anthony mattox new media art & design

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.

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.

read on »

Exhibitions: SSI4 & Juried Undergrad Show

Two pieces of mine are currently on display in exhibitions at MICA.

WikiWeb, a piece I created about a year ago is part of an exhibition of interactive work, Sight Sound Interaction (SSI4). The show is curated annually by Jason Slaon and is in the Rosenberg gallery on the second floor of the Brown Center. The project itself is an interactive map of Wikipedia. Pages on the site are represented by small points and links are are drawn as lines connecting pages. Any point can be expanded to show all the pages it links to. You can interact with a working version of the project on the project site or swing by the exhibition to see it and some other works.

The Juried Undergrad Exhibition is another annual show which features a wide range of work from students at MICA. This year I submitted a print from my ribbons piece. It’s exciting to see my work printed on a larger scale, about 36″x24″. To get the image for the print I added a bit of code to save the drawing as vector objects which can then be redrawn and exported as a PDF. The exhibition is in the Meyerhoff and Decker galleries on the first floor of the Fox building.

IxDA Design

My department at MICA recently changed it’s name from Interactive Media to Interaction Design & Art (IxDA). Interactive media was perhaps an appropriately ambiguous name considering the work coming out of the department, but the new name is hopefully more self-explanatory.

To advertise the new name there is a t-shirt design competition, and then free shirts for all the majors. I’ve been working on some designs, mostly just typographic logos. This one looked half decent and I combined it with something I was working on in Processing. Here are a couple sketches.

Typographic Experiments

This semester I’m taking my first formal class in typography. I’ve gleaned enough to do a decent job with it, but it’s definitely something I should do. So far the work for the class has involved a series of exercises, each producing a number of square compositions exploring letter forms and their interrelationships. In each we had a number of restrictions and goals. Here are just a few that I found more interesting.

Of course, after playing with letters in Illustrator for a while, I thought it would be a good idea to throw some letters in Processing. Processing handles text pretty well and the results can be exported as a PDF (vector graphics). The text will be rendered as text in the PDF. For scripts involving words I created an SVG file of the word so I could have more control over the type.

The next three used my particle system with a perlin noise flow field as in some of my other projects. Each characters’ mass is based on its size, but one character is also a little lighter than the other making them separate slightly as they are pushed by various forces. The noise field is also slightly offset in a third dimension to cause further separation.

Using a more recent iteration of my particle system I created these next two by replacing the springs with the word interconnection.

I used a cellular automata script to create this last one. Each state of a position in the array corresponds to a letter in the word automation which is also written out in the first generation of the system. With so many states the system becomes to complex to form any recognizable patterns, but I thought it was at least a little humorous.