Boston, Middlesex College, and The Community College of Rhode Island. I am the recipient of a J.William Fulbright Scholar Grant and the Ruttenberg Arts Foundation Award for the best new work nationally in photographic portraiture.
I live and work in Somerville, Massachusetts.
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
The Library of Congress, Washington, DC
The George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York
The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago
Transformer Station, Cleveland, Ohio
The Collection of Fred and Laura Bidwell
The Ruttenberg Arts Foundation, Chicago
The Friends of Photography, San Francisco
The Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, MA
Light Work, Syracuse, NY
Princeton University
FLAK Photo Collection
The Polaroid Collection
The Museum of New Art
The Peter C. Bunnell Collection
Collection of Gus and Arlette Kayafas
The Collection of Jim Fitts
The Collection of Jeffrey Keough
and other private collections
NEWS
JEKYLL (2024) Generative still patterning animated with transitions. (8k/360/60fps/ProRes).
KYOSAI PATTERN (2020). Still frame layered animation made from downloaded web artifacts blended with pixelated versions of the work of Kawanabe Kyōsai.
LADDER (2023)
Still frame patterning animated with transitions. (360/4k)
LILY (2023)
Generative still patterns with transitions. 8k.
LUCY (2024) Still web artifacts and generative patterning animated with transitions. (8k/360/ProRes)
LUSH (2024) Generative and optical still frame patterning animated with transitions. (8k/ProRes)
MARBLEHEAD (2024) Three generative still patterns, animated. (360/8k/ProRes)
MERIDIAN (2024) Five-hundred-sixy-seven generative web artifacts animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
MONARCH (2022) Generative asymmetrical structures with generative patterning.
La Reserva Curicancha, Monteverde, Costa Rica, 2014.
Mystery School uses photographs, sounds, looped video clips, drawings, and writings to present a collaborative portrait of people who live and work with autism, epilepsy, down's syndrome, and other cognitive and perceptual disabilities, I am most deeply interested in creating spaces where we might see and accept parts of a greater wholeness.
NORTH BEACH (2021)
Still images of a sunrise on Long Beach Island, New Jersey, layered with transitions.
NOT (2024) Three generative still patterns, animated. (360/8k/ProRes)
OPTICON (2022)
Web artifacts with transitions (8k60p).
Orchid Studies, Noise gradients poured into organic form, (2019). These images are two dimensional representations of continuous time vector relationships based on an electronic capture of an orchid with an iPhone. In other words they are files that can (also) be printed into objects or experienced as dimensional realities inside VR.
Discrete time views values of variables as occurring at distinct, separate “points in time”, or equivalently as being unchanged throughout each non-zero region of time (“time period”)—that is, time is viewed as a discrete variable. Thus a non-time variable jumps from one value to another as time moves from one time period to the next. This view of time corresponds to a digital clock that gives a fixed reading of 10:37 for a while, and then jumps to a new fixed reading of 10:38, etc. In this framework, each variable of interest is measured once at each time period. The number of measurements between any two time periods is finite. Measurements are typically made at sequential integer values of the variable “time”.
A discrete signal or discrete-time signal is a time series consisting of a sequence of quantities.
Unlike a continuous-time signal, a discrete-time signal is not a function of a continuous argument; however, it may have been obtained by sampling from a continuous-time signal. When a discrete-time signal is obtained by sampling a sequence at uniformly spaced times, it has an associated sampling rate.
Discrete-time signals may have several origins, but can usually be classified into one of two groups:
- By acquiring values of an analog signal at constant or variable rate. This process is called sampling.
- By observing an inherently discrete-time process, such as the weekly peak value of a particular economic indicator.
In contrast, continuous time views variables as having a particular value for potentially only an infinitesimally short amount of time. Between any two points in time there are an infinite number of other points in time. The variable “time” ranges over the entire real number line, or depending on the context, over some subset of it such as the non-negative reals. Thus time is viewed as a continuous variable.
A continuous signal or a continuous-time signal is a varying quantity (a signal) whose domain, which is often time, is a continuum (e.g., a connected interval of the reals). That is, the function’s domain is an uncountable set. The function itself need not be continuous. To contrast, a discrete time signal has a countable domain, like the natural numbers.
A signal of continuous amplitude and time is known as a continuous-time signal or an analog signal. This (a signal) will have some value at every instant of time. The electrical signals derived in proportion with the physical quantities such as temperature, pressure, sound etc. are generally continuous signals. Other examples of continuous signals are sine wave, cosine wave, triangular wave etc.
