05/04/21
Interview with Matt Jukes
Matt Jukes (b1976, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea) came to London, from Melbourne, in 2004, for a one-month holiday. While here, however, he visited the Rothko Room at Tate Modern and immediately knew he couldn’t return home. He has since studied printmaking at Morley College (having already read design at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology), and his work continues to be influenced by that of Mark Rothko, with its roots in layers, colours and emotions.
Feelscape is Jukes’s first venture into visually representing how memories and emotions change over time. An algorithm he created, in collaboration with the creative developer Jop Wielens, uses the participant’s webcam to analyse the relative positions of their facial features as they recall a chosen memory. These are then rated against the typical expressions of six key emotions – happiness, surprise, sadness, anger, disgust and fear. In the algorithm, each emotion has been assigned a colourway [series of colours], and the resultant artwork – an abstract landscape produced in their browser – is a blend of these.
Jukes spoke to Studio International about his new work, his concern for people’s mental health during the pandemic, how memories are continually formed and reformed, and his plans for after lockdown.
Read the full interview here