About MIKMAT.net
This is a home for my intellectual work: a collection of projects, experiments and ideas that have occupied me over the years.
Some began with a practical task, others with a question I could not quite leave alone. You are welcome to look around.
I, the human
I am Mikkel Mathiasen, a designer and artist based in Aalborg, Denmark. I work across installations, digital interfaces, visual communication and research.
I am something of a cave-dweller and spend considerable time in cyberspace, but it is in my immediate, physical surroundings that I find the substance of life. In my spare time, I play computer games with the lads and express myself through cooking and esoteric group memes. Occasionally in watercolour painting.
Introverted? Yes, but I do enjoy meeting new people.
Coffee? Black.
What holds the work together
I have always been interested in how technologies can carry human expression: how an interface, an object or a staged encounter can become something we experience, interpret and respond to.
My work moves between organising information, developing visual and conceptual materials and exploring encounters. Aesthetics, the peculiar and the uncanny have been recurring interests; how can an unfamiliar interaction interrupt our expectations and make us notice something we otherwise overlook?
Across these activities, I bring a humanist concern for what technologies, objects and environments do to human experience: how they shape our actions, feelings and relationships.
I am particularly drawn to experiences that leave room for interpretation—where something familiar becomes strange enough to invite a second look, or where participation becomes part of the expression.
I would like our technologies to speak a human language—an ensemble of people and our technological machines.
That is what I hope for, at least.
Thinking through making
Methodology matters to me, but I prefer to approach problems informally and openly, through sketching, experimentation and exploratory discussion. Theory helps me ask questions; working with the material gives those questions something to meet.
My process moves between reading, drawing, building and revising, often with ink and paper somewhere close at hand.
A first attempt gives me something to respond to: a possibility I had not imagined, a detail that resists the idea, or a reason to begin again, to iterate.
I need to see the first marks on the page before I know where the next ones belong.
Each version makes the next decision a little more tangible. I can compare, adjust and discover what matters by seeing what changes.
I take particular pleasure in seeing a project acquire a physical presence, whether as a sketch, a print, a laser-cut model or an improvisational scenario. A prototype which gives others something to question, alter and contribute to while the direction is still open
Working With Me
I find great pleasure in taking part in other people’s ideas and projects. My own ideas tend to develop through shared experimentation, and I value the unexpected directions that emerge when different experiences and disciplines meet.
I am most comfortable in a democratic environment, with openness and shared responsibility. I enjoy helping a group find its bearings: mapping possibilities, visualising ideas and keeping a common direction in view.
Structure gives our otherwise loose creativity somewhere to go.
I bring a calm disposition and a fairly persistent desire to understand how things fit together. I appreciate colleagues who share what they know and leave room for others to do the same.
How I got here
Theatre and art have shaped my understanding of digital media.
During my bachelor’s degree in Art & Technology at Aalborg University, I worked with installations, performance and physical experimentation. Exhibiting the work brought those experiments into contact with other people's presence and participation: what happens when someone enters, approaches, touches or hesitates?
My subsequent master’s degree in Interactive Digital Media gave me further ways to investigate those encounters through interaction design, research and evaluation. At DADIU, I worked with quality assurance and user research within a game-development team.
Along the way, I have also worked in factories, commercial kitchens and pest control. Those jobs taught me something about contributing to a larger operation, working towards a shared goal, and cycling into a headwind.
Master of Science in
Interactive
Digital Media
Aalborg University · 2023
Design thinking, strategy, UX, and multimedia design & development.
Bachelor of Arts in
Art &
Technology
Aalborg University · 2018
Media art, interaction & exhibition design in theory and practice.
A home for the work
MIKMAT.net began as a way to make my work understandable beyond a résumé. It has gradually become a place where I can return to it myself.
Gathering these projects means revisiting the reports, images, decisions and people behind them. Some ideas have become clearer with distance. Others remain unresolved, or have acquired a significance I did not recognise at the time.
Its stories combine original documentation with recollection and present-day reflection.
Keeping the work here lets me follow a thought beyond the project in which it first appeared.
This is where I keep the work within reach, and leave room for whatever comes next.
Made with 🧠 and 💖 in Aalborg.