OTOÑO (2022)
Still patterns created with an AI generator, merged in video space with transitions.
PHASE (2024) Seven paper patterns animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
PINUP (2024) Manipulated digital media. (8k/360/60fps)
PLONGÉE 360 (2023)
Still frame generative patterns with transitions.
MATTHEW SWARTS
© Matthew Swarts
RADIAL NOISE
Noise gradients inside pixel spaces without photographic information (2019).
How do you make (a photograph) (without a camera) in space that is increasingly electronic, mathematical, and abstract?
And what remains if our precious data is lost?
“The original meaning of “noise” was “unwanted signal”; unwanted electrical fluctuations in signals received by AM radios caused audible acoustic noise (“static”). By analogy, unwanted electrical fluctuations are also called “noise”.
Image noise can range from almost imperceptible specks on a digital photograph taken in good light, to optical and radioastronomical images that are almost entirely noise, from which a small amount of information can be derived by sophisticated processing. Such a noise level would be unacceptable in a photograph since it would be impossible even to determine the subject.”–Wikipedia
- Various sounds, usually unwanted or unpleasant.
- He knew that it was trash day, when the garbage collectors made all the noise.
-
- Sound or signal generated by random fluctuations.
- (technology) Unwanted part of a signal. (Signal to noise ratio)
- (genetics) The measured level of variation in gene expression among cells, regardless of source, within a supposedly identical population.
- Rumour or complaint.
- The problems with the new computer system are causing a lot of noise at Head Office.
-
- A slope or incline.
- A rate of inclination or declination of a slope.
- (calculus) Of a function y = f(x) or the graph of such a function, the rate of change of y with respect to x
that is, the amount by which y changes for a certain (often unit) change in x
equivalently, the inclination to the X axis of the tangent to the curve of the graph. - (sciences) The rate at which a physical quantity increases or decreases relative to change in a given variable, especially distance.
- (mathematical analysis) A differential operator that maps each point of a scalar field to a vector pointed in the direction of the greatest rate of change of the scalar. Notation for a scalar field φ: ∇φ
- A gradual change in color. A color gradient; gradation.
RADIATE (2024) Three animated still patterns. (360/8k/ProRes)
RATTLESNAKE (2023) Generative patterning animated with transitions. (360/8k/60fps).
RIDING HER CROP (2024) Three patterns, animated. (360/8k/ProRes)
RIPPLE (2023)
Web artifacts with transitions.
RORSCHACH (2024) Manipulated digital media. (10minutes/8k/ProRes)
The Rorschach test is a projective psychological test in which subjects' perceptions of inkblots are recorded and then analyzed using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both. Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning. It has been employed to detect underlying thought disorder, especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly. The test is named after its creator, Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach. The Rorschach can be thought of as a psychometric examination of pareidolia, the active pattern of perceiving objects, shapes, or scenery as meaningful things to the observer's experience, the most common being faces or other pattern of forms that are not present at the time of the observation.
SEA STRATA (2019) (4K video loop.) A very thin, single, native screen sample of a video of an ocean wave in sunlight, multiplied and woven through stages of development.
SEEP (2024) Animated generative still patterns. (360/8k/ProRes)
SELF STUDY AS NOISE
Noise gradients mixed with pixelated information from a human face (iPhone Self-Portrait of Myself Weeping), 2019.
These images are two dimensional representations of continuous time vector relationships based on a capture of a human face. In other words they can be printed as objects and/or experienced in VR as dimensional realities.
“The original meaning of “noise” was “unwanted signal”; unwanted electrical fluctuations in signals received by AM radios caused audible acoustic noise (“static”). By analogy, unwanted electrical fluctuations are also called “noise”.
Image noise can range from almost imperceptible specks on a digital photograph taken in good light, to optical and radioastronomical images that are almost entirely noise, from which a small amount of information can be derived by sophisticated processing. Such a noise level would be unacceptable in a photograph since it would be impossible even to determine the subject.”–Wikipedia
- Various sounds, usually unwanted or unpleasant.
- He knew that it was trash day, when the garbage collectors made all the noise.
-
- Sound or signal generated by random fluctuations.
- (technology) Unwanted part of a signal. (Signal to noise ratio)
- (genetics) The measured level of variation in gene expression among cells, regardless of source, within a supposedly identical population.
- Rumour or complaint.
- The problems with the new computer system are causing a lot of noise at Head Office.
-
- A slope or incline.
- A rate of inclination or declination of a slope.
