Matthew Mottel is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, improviser, archivist, educator and cultural organizer based in Newburgh, New York. His work moves between experimental music, moving image, performance, installation, archival research, temporary architecture and social practice.

A co-founder of the internationally touring experimental music group Talibam! with drummer Kevin Shea, Mottel has spent more than two decades developing collaborative forms of performance and improvisation. The duo’s recordings and touring coexist with his work in flexible ensembles, original composition and collaborations across music, dance and visual art.

Since 2010, he has directed the Syeus Mottel Media Archive, activating historical photographs, recordings and documents through exhibitions, publications, performances and contemporary artistic research. CHARAS Is Alive on Spaceship Earth and MOTTEL_MOTTEL: The Image Is a Seed connect experimental cultural histories with the possibilities of collective artistic production. His historical work follows the people, institutions and conditions that made those cultures possible.

Recent presentations include The Image Is a Seed at ISSUE Project Room (2026), Parents in the Avant Garde at The Watermill Center and Yale CCAM Fest: Fluxus (2026), a music residency at The Stone (2024), and burnt truth at Gallery Gundula Gruber in Vienna (2021). In 2021, Talibam!’s Matt Mottel and Kevin Shea were the Moers Festival’s two Improvisers in Residence in Germany.

With artist Nicole Lattuca, he co-created Parents in the Avant Garde, an ongoing practice exploring intergenerational graphic scores, improvisation, architecture and collective participation. Children, parents, musicians and first-time participants can move between drawing, composing, performing and listening.

Mottel is a co-founder of Safe Harbors Radio in Newburgh. His recent teaching at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and Kean Jersey City (formerly New Jersey City University) includes digital art, sound production, animation, motion graphics, internet art and media culture. Teaching, public programming and archival work remain connected to the same questions of authorship, listening and access.

He holds an MFA in Digital Intermedia Art Practice from the City College of New York (2019) and a BA in Political and Cultural Studies from SUNY New Paltz (2003).

I research primary source documents, archives and cultural history to create inter-media environments. A photograph, a recording, an instrument or a public space can be the beginning of a work. I want to unearth lesser-known stories and create new media works that relate them directly to present-day experience.

I come to this work as a musician. Through listening and choosing what to play, I am editing in real time. That practice carries into the studio: how an image is sequenced, how a sound occupies a room, how a sculpture gives somebody a place to perform. The material can move between forms while the question that brought me to it stays in view.

My father called his photographs his diary. I started scanning his negatives in 2010. The CHARAS photographs became research, a book in circulation, an exhibition and a dome that other people could use. In The Image Is a Seed, a photograph becomes material for somebody else’s memory, composition or film. The archive provides a template for new activity.

The content cannot exist without a context. An image of CHARAS means something different when the people, the neighborhood and the work of maintaining a community space are part of the account. The history has to meet the conditions of the present. In my work and in the classroom, the source material can become something another person can interpret, question and change.

With Nicole Lattuca in Parents in the Avant Garde, children’s marks become scores. The people making the drawing can play alongside the musicians. A line can be repeated, a crowded patch can get loud, an empty part can stay quiet. The work depends on the choices being made together.

• 2024The Stone residency
• 2023Fun on the One
• 2022–2023Social Practice CUNY
• 2021Talibam! / A year in Moers
• 2019The Image Is a Seed / Tokyo
• 2019Sonic Receptacles
• 2013Croxhapox
• 2012IRT Theater / Incubator Arts Project
• 2011LMCC Swing Space
• 2010Osmotic Imagination / ISSUE residency
• 2010Residency Unlimited
• 2009Instants Chavirés

Talibam! with Kevin Shea; original composition and improvisation across international touring and recordings since 2003.

Yuko Otomo: The Steve Circuit and its Projected Redux, working with Steve Dalachinsky’s poetry, images, recordings and cultural geography.

Nicole Lattuca: co-creator of Parents in the Avant Garde, including Scribble Scores, temporary architecture and intergenerational public programmes.

Selected collaborative work with Cooper-Moore, Karole Armitage, Rhys Chatham, Yasunao Tone, Daniel Carter and Jean Carla Rodea.

2010—present · Director, Syeus Mottel Media Archive. Digitization, indexing, exhibitions, publications, research, licensing and public activation of approximately 3,000 color slides and more than 500 contact-sheet folders.

CHARAS research follows dome building, housing, cultural work and CHARAS / El Bohío through photographs, oral histories, public discussions, installations and films.

CHARAS: The Future in Action — Domes, El Bohío, and the Making of a Nuyorican New York is a book in development. It is listed as ongoing research, rather than a completed publication or an awarded application.

2018—present · ESP-Disk digital communications and media: publicity, video, still imagery, graphics and editorial content for the independent music label.

Safe Harbors Radio: a community radio and podcast platform, with studio systems, host onboarding, recording workflows and public programmes.

Fun on the One: a three-day pop-up broadcast studio in Newburgh, supported by Awesome Newburgh in 2023.

Parents in the Avant Garde: collaborative drawing, collective construction, workshops and performance across parks, arts spaces and institutions.

Newburgh Free Library: all-ages zine workshops using photography, writing, sequencing and low-cost publishing.

Nha Minh Sunday Music Series, Brooklyn, 2015–2017: curation and production of weekly improvised and experimental music.

Brooklyn College, CUNY / Kean Jersey City, Kean University (formerly NJCU)

Project-based teaching across image, sound, moving image, animation and digital publishing. Listening, critique and collaborative production make room for students with different technical backgrounds.

Teaching / Professional — philosophy, courses and projects

• Introduction to Digital Art
• Digital Media I
• Sound Production
• Motion Graphics
• 2D Animation and Multimedia
• Internet Art and Design
• Media in American Culture

The original Biography and Artist Statement ↗ and C/V ↗ remain at their existing URLs.