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.
His work includes algorithmically-generated installation pieces for video, multichannel sound, and robotically-controlled objects, live digital solo and ensemble improvisation, and multichannel fixed-media electronic compositions.
Educated at Oberlin College, where he studied history and electronic music, and at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague, he presently works as a freelance developer of interactive technology, teaches at New York University and Trinity College, and is an Artist Mentor for the Sound Art master's degree program at Columbia University.
He was composer-in-residence for the MacArthur-award winning choreographer Elizabeth Streb, and was technology director for the neo-vaudeville troupe The Flying Karamazov Brothers, developing interactive systems in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab. He has designed interactive technologies for both performing and fine artists, including Laurie Anderson, Bill T. Jones, and Martha Rosler.
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 most recent audio installation, Summerland, was shortlisted for the international New Technological Art Award by the Liedts-Meesen Foundation.
Ostrowski has appeared on over a dozen recordings, and his 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.