- (calculus) Of a function y = f(x) or the graph of such a function, the rate of change of y with respect to x
that is, the amount by which y changes for a certain (often unit) change in x
equivalently, the inclination to the X axis of the tangent to the curve of the graph. - (sciences) The rate at which a physical quantity increases or decreases relative to change in a given variable, especially distance.
- (mathematical analysis) A differential operator that maps each point of a scalar field to a vector pointed in the direction of the greatest rate of change of the scalar. Notation for a scalar field φ: ∇φ
- A gradual change in color. A color gradient; gradation.
A continuous signal or a continuous-time signal is a varying quantity (a signal) whose domain, which is often time, is a continuum (e.g., a connected interval of the reals). That is, the function’s domain is an uncountable set. The function itself need not be continuous. To contrast, a discrete time signal has a countable domain, like the natural numbers.
A signal of continuous amplitude and time is known as a continuous-time signal or an analog signal. This (a signal) will have some value at every instant of time. The electrical signals derived in proportion with the physical quantities such as temperature, pressure, sound etc. are generally continuous signals. Other examples of continuous signals are sine wave, cosine wave, triangular wave etc.
SEVEN STATES (2023)
States of an image with patterning created with generative AI.
SIMILAR (2019) Manipulated search data.
SLURS (2021). Layered, appropriated, original and manipulated digital media.
SNOW SQUALL, Somerville, Massachusetts, 2021.
SPELL (2024) Three generative still patterns, animated. (360/8k/ProRes)
SWISS (2022) Neutrality in the public domain.
TEA MAP (2018)
Macrophotography of screen displayed images.
TECTONIC (2023)
Web artifacts with transitions (360/4k/60fps).
TRAINS IN NORWAY (2021). Interwoven video samples from the broadcast cab view of a Norwegian train.
TRAINVIEW (2020), video installation. Two Live Train View samples, from Japan and Norway, composited and resequenced in 5K. Made during the pandemic on March 18, 2020 in Somerville, Massachusetts.
This is TRANSPARENT PING (2021), a video made by animating several layers of transparent still (.png) images created in Photoshop.
TWENTY-ONE (2023) Twenty-one generative still patterns animated with transitions (360/8k/60fps)
UNDERTHING (2023)
Generative patterns with transitions.
UNTITLED (2004)
In the bowels of technology—the manipulative, trashy, commercial, tainted Internet—Matthew Swarts mines societal waste in search of that which is utterly human: sex, love, death, spirituality. Melancholy, ruminative, and strange, Swarts’s images are culled from comics and porn, second-hand store paintings and educational diagrams, nature programs and mid-century design. His curiosity on several levels is about end-user photographic technology—namely, can the Internet itself be seen as a camera? Each image here began as a simple word input into an Internet search engine, a curiosity about what a random word “looked like” when input into one of the various search engines Swarts employs for finding new images. Once downloaded and manipulated, each tiny, low-resolution electronic image is made into an object and printed, in this case, by a twenty-nine dollar inkjet printer onto a variety of substrates ranging from paper towels to wrapping paper. This image is then scanned at maximum resolution and reproduced using the finest large-format printing options available. In final form what began as (in most cases) a 20K JPEG file has become a lush and seamless inkjet print measuring nearly four by six feet. One cannot help but ponder the playful exchanges of high and low resolution (virtual and life-sized) Swarts embeds into the making of an image, as if the physical crisscrossing of technology were meant to echo the psychological valence of meaning associated with his images. Swarts holds a degree in philosophy from Princeton, so it is little wonder his images resonate with heady questions as much as they do with self-effacing humor. As the seemingly non-rational grids of images here demonstrate, he is interested in making visible how our commonly held associations for images (and, by extension, the words and other images that they signify) may be suspended by certain juxtapositions, certain obfuscations. How, more simply, does the viewer's need to find a narrative change across fresh, more elliptical, shifts in context? Can narration be suspended altogether? By taking such highly trafficked, highly commercialized images out of context, away from their intended use to explain or sell us something, Swarts’s work also reiterates that understanding visual language is about understanding appropriation because (in what could be the work’s most important announcement) images don’t belong to anyone. Yet with this collection of quotidian images, as is the case with his earlier photographic environmental portraiture, Swarts succeeds in mapping a complex and haunting interior landscape. Technological and philosophical questions aside, it is in their psychological trajectory that Swarts’s images vibrate strongest. Instead of a Freudian tale, Swarts diagrams the clumsiness of the human condition by transferring to the viewer a frustrated obsessiveness about trying to make rational connections—connections in this case burdened by consciousness, by history, and, overall, by memory. Through