Q&A with Naho Matsuda
Welcome to Q&A, a new series from the editors of Artists + Machine Intelligence.
Every week, we feature collaborators working at the intersection of art and technology. This April, in celebration of National Poetry Month, we’re spotlighting artists, writers, and poets exploring computational creative writing. Follow us on Medium for new posts weekly.
Naho Matsuda is an artist and designer, investigating social and cultural issues within contemporary technology practices. In a 2017 project for the city of Manchester, she stripped the numeric values from public data streams to describe the city in haiku-like vignettes. Now, she turns her interest in language, abstraction, and aesthetics towards an unlikely subject: the U.K.’s National Careers Service. This week, whilst taking a break from grading projects (she is also a designer researcher at Goldsmiths’ Interaction Research Studio), Naho speaks to us from her home in London on finding her career path, feeling homesick, and the importance of building communities of care.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
What is your current state of mind? A bit, kind of, up and down. This current situation frames everything that I’m doing at the moment. I’m trying to figure out where my practice is going. A lot of projects have been cancelled. Working in my bedroom can be super nice, but it’s a weird time.
Describe a typical Tuesday: I have a lot more of a routine now than I did before. I wake up quite early, do a bit of reading. And I’ve started to do yoga. Before Covid-19, I didn’t do any exercise. But now that I’m locked in, I’m more aware of how little I move. So I start every morning streaming yoga with an American yoga teacher, which is absurd. Then, I either work for my research job, or on my own projects. In the last few weeks, I’ve been writing a lot of applications. I look for open calls or U.K. Arts Council applications to apply for funding. I’ve been writing around 8 applications in parallel for different projects. Other than that, I live with two flatmates, so now I share everything with them, which is quite nice. We wouldn’t hang out as much before, but now we cook together.
Currently reading: Original Copies: Architectural Mimicry in Contemporary China, and Larry, the Chief Mouser: And Other Official Cats.
Just started watching: Killing Eve, and this video of Ingo Nierman and Tom McCarthy in conversation
Where do you find inspiration? For me, it’s a bit everywhere. I get most excited talking about projects with friends and artists that I meet. Really, looking and hearing about other people’s work, or talking about new project ideas from others. An idea starts with something I find fascinating. Often it’s a combination of finding it fascinating and finding it humorous, funny, or something that makes me smile a lot. Then I write it down in just one sentence, and see if that survives a couple of days…
Which came first for you: art or tech? I think back to my dad, who worked in I.T. So, I grew up with computers around me, but I wasn’t the geeky kid who builds a computer with my dad. I played computer games, and I think I did my first drawings on the corporate paper of my dad’s company where he was working! Throughout my practice, I’ve always worked around technology. My work doesn’t start with technology often, but technology might be a tool to materialize the project. I think I’m a bit unusual in this scene. When I showed “every thing every time,” I come from a slightly different angle, and I work with different developers and creative technologists. That’s not my background, but I work closely with them, and it seems to work really well.
What are you working on? I started a project just before lockdown about the future of work. I was interested in how people receive advice on choosing job roles, so I did a residency with career advisors. I looked at a lot of career tests, and the language used in these tests.
The title of this project is “Moderately Interested,” and it is based on the U.K’s National Careers Service website. Anyone can visit this website to find help on career choices, or the next step in finding a job, or changing jobs, and so on. There’s a questionnaire you have to answer to find out what kind of career you might be interested in. There are 84 descriptions of different job roles. All of them are abstract. (And ‘moderately interested’ is the median option from the 5 degrees of interested, ranging from ‘not interested at all’ to ‘extremely interested.’)
Like “typing information into a computer” or “providing advice to people who have problems.” You select how interested you are in this activity, and the site gives you a suggestion for a few areas that you might be interested in working in. So, I did a series of prints based on these descriptions on the site, and the next part of the project is photographing these prints in different work locations as the background. I only once took the test with the intention of trying to find out what I want to do, or what field I am interested in. Some of the suggestions I received were…“working with people,” “fixing an air conditioner,” “loading or unloading a ship…” and I think that’s a bit me, I’m a bit interested in everything.
An artwork you’ve been thinking about lately: Do Snow Monkeys Remember Snow Mountains?. It’s a video artwork by Japanese artist Shimabuku. In the 1970s, Japanese snow monkeys were relocated to a desert sanctuary in Texas. When the monkeys came to this new environment, they completely struggled. But then they learned how to catch rattlesnakes, and eat different food. And they grew actually larger than they were in Japan! Shimabuku heard about this, and he visited those monkeys. He bought lots of ice from a corner shop, from a little supermarket, and built a little snow mountain for the snow monkeys. He wanted to see if the snow monkeys would remember the snow of Japan, generations after being relocated to a different environment. The video is very simple. It just shows monkeys looking at a tiny, tiny pile of ice and trying to eat it. But I really like the poetry of it, it’s quite beautiful and a bit funny, too. So, yes, I think about this work sometimes. Because of the virus, and me being in London, thinking of the places where I felt more at home, or when I feel homesick, now that I suddenly can’t go back to Japan.
Advice you wish you heard 10 years ago: Now, that I’m living in the U.K., I’m a lot more aware of discrimination and patriarchy, things that I wasn’t really aware of in my early twenties. I wish I had more female role models in my education, and I wish I would’ve had more people tell me to stand up for myself, to not take things too personally, and to build better peer groups or communities of care. Things that I have now, but in my early 20s, I didn’t really pay much attention to discrimination, because it was so normal. And I guess, as a young woman, it must be very different to study and start working now. To live in a post “Me-too” time. I think it’s very different from just 10 years ago, which just seems strange, because it doesn’t feel that long of a time ago.
In 2020, I want to see more of: Moments of change. I hope that we get through this crisis, and that everything that we notice that is not working, everything that the crisis makes more evident, that these things that will change. So yes, more moments of change. I hope for a system that is more caring.
In celebration of National Poetry Month, tell us about a poem that speaks to you: For O,Miami, a poetry festival in Miami, Florida, I made two ‘writing machines’ with Paul Angus: Letter to Miami, and Miami Roads, which is based on ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost, but with very Miami locations... I was supposed to show a new project at O, Miami, but as the trip was cancelled due to Covid-19, we launched these two little online projects instead…
Artists + Machine Intelligence (AMI) is a program at Google that invites artists to work with engineers and researchers together in the design of intelligent systems. Questions? Feedback? Tweet us or email: artwithmi@google.com
