Mate Steinforth

Speculative Interfaces → Profile & Selected Works

Mate Steinforth

I am a Berlin-based artist, creative director, and independent researcher with over three decades of experience at the intersection of visual culture and digital technology. My career spans co-founding the animation studio →Sehsucht Berlin, directing global campaigns for →Nike and →MTV, and most recently, contributing as a senior software developer at →Meta Reality Labs.

There, I worked on future-facing interface systems-integrating low-level →hardware programming, graphics engineering, and real-time interaction design for the world’s first true AR glasses →Orion with →neural input technologies.

Throughout this journey, I've become increasingly drawn not just to what we can build, but to how the tools we create shape cognition, behavior, and perception-often invisibly. This evolving interest has led me to shift away from commercial production and toward a research-driven design practice. I now seek to understand and question the assumptions embedded in the interfaces we use every day. Through over 70 →Talks and Lectures worldwide, I've begun this investigation publicly-and now, I'm eager to deepen it within a rigorous, interdisciplinary academic setting like the MA Design & Computation program.

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Selected Works→

1000 Clouds per Second

1000 Clouds per Second

An immersive installation that materializes the environmental cost of data infrastructure. Visitors enter a mirrored, fog-filled chamber-a tactile metaphor for the "cloud"-while a live counter tallies the carbon emissions generated by global digital activity in real time. The title plays on the poetic lightness of "clouds" and the precision of "per second," collapsing the perceived immateriality of digital systems into their physical, ecological reality.

Beyond environmental critique, the work stages a confrontation with opacity itself: the glossy, reflective exterior contrasts with a disorienting, obscured interior, challenging viewers to question what remains hidden in the interfaces they use daily. By situating abstract systems within a sensory, spatial experience, the project fuses speculative design, environmental media, and perceptual computing.

Expanding on themes first articulated in →my essay on NFTs and emissions, the piece continues a line of inquiry into the hidden materialities of digital culture and their broader ecological implications.

Relevance to MA → Bridges speculative design with media infrastructure critique. Offers a model for translating cognitive and environmental concerns into spatial, experiential computation. Engages with design as both inquiry and epistemic provocation.

→ 1000 Clouds per Second
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ATD: Attention and Dial

ATD: Attention and Dial

A poetic →CGI short that reflects on the evolution of human-interface relationships-from the logic of dial-up to today's algorithmic attention economy. Titled after the Hayes command "ATD" (used to initiate early modem connections), the piece uses disembodied hands to explore the affective and behavioral residue of touchscreen culture: swiping, scrolling, and tapping rendered in hyperreal detail.

The work draws from media theory and affective computing, foregrounding the interface as a site of habituation, compulsion, and soft coercion. Gestures become symbolic: not just interactions, but micro-performances of desire and distraction. The minimal, sterile aesthetic serves to highlight the emotional charge embedded in our daily digital rituals.

Relevance to MA → Connects interface design to behavioral conditioning and cognitive load. Merges animation, narrative systems, and theoretical critique-key areas for research in design ethics, media computation, and affect.

→ ATD: Attention and Dial
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Meta Reality Labs

Meta Reality Labs

As a Product Design Prototyper at Meta Reality Labs, I developed speculative interfaces for next-generation →AR and →neural input devices. My work explored how emerging platforms might enable natural, intuitive interaction through gaze, microgesture, voice, and ambient AI. Projects ranged from gaze-driven UI to emotionally responsive systems and seamless spatial navigation.

Working closely with engineers and researchers, I used Unity, custom tools, and →low-power silicon platforms to create high-fidelity simulations that informed both product direction and broader interaction models. These prototypes functioned as research vehicles-used to test assumptions about embodied computing, user perception, and assistive AI in real-world scenarios.

Relevance to MA → Provides firsthand experience with speculative prototyping and embodied computing. Informs critical inquiry into future interaction models, particularly at the intersection of neuroscience, perception, and real-time systems.

Meta Reality Labs

→All works under NDA, please →inquire personally

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BetaBeta

BetaBeta

A creative AR initiative exploring how augmented platforms mediate identity, intimacy, and self-performance. I co-founded BetaBeta to design expressive AR experiences-ranging from viral Instagram filters to spatially-aware fashion installations-that expand visual storytelling into interactive, lived space.

Projects include collaborations with artists and cultural institutions, such as a bespoke AR filter for →FKA twigs and an AR fashion prototype exhibited at FASHIONTECH Berlin. Across these works, I approached AR not as a gimmick but as a medium for cultural critique-where filters are masks, environments are interfaces, and play becomes a form of inquiry.

