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Computational Arts graduate wins £5,000 Aspen Online Art Award 2016

written by Phoenix Fry

Matilda Skelton Mace graduated from Goldsmiths’ MA/MFA Computational Arts programme in 2015. She is a London-based artist and designer, working with the building blocks of reality- space, light, and geometric form. She is interested in the ‘in between’, exploring ideas of implied, imagined and virtual space, the dissonance that can arise between real and virtual and the way we perceive it.

Last year she was shortlisted for the HIX Award and has exhibited installations at galleries, nightclubs and festivals. This year her work is centred on providing visuals for music events by promoters including Gottwood festival, Inverted Audio and Blueprint Records.

Last year she was shortlisted for the HIX Award and has exhibited installations at galleries, nightclubs and festivals. This year her work is centred on providing visuals for music events by promoters including Gottwood festival, Inverted Audio and Blueprint Records.

As winner of the Aspen Online Art Award, Matilda has been commissioned to create a virtual world based on the unique digital ‘fingerprints’ of visitors to their website.

Drawing on the phenomenon of ‘Sky Islands’ – mountains with unique flora and fauna caused by climatic isolation from the surrounding lowland – users’ metadata are used to create particular landforms with their own plants and weather systems. Visitors with matching characteristics (for example using the same hardware or operating system) generate landforms in a similar location to eventually build up a mountain range corresponding to correlations in metadata. Their weather and plant life reflects the geographical location of the user. Visitors can explore this expanding world and a visual representation of metadata profiling emerges, with its implications for anonymity rights and freedom of expression.

Launched in 2014 by Aspen Insurance Holdings in association with the Contemporary Art Society, the Aspen Online Art Award is the first of its kind in the UK.

The judges, who included Attilia Fattori Franchini, Curator, and the Aspen Art Committee, selected Skelton Mace from a shortlist of seven artists to win a commissioning prize of £5,000 and the opportunity to create a new online-based work for Aspen’s renowned art collection.

Attilia Fattori Franchini said: “This award is a fantastic opportunity for an emerging artist and the strength of Matilda’s proposal shows that she is one to watch. It will also sit particularly well within Aspen’s collection as her ideas around data privacy and cyber risk are particularly pertinent to our contemporary culture.”

Lanny Walker, Art Consultant at the Contemporary Art Society, said: “Matilda’s artwork explores many themes relevant to current debates within contemporary art and beyond, where identity, data privacy and our virtual footprint are continuous concerns. In this she follows in the footsteps of artists including Hito Steyerl, Oliver Laric and Heath Bunting, who touch upon these issues in their own practices.”

This year’s shortlist was dominated by Goldsmiths’ 2015 Computational Arts graduates, with Lior Ben Gai and Angie Fang also nominated.

Apply for entry to the programme.
See work of our 2015-16 cohort.