images alluding to sexuality and aggression, the body becomes a transport vehicle to the metaphysical, as Swarts implicitly questions if they signify disrespect for the body or, rather (as in the image of what appears to be two hanging corpses) are a release from it through the experience of its most extreme possibilities. Many of the images depict the self amidst external visible “static”—a man, for example, with a rubber face pulled up over his head, trapped inside himself and a haze of drawn connecting lines, a total physical and psychic stasis so potent that one feels the claustrophobia. Or a drill sergeant barking a jump order to a parachute trainee hung precariously over a cliff on a steel support beam behind a screen of floating silver orbs, frozen in a moment so uncertain it is unclear whether the man is indeed being trained or is jumping to his death, or both. Or a wrestling hold between two men, seen as an act of ambiguous intimacy behind a veil of infinitely repeating waves and crudely-made folds, equal parts physically and psychologically abrasive. Finally, a man tied down and edging toward an abyss in the midst of visible noise created by the lines of grammar school notepaper (how strange), his helpless and inevitable demise charted across the picture plane. The images here are those of experiences that push the realm of the known. Groomed and highly designed yet poetic and elliptical, they upend the syntax of visual experience with refreshing power. Alexis Salas ©2005 Matthew Swarts' also turns to the internet to appropriate images. Simple internet searches for keywords such as "sex," "love," and "death" bring forth a visual language that Swarts reconstitutes into his work. In the process, he manipulates and prints his images onto media ranging from towels to paper bags using cheap desktop printers. High quality scans are made of the finished low-tech inkjet printouts, and then printed with the best printer and paper possible. This work questions ownership of the images and focuses on the process of printing digitally, embracing the imperfections in the low-tech prints by painstakingly reproducing them in the large exhibition prints. ©John Mannion, "Digital Transitions, Selections from the Light Work Permanent Collection."
UNTITLED (2005)
As shown at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, Lincoln, Massachusetts
I spend an inordinate amount of time collecting strange images from the web. Search engines have become like books to me: I cruise through literally thousands of pictures to download a few I find interesting. Out of curiosity, I began placing some of these images inside my photographs. At first, they were just pictures inside other pictures, but soon I began using the computer to create 'screens' that 'covered' digital photographs. The screens modulate and complicate the politics of looking, bending and submerging the narrative of the photograph.
On one level, the images here are about memory, desire, and perception. But really, I am simply in love with the way information is rendered by an inkjet printer. With my work I hope to create a layered seduction, drawing the viewer into the image far enough to scrutinize the very surface of the print. There, I believe, the mark making of the machine becomes as mysterious as the world.
Dimensions variable.
UNTITLED (2006)
as shown at Boston's Photographic Resource Center (PRC) SYNTAX exhibition curated by Leslie K. Brown
When my grandfather died I inherited thousands of images from his life. In making scans for some relatives, I realized I wanted to make work with these pictures—images for which I had a deep sense of childhood mystery. I was between projects then and the work I was doing involved downloading line art which I then transformed into screens to layer over my photographs. Because the photographs and their meaning were so personal, with my grandfather's imagery, I wanted to create something less mechanical and more with the quality of line made by my unskilled and shaky hands. I doodled on post-it notes and scanned them into the computer. Within Photoshop, I then built structures out of the crude mark-making. These I then layered over my grandfather's pictures from his personal album, adjusting the push and pull between the image and the drawn screen with the computer, confusing the perceptual experience of each image. I did not do it consciously, but the ways in which the screen prevents the mind from entering and holding the image now feel like they have their analog in the arc of loss.
UNTITLED (2008) Manipulated introductory images from Scandinavian pornography.
URSULA (2023)
Layered web artifacts with animated transitions.
VASARELY (2024) Thirteen auction result images for Victor Vasarely downloaded, transformed, and animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
VASARELY (2024) Thirteen auction result images for Victor Vasarely downloaded, transformed, and animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
WATERFALL (2019) Manipulated still images.
WAVES (2022)
WEFT (2023) - Animated web artifacts.
WHITE WHITE WHITE (2012/2024) Manipulated web artifacts.
WHORL (2023) Three patterns, animated with interaction.
YELLOWJACKET (2024) Three generative still patterns, animated. (360/8k/ProRes)
YOURTOWN (2020) 8K.
An inquiry into my favorite tree.
Layers of web artifacts with animated transitions, and light on water. (4k/360)
ZIPTIE (2024) Over five hundred web artifacts animated with transitions. (360/8k/ProRes)
