anthony mattox new media art & design

The List List

The List List is net art* piece I’ve been working on for the past few months. It is a collaborative list of lists, an open platform for everyones favorite superlatives.*the deacons of new media art might not agree as it isn’t ugly as sin and the concept isn’t unbelievable convoluted and yet meaningless.

On the site, you can create lists and vote lists and items within them up and down. The goal is just to build a collection of fun and humorous lists.

The site has been an enormous technical exercise in precisely executing a complex web page. Despite the apparent simplicity, it is one of the more involved sites I’ve built. Including a number of interactions with the database and an extensive collection of ajax scripts so that all the site’s functions can be used without reloading the page and with a flourish of sleek animations.

It’s very easy to get burned out on a piece with just a few details left to go. I did my best to polish every detail of the The List List, making every transition smooth and considering every graphic, semantic, and functional minutia.

I built the site using CodeIgniter, a php framework, and jQuery. CodeIgniter was probably not necessary, but it made laying out the foundation super fast. jQuery is of course great for animations and simplifying Ajax scripts.

Go have some fun with it.

New Music Exhibition – Poster for the Ligetisplit Ensemble

Another poster for the Ligetisplit Ensemble.

The poster is a little atypical, but I tried to establish the relevant hierarchy of information in new ways to create an interesting poster. The title is near the bottom of the poster, but is large enough be the focal point. The background graphics also bring attention to it.

Other key information, for someone who wants to attend, is closest to the top-left, in a position of attention. Little icons also help to make their purpose clear at a glance.

The graphics were created in illustrator using transform tools, something I’ve been playing with in my make something cool everyday project.

Make Something Cool Every Day

In the shadow of Mark Weaver, my friends Andy Mangold and Jonnie Hallman, and many other more talented humans than myself, I’ve decided to make something cool. Every day.

Every day I plan to spend around 15 to 30 minutes making some quick piece of artwork, either an image, flash applet, processing sketch, sound, or any other medium. The project is meant to keep me productive and be engaged in at least a little something creative every day. It’s also a place where I can exercise and develop skills which I don’t normally have many opportunities to use. Generally I like to work on larger scale projects, and, while this is a very large project, it’ll get me doing something a little different every day. I’m also hoping some of these sketches will set off other, more complete works. Hopefully I can stick to my time constraints so it doesn’t become a burden that I give up.

I began the project about a month ago to build up some content before I publicize it (also while I fixed things in the website). So I’ve got a good batch of things there already. Check out the project at http://makesomethingcooleveryday.anthonymattox.com and subscribe to the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/anthonymattox/msced.

The nerd stuff: The site is built with codeigniter and jQuery. This is the second project I’ve used codeigniter for and I’m pretty happy with it. The site still has some kinks in it. Aside from those two frameworks, I built everything else from there up for my own edification and for more control. Bugs and more features will slowly be fixed and added.

Website for Rachel Verhaaren

I’ve just finished a website for this cute girl I know, Rachel Verhaaren. She is a photographer, and a student here at MICA. Her work has really fantastic colors and textures (two of my favorite things), especially her large format photographs and often focus on optics and perception.

Most photographers seem to want the most minimal of sites, a white or dark grey page with their work in the middle. I felt it was more appropriate to give it just a little bit more color and give visitors a good impression of Rachel’s work as soon as they open the page, something few photographer’s sites do. WIth that in mind, her portfolio is on the front page with large images linking to sets of images.

www.rachelverhaaren.com

Some nice javascript touches are built with jQuery and the site is powered by Wordpress.

History of Electronic Music Instruments – Poster for the Ligetisplit Ensemble

Here is a poster I designed for an event held by the Ligetisplit Ensemble, a musical group in Baltimore. The event, a History of Electronic Music Instruments, should be a good night.

I used an old Processing sketch which visualized an audio stream. The typography isn’t quite what I usually do, but it seemed appropriate for the event. It probably isn’t that unusual anyway.

Mandala Coaster Sketches

I’m taking a web design class this semester working with Etsy, an online marketplace for handmade goods. To familiarize ourselves with the site, our first assignment is to make something to sell on it. As you can imagine, students in a web design class are not necessarily the craftiest of people.

I’ve decided to design a set of coasters and have them laser cut from wood. The coasters will be circular, with designs partially cut into the surface and then primed.

I’ll post the finished pieces and a link to the shop when they’re done. They’ll come in a set of four and there will be a handful of sets available if you’re interested in them. For now, here are the designs I’m planning. They were drawn in Illustrator. Nothing generative this time. Click on the images to see them larger.

MICA Interaction Design T-Shirt

My department at MICA (The Maryland Institute College of Art), Interaction Design and Art, recently had a competition to design a shirt for the major.

The ring in the design was created in processing. My original design was a little bit more intricate and had four colors, but I think it still looks pretty good. If you want a free shirt, just come to mica and join our department.

Pulsus

For the past few months I’ve been hard at work building a flash game. As my first game (but hopefully not last) it was a bit of an adventure, but worthwhile in the end. There are certainly still details to be worked out and some extra features to finish off, but overall it’s come out pretty well.

First go play it! Then come back here if you’d like to know a little more about how the game was created.

I’m not one to preface my work, but I would like to mention that I am not a gamer in any respect. This being said, I may not be aware of all the game conventions I should be following, despite a good amount of ‘research’. If you have any tips for this or future games, feedback is always appreciated. You can leave public comments here or send me feedback through the Pulsus contact form.

Recently, thanks to a class with Jason Corace, I’ve become interested in games as interactive systems. In the same class I developed a card game and created Pulsus for my final project.

The Game

The game, Pulsus, is a puzzle game about particle systems. Players have to place objects to direct particles from emitters into goals. While it is a puzzle game, it is also about exploring a dynamic system.

In the game, players solve puzzles by placing objects onto the stage which effect the way the particles move. In each level the particles must be moved from particle emitters into goal points. Different colored goals accept only particles of that color. Particles must hit the goal quickly enough to fill it up, but once it is complete is will remain filled. The colored force objects will attract their own color while repelling others. Grey objects interact with all particles in the same way.

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Filaments

On my way to developing my 3d tree script I first added a function to my basic particle system to cause the particles to branch. I went back and polished up the rendering of this as it looked interesting in 2d.

As usual, the script is built in Processing. Particles are generated by clicking on the screen and then they spread out pushing each other away. A slight perlin noise field gives the strands a more interesting motion and texture. Each frame is drawn successively on the screen, tracing the particles motion, without clearing the background. Each particle is rendered as a filled ellipse with a lighter transparent outline, creating a slightly 3d feel as the outlines get denser toward the edges.

To render the images with a higher resolution I created a global scale variable. The width and height of the applet are multiplied by this variable and then the scale function is called with that variable at the beginning of the draw loop. This lets me switch quickly between a manageable size to see what’s going on and the high res version. On my mac, entering expose fits the oversize window onto my screen. It’s far from a perfect system but it works. Exporting vectors is a much better rout, but this application is to complex for that to be feasible.

Now pictures. Click to see them bigger.

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