Bio
Teddy Mathias is a graduate of the Yale School of Art MFA, where he won the Phelps Berdan Memorial award. His work aims turns the overfamiliar spaces and images we encounter daily into catalysts for play and exploration using game engines, mobile devices, typography, clay, and augmented reality. He’s also a member of the band Filligar and a U.S. Arts Envoy. He’s a Chicago native and currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Statement
Imagine waking up one day to experience the world, again, for the very first time.
Walking out the front door, hundreds of freshly unfamiliar sights, objects, sounds, smells, and people, activate your newborn brain. Every step forward loads new unfamiliarities.
Forgetting your daily commute, you stare down the abyss of a manhole and imagine where it leads.
You might feel like a kid again. For a kid, the world is as activated as it will ever be. Your capacity for play and exploration has skyrocketed since the day before.
The previous, adult version of you hovers in a state of familiarity with your surroundings. For you and other adults go about your lives with relative certainty, a feeling that devours what remains of your childlike curiosity.
I’m interested in activating these overfamiliar, overlooked spaces and things as imaginative environments and objects that promote play and exploration. Such spaces and things often serve as a raw material for my work. Sometimes the work takes the form of an unfamiliar activity in an overfamiliar place. Other times, it involves newfound abilities. You might learn to draw on a screen with goofy facial expressions like a baby learns to walk. Or, an overlooked manhole might lead you on an investigation yielding newfound imaginations and, even, music.
Through my work, I hope to address the possibility that we’ve become too accustomed to familiarity. In this, I myself am guilty.
My twenties were spent crisscrossing the American landscape in a tour van. On the road, hungry and exhausted, we sought the familiar, copy–pasted shopping centers offering familiar goods to expectant customers and lodging at a familiar price.
And now we have our devices. We’ve designed our technological world to feel familiar, displaying interfaces designed to produce expected behaviors. Even children tap away at wooden smart phones, with buttons painted on, playing at the process of familiarization at an early age.
As a means of drawing people to my work, I try to take advantage of the fact that, evolutionarily, we are pre-programmed to notice even slight unfamiliarities in familiar things and spaces. This would have once been an important safety feature for humans. But it’s becoming a trait that makes us sensitive to even the slightest hiccup in our expectations. As a designer, I use the act of making the familiar unfamiliar again as a setup for the activation of spaces and things.
When something familiar is perceived as unfamiliar again, the viewer must reconsider their relationship with that thing. This can lead to exploration and play as the viewer rediscovers this new version. Things that we generally tune out or don’t notice become things that we can’t ignore.
Augmented reality is another technological development fraught with contradiction. Yet I find it helpful for activating these overly familiar spaces in the context of a working method best captured by the Situationist’s slogan from the May ’68 protests in Paris, which translates to “beneath the paving stones lies the beach.” I’m drawn to this slogan because it’s both a call-to-action — encouraging people to literally pry away the stones from the street — and a probe for the imagination to uncover a more playful world that exists beneath familiar realities.
I aim to produce work that not only encourages participation, but promotes the kind of world I’d like to inhabit. It follows that this promotion becomes a critique of the world that we do.
There’s something underneath those overfamiliar things in your world that you ignore every day.
Look again.