Relevance to MA → Demonstrates experimental work in real-time aesthetics, platform-based design, and sociotechnical critique. Expands interface design into the emotional, expressive, and performative dimensions of digital culture.

→ BetaBeta → Feature about AR Filters
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Letter of intent→

My interest in the MA Design & Computation stems from a desire to reorient my design practice through critical inquiry, collective experimentation, and planetary thinking. →My journey began in the 1980s, in the margins of the →demoscene computer subculture-an underground network where kids with hacked machines made generative visuals, bootleg games, and interactive artworks under severe constraints. It was here, in that hybrid of code, play, and expression, that I first encountered computation as a medium for art. Years later, as a student of philosophy and later a designer and engineer, I have remained drawn to how ambient and neural interfaces-technologies designed to be "seamless" or "invisible"-alter our attention, behavior, and sense of agency.

My research explores the politics and poetics of interface design in an age of ambient computation. Specifically, I seek to understand:

How ambient and neural interfaces encode assumptions about normativity, productivity, and affect regulation;

In what ways co-design with neurodiverse participants can reveal alternatives to dominant models of interaction and attention;

How speculative interface design might challenge the aesthetics and protocols of extractive computation.

To explore these questions, I propose a →Speculative Co-Design Framework grounded in three interconnected methodologies:

Critical Prototyping → Developing working prototypes of alternative interfaces (e.g., neural devices that respond to emotional valence rather than task completion), used as speculative artifacts for discussion and critique.

Participatory Workshops → Collaborating with neurodiverse users, accessibility advocates, and HCI researchers in iterative co-design sessions to surface latent needs and reframe "usability" beyond normative assumptions.

Narrative Systems → Articulating findings through visual essays, manifestos, and small-scale exhibitions that situate the work within broader sociotechnical and ecological discourse.

This approach builds on my previous work, such as ATD: Attention and Dial, which reflects on gesture, affect, and habituation in interface culture, inspired by scholars like Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and James Bridle. However, the MA will allow me to move beyond individual expression to structured inquiry and collective knowledge production.

Importantly, I recognize my own positionality: I have spent much of my career contributing to the very systems I now seek to interrogate. My work at Meta, for instance, helped shape speculative AR interfaces intended for mass adoption. While I remain fascinated by the creative potential of emerging technologies, I now feel compelled to interrogate their assumptions, challenge their defaults, and contribute to more inclusive and reflexive alternatives.

Through this work, I aim to transition fully into an artistic practice-one that uses interface design not to optimize engagement but to provoke reflection, disrupt assumptions, and propose alternative modes of sensing and relating. The MA is a necessary threshold in this shift: it offers the intellectual rigor, critical context, and community required to cultivate a reflective, socially engaged art practice rooted in computation.

My long-term professional goal is to establish myself as an artist working at the intersection of design, computation, and critical theory. I envision producing installations, interventions, and discursive works that challenge normative paradigms of interaction and explore more inclusive and affective alternatives. I hope to exhibit, teach, and contribute to emerging discourses around ethics, accessibility, and digital embodiment.

What draws me to this MA is not only the intellectual content but the opportunity to collaborate on an executive level with peers and mentors committed to rethinking design in practice. I am especially motivated by the chance to be present-physically and intellectually-in an environment where learning is grounded in place, dialogue, and embodied engagement. I am excited about committing to this process and investing the time and energy it demands.

Thank you for considering my application.

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CV (Selected)

CV → Complete CV 2025
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Closing Statement

This application represents a turning point-not a departure from my past, but a reorientation of it. After years of building advanced digital systems, I now seek to examine the ideologies and epistemologies they encode-not to reject technology, but to reframe its values. I want to understand how interfaces shape not only experience, but expectation-how they condition what we notice, how we act, and what we come to believe is possible.

I bring to this program a practiced technical hand, an interdisciplinary sensibility, and a deep curiosity about systems. But above all, I come with a desire to ask better questions-about the role of design in society, about the norms embedded in our tools, and about what more thoughtful, responsive, and humane technologies might look like.

The MA Design & Computation program is the kind of space where I believe those questions can be asked most productively: collaboratively, critically, and across disciplinary boundaries. This work, I hope, will lay the foundation for a more inclusive and reflexive interface culture.

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hi [at] matesteinforth [dot] xyz