A New York City native, Matthew Ostrowski is a composer, performer, and installation artist. Using digital tools and formalist techniques to engage with quotidian materials -- sonic, physical, and cultural -- Ostrowski explores the liminal space between the virtual and phenomenological worlds. Engaged with tropes of interruption and flux, his works function as environments in a constant state of change, exploring the process of consciousness in its constant state of collision with the world.
Educated at Oberlin College and the Institute of Sonology in the Hague, his work includes live digital solo and ensemble improvisation, multichannel fixed-media electronic compositions, and algorithmically-generated installation pieces for video, multichannel sound, and robotically-controlled objects.
Ostrowski has collaborated with a large number of artists in the US and abroad, including David Behrman, John Butcher, Diamanda Galás, Nicolas Collins, Anne LaBerge, Zeena Parkins, David Watson, and many others. He regularly performs in the duo KRK, with Prague-based contrabassist George Cremaschi, in the multimedia duo Fair Use with R. Luke Dubois, and with electronics/accordion player Andrea Parkins. His recent installation Summerland, for 24 computer-controlled telegraph sounders, was selected as a finalist for the international New Technological Art Award by the Liedts-Meesen Foundation.
Ostrowski's productions have been seen or performed on six continents, including the Wien Modern Festival, Transmediale and Maerz Musik in Berlin, the Kraków Audio Art Festival, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, PS 1 and The Kitchen in New York, the Rencontres Internationales video festival in Madrid, Unyazi in Johannesburg, and Yokohama's dis_locate festival. He has received numerous grants and awards, including a NYFA Fellowship for Computer Arts, and his essays have been published in the Performance Art Journal and Leonardo.
He presently works as a freelance developer of interactive software, holds teaching positions at New York University and Ramapo College of New Jersey, and produces documentation and videos for IRCAM in Paris.
Selected Publications
- “Exquisite Corpses from the Bunker” The Art Section, Fall 2021. https://www.theartsection.com/exquisite-corpses-from-the-bunker
- “Summerland: Exploring the intersection of spiritualism and technology at the dawn of the electrical age.” Leonardo Music Journal, Volume 29. (2019)
- “On Science and Art.” Performance Art Journal 100. (2012) Boston: MIT Press.
- “Minding the Gap: towards managing competing technologies in improvised music.” (re)thinking improvisation: artistic explorations and conceptual writing. Malmö: Lund University Press, 2011 (with G. Cremaschi)
- “The anxiety of the client: The database as a compositional tool”. Leonardo Music Journal Online, Volume 16. (2006).
- LiSa Manuals. Stichting STEIM, Amsterdam. LiSa 1.1 won electronic music’s highest software design award (Bourges, 1997), including a mention for the excellence and thoroughness of the documentation.