AFO Music Is Science: Max Cooper 3D/AV live

Max Cooper is an electronic musician and producer, a multidisciplinary artist, the founder of a music label, and a former scientist who has carved out a unique position at the intersection of music, visual art, and scientific research. This year, he will perform at the AFO festival, presenting his 3D/AV live show in the Husův sbor venue in Olomouc. He holds a PhD in computational biology, is the first contemporary electronic musician to have performed at the ancient Acropolis theatre in Athens, and was among the early artists to work with the Dolby Atmos format.

For over 15 years, Cooper has explored the intersections of art and science through music, collaboration, and his label, Mesh. His work includes installations, performative and immersive experiences, music videos, and live audiovisual projects that translate abstract ideas, data, and structures into sensorially accessible forms. In this way, his practice naturally aligns with the long-term mission of the AFO festival: to explore and present diverse ways of communicating science—not only through facts, but also through emotion, imagery, rhythm, and space.

“I’ve always had a strong emotional connection to aesthetics, and from an early age I realized that pure forms of electronic music, as well as the reductive natural aesthetics of science, were deeply important to me. This connection opened up a world in which I’ve been happily lost ever since.”

The transition from computational biology to electronic music may not seem like the most obvious career move, but for Cooper, the shared principles are clear:

“In both fields, you are free in a certain sense. Free from the constraints of living systems, free from the limitations of physical sound. The only limits are in your mind.”

Max Cooper’s work also resonates strongly with the theme of AFO 61 – Common Ground. His practice seeks dialogue between science and human experience, rationality and emotion, data and the body. At a time when communication is increasingly fragmented and common ground is more difficult to find, Cooper’s work offers a space where different ways of knowing can meet—without the need to explain everything in words.

His live 3D/AV performance in the sacred setting of Husův sbor thus becomes not only a concert, but an intense experiment in finding a shared language: between art and science, technology and emotion, the individual and the collective space