mmmatto, also known as Matto – Shinkai and by his real name Matt Shadetek, is a multidisciplinary generative artist whose Zen and Ch'an Buddhist-influenced practice spans on-chain code, video, plotter drawing, and photography. Based in North Carolina, he founded Hypercastle Explorers, a project that builds tools to visually interpret the hidden 3D structure underlying the Terraforms collection by the anonymous duo Mathcastles.
Born in the early 1980s, he discovered photography in a darkroom at age eleven and computer programming a year later through a BASIC Language Programming Club, experiences he credits with shaping his interest in technical, rules-based, and procedural art making. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Applied Sciences in 2003 and an MFA in Film and Animation in 2008, both from the Rochester Institute of Technology, and later taught film and video production at the Art Institute of Washington.
