Matti Niinimäki

Hi! I’m Matti, I wear quite many hats—metaphorical hats, I usually just wear one actual hat at a time. Here is a list of some of the things I am currently doing.

I teach at the School of Arts, Design and Architecture (ARTS) at Aalto University. Currently associated with the following titles:
- Senior University Lecturer
- Head of Major, New Media
- Programme Director, Master’s Programme in Art & Media
I work as a new media artist
Beyond my position at Aalto, I do guest lectures in other universities, and I also educate people of all ages in various workshops and events.

Where to find me:

🕸️ My website
📷 Instagram
🐤 Twitter
🖇️ LinkedIn

Motivation

I had a couple of reasons to join Fab Academy:

I coordinate the Digital Fabrication courses together with Krisjanis and Solomon here at Aalto University. These courses are the way for Fab Academy students to include the program to their studies at the university, so I have been following the last two years of Fab Academy quite closely. We are attempting to further develop the integration of Fab Academy to our MA studies so it seemed to make sense for me to also officially complete it.
I am using this opportunity to develop some teaching materials for the other courses I teach here (Introduction to Critical Making and Physical Computing).
The most important reaason for me is to just dedicate some time to actually make something that I want. Recent years, I have been mainly working on commissions for museums and teaching a lot. The moments when I have time to just work on my own artworks or other projects have been quite rare.

What have I done before?

Mandu

Between 2011–2021 I was running an online store called Mandu, I sold microcontroller boards, sensors, robotic parts and many other electronic components. Mandu was an official reseller of Arduino, Sparkfun, Adafruit, Pololu and some other manufacturers. With the sharp increase in administrative duties at Aalto University and all the Covid-19 related issues, I decided to pull the plug on that, but for 10 years I was supplying the Finnish maker community with their needs.

My art and design practice

I create interactive artworks. Here is one of them. Taiwanese Ethersnake is part of my ongoing research into the unknown and unintended side effects of technological advancement. Through this series of works I want to bring attention to the relationship between humans and technology in a time when we are getting step by step closer to something that could be called artificially created life.

To explore this idea, I started off from the thought: “What would a pet store for robots look like?”

I design exhibitions and create interactive experiences for museums. The image below is from the National Museum of Finland where I recently created various interactive installations that are part of the Story of Finland permanent exhibition. This specific image is from a room where a large timeline of scrolling images of people taken from every year between 1917 to 2017. The visitor is able to control the direction and the scrolling of the timeline with the ship telegraph in the middle of the room.

Probably the most Fab Academy -like project I have made is this. Here are two iterations of a project called Äänimuseo (Sound Museum), they are interactive audio players that are used with the elderly in guided groups to initiate discussions on their memories and life experiences. Each portable device comes with a library of sounds that are played by placing the wooden disc on top of the device. The only control knob on the device is for controlling the volume. Otherwise everything works just by placing the objects on the device. I have made almost a dozen different versions of this and all of them have been prototyped and mostly also manufactured at the Aalto Fab Lab.

I should make a proper documentation video of these but for now I’ll just guide you to these two Instagram videos:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Matti Niinimäki (@mnstri)

…and many other things, check out the links above or send me a message if you are interested in hearing more about something.

My Lab: Aalto Fab Lab

The Aalto Fab Lab is the first Fab Lab in Finland, it was opened in 2011, during the 2nd year of my MA studies at the university. I have been involved with the lab quite closely ever since it openend. As a student, I spent a lot of time there working on my projects and as I have been also teaching various classes there for the past 10 years.

Aalto Fab Lab website

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