Matthew Plummer-Fernández is a British-Colombian artist based in London who works with bots, algorithms and 3D scanning and printing to examine the automated systems embedded in digital culture.,Their work often remixes copyrighted pop culture icons and internet ephemera into new, distorted objects, images and data files.
They earned an MA from the Royal College of Art in 2009 and completed a practice-based doctorate at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2019, later becoming course leader in BA Fine Art – Computational Arts at Camberwell College of Arts in 2021.A recurring throughline in their work is Mickey Mouse, beginning with the 2012 piece Sekumoi Mecy, an anagram of Mickey Mouse and the first of several works investigating the character as a symbol of copyright and its limits.In 2015 four further Mickey-derived sculptures and prints — Every Mickey, Merge Simpson, Gogogogogoku and Spongebool — were shown in the solo exhibition “Hard Copy” at NOME gallery in Berlin.
Their bot works include Novice Art Blogger (2014), custom software that generates AI reviews of paintings drawn from Tate's archive,and Shiv Integer (2016), made with Julien Deswaef, which mashes up 3D models scraped from Thingiverse.From 2012 to 2019 they also ran Algopop, a Tumblr blog documenting the appearance of algorithms in popular culture and everyday life.Their sculptural series Digital Natives (2012), vessels made by degrading and remixing 3D scans of household objects, entered the permanent collection of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.,In 2014 they received an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica, and their work has since been commissioned by institutions including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, AND Festival in Manchester, and ZKM in Karlsruhe.
Their design studio, Studio MPF, made Peak Simulator (2015), a landscape generated using the same Midpoint Displacement algorithm as the first computer-generated landscape in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, installed at Grizedale Sculpture Park for the AND Festival.They also co-curated “Art of Bots”, an AND Festival programme of bot-inspired performances, workshops and debates.
