Back to India is a Telugu language film to be shot in Hyderabad, India. Produced by Arun Singarahu and directed by Matt Volla, Back to India is a "Bollywood" style romantic comedy to be released throughout India.
Physical Semiology is a way to describe people's unique walking signature with language. The project started as a way to classify the mechanics of body language to stage actors for film scenes or choreograph dancers. It is also the subject of a radio show called Walk Radio: a talk show about walking
Earwaves is a series of drawings and watercolors that depict waves and reference the act of hearing.
Live sound performances using up to 600 ping pong balls, contact microphones and Max/Msp.
Matt Volla's Unruly Drawings is a book published by Front 40 Press. The drawings span a period of 10 years and the unconscious scribbling creates a narrative of evolving form.
Characters from the book star in a short animation called An Unruly Animation.
tennisMusicmusicTennis is a project that translates the action of playing tennis to the action of playing music and translates a music composition into a strategy for playing tennis. In tennisMusic, I mapped out every location the ball bounced during the 2002 Women’s Wimbledon Finals and created a mathematical system to translate the horizontal plane of the tennis court to a vertical plane of the music staff. In musicTennis, I extracted the pitch changes in 20th century music compositions (Annie Gosfield, John Cage and Ornette Coleman) and translated this information to a strategy of ball placement on the tennis court. These calculations can be loaded into the tMmT watch to act as the tennis player’s “score.” The tMmT watch is a programmable microcomputer that can be worn on a tennis player’s wrist while playing musicTennis. The watch is triggered by the tennis player hitting a tennis ball and emits a tone that corresponds to a location on the court where the player is supposed to hit the next ball. I produced an instructional video to teach interested musicians and tennis players.
NonRacketBall is a video that occurs in a racket ball court, with racket ball rackets and racket ball balls. However, the performers do not abide by the rules of racket ball. The goal is not to win, but rather, to compose the sounds of their actions in a musical way. The accompanying soundtrack includes the sounds from the racket ball court and a composition for piano, trombone and cello. Part one is for solo performer, part two is for duet and part three is for trio.
BARTology is a series of drawings that map out people’s movement on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transportation) at all hours of the day and night in order to capture different types of commuting. Each map has an accompanying sound composition. The maps document where people sit, what doors they enter and exit from and what stop they enter and exit on. This information is transposed to a music notation using syntax based on the physicality of the train. For example, the seats located at the very front of the train are pitched high; seats located at the back of the train are pitched low. Tempo is based on the time of the day in which the ride takes place; i.e., during rush hour the musicians are instructed to play as fast as they can; for late–night trains they are instructed to play as though they are drunk. Each train ride is scored for string and horn duet; one player plays the people that are seated or standing and the other player plays the people that are entering and exiting. The nature of the instrument determines which role each of the players play: strings are generally good in representing the seated passengers because they can be plucked to create individual sound events. The horns provide a good long or short sustained tone that creates a trajectory like that of a walking passenger on their way to the BART station. The duets include: bassoon and violin, trumpet and cello, double bass and clarinet, trombone and koto
Pourology is the name of a series of paintings referred to as “pours.” The name “pour” suggests the action as much as the end-result. Hi-polymer acrylic enamel is poured onto wood or paper. Multiple colors are poured together and the different viscosities of the pigmented enamel interact with each other to form a combined shape and texture. The Pourology series follows in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s “The Standard of Three Stoppages,” where he dropped string from a given height and retained the aleatoric shape of the string after it fell to the ground as a sculptural object. The “pours” are a similar study utilizing color, shape and texture. The objects of paint and wood do not reveal the artist’s hand as much as revealing the nature of the paint on a flat surface pulled by gravity; and at the same time, the forms suggest how paint would react in a world that is not governed by gravity.
Puzzled Up and Puzzled Down is a two-part installation that relates the measurements of a puzzle piece in Euclidean space (x-coordinate, y-coordinate, z-coordinate) to the properties of sound (duration, frequency, occurrence), thereby creating a sonic object. In Puzzled Up, the act of putting a puzzle together on a horizontal axis is re-contextualized and the puzzle is stacked, one piece on top of the other, on a vertical axis. There is an accompanying sound piece that creates a sonic analogy to the stacked puzzle sculpture. Since the images on puzzles are very diverse, anything from castles to puppy dogs, the sound source for the sonic puzzle stack comes from the landscape of popular music, from John Cage to Ricky Martin.
Puzzled Down is a video and sound installation of puzzle pieces being scattered haphazardly instead of being locked together specifically. In the video, the puzzle pieces fall from the ceiling. The images are accompanied by audio that is the result of a semi-random frequency generator (programmed in a computer programming language called Supercollider) that uses the coordinates of the sonic puzzle piece to create an analogy in sound to the video images of puzzle pieces flipping, turning and twirling through the air.
