Madrid born and bred Claudia Maté is a young web developer and experimental artist (and GIF expert) who built her own computer. Her sometimes provocative work is impregnated with Internet-era elements, working on a personal level. Here she talks to Dazed about her current projects, net art and the so-called New Aesthetic...

The first thing I ever bought was a computer, I bought it piece by piece and my father helped me to build it. Since then I have spent more time in front of a monitor than doing anything else

 Dazed Digital: Where did your interest in all things digital come from?
Claudia Maté: I have always been interested in it. The first thing I ever bought was a computer, I bought it piece by piece and my father helped me to build it. Since then I have spent more time in front of a monitor than doing anything else.
 
DD: You have said that you want to find the perfect fusion between the web and 3D, tell us more about that?
Claudia Maté: It isn’t as ambitious as it seems, I don’t pretend to invent anything. I’m a web developer and spent most of my time working on the Internet and when I switch off I like to dedicate some time to experiment with 3D. Technology advances very fast and now we can fuse these two worlds bringing small 3D scenes to the web to interact along them. To me this is something very experimental with different ways, I just try to find mine.
 
DD: Tell us about your creative/visual references...
Claudia Maté: I don’t have a key reference, I could name lots of artists whose work inspires me. I’m trying to reunite them all together in Cloaque, a collaborative project I work on along with Carlos Sáez.
 
DD: Can you talk about your work process?
Claudia Maté: I love to experiment because it is a way to achieve results I would have never planned, I feel free to do whatever I want so I don’t have an specific creative process, it just changes depending on the project, being Cloaque one of them. On the other hand not everything in my life is experimental, I work on developing websites, in these cases there’s a client and I have to adapt to their needs so there’s a process to make sure the client and I are happy at the end of the day.
 
DD: Do you think your work is part of the 'New Aesthetic'?
Claudia Maté: I don’t know, I don’t really understand the term. I guess we live in a never ending new aesthetic, the Internet plays a big role in it, there’s always been art on the web only people have just started to look at it.
 
DD: What are you working on at the moment?
Claudia Maté: Right now I have several things up my sleeve and a few other in my head but I prefer not to advance anything, I’ll publish it gradually when the time comes.

Text by Paula Robles