Edge.org : People

KATINKA MATSON is an artist, cofounder, Edge.org; literary agent, and author.

President of Brockman, Inc., a New York literary agency, she is also co-founder and a director of Edge Foundation, Inc., and author of The Psychology Today Omnibook of Personal Development; Short Lives: Artists in Pursuit of Self-Destruction; The Working Actor: A Guide to the Profession; and co-editor (with John Brockman) of How Things Are: A Science Tool-Kit for the Mind. Her digital art is featured on Edge as well as her own website katinkamatson.com.

"Ever since Marcel Duchamp mounted the front wheel of a bicycle onto a bar stool, the anarchic use of everyday technologies has been part of the standard repertoire of Modern Art. Usually such works question our perception by distorting reality. The flower images by the New York artist Katinka Matson are different for their exactness and completeness: the surreal aura of her pictures come from their enormous clarity. The flowers seem to radiate from the inside and the details are recognizable into the last fiber as though they were being viewed under a magnifying glass."
—Sueddeutsche Zeitung

"When I saw Matson's images I was blown away. Erase from your mind any notion of pixels or any grainy artefact of previous digitalisation gear. Instead imagine a painter who could, like Vermeer, capture the quality of light that a camera can, but with the colour of paints . . . She is at the forefront of a new wave in photography."
— Kevin Kelly, Executive Editor, Wired

"Katinka Matson, an amazing digital artist, merging the technological with the botanical in a beautiful way.... Katinka's scanned creations are towering, dense and richly hued.  Without cameras or special lenses, [she] captures the unfiltered raw vibrancy of lilies, tulips, and daisies. Closer to painting with nature than to containing and "capturing" it, Ms. Matson's work is raw, striking, if not shocking. There is honest power in this fusion of technology with nature."
 — CBS News

"As the moving lens slides along the surface of one of Matson's tulips, it is able to view the flower from all sides; her floral pictures are so intense that looking at them, you almost get the feeling that you are able to peer around the flowers themselves. "
—The New York Times Magazine: "The Year In Ideas"