Anthony Mattox Interaction Design + Digital Art

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.

I’m planning to shift the direction of my site a little. Till now the focus of my blog has primarily been my artwork and little sketches I produce, and my portfolio has been a selection of the better works from my blog.

I’d like to expand the breadth of my blog and make it a bit more bloggy. I plan on including posts of other artists I discover that inspire me and perhaps some other interesting things I come across. I’d also like to expand into some other interests of mine, including food and music. Through this I hope to share a larger range of my interests and perhaps share a little more about myself. Hopefully I can hold myself to this, so expect some thorough in the near future.

Further in the distance I plan to restructure my portfolio. Having it pull work from the blog makes it easy to update, but limits the functionality of it. Rather than a chronological list of my works, I hope to build something awesome which presents my work better.

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.

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.

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.

Snow. Venturing out in the tail end of the recent snow storm. I’m not used to so much snow, and neither was the rest of the city. Cars were (are) completely lost in snow and the streets were completely filled. The snow’s definitely slowed things down, and also stopped the whole city, But it was also a great experience.

With two feet of snow on the roads, the city belonged to pedestrians. The scene was fairly apocalyptic, but at the same time people were walking around in the snow and everyone seemed a little friendlier than usual. Not to mention crime has dropped to almost nothing.

At sunset after the storm, the houses were cast in the most beautiful warm light. Here is also a car under a pile of snow.

When the snow first started it melted. The snow then stuck onto the wet trees. It made a great winter wonderland scene and took a few trees down.

Rachel Verhaaren wading through the snow.

Read On »

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.

For a while I’ve been interested in exploring sound as a new medium. Pure Data is a sound program which I’ve been particularly interested in. The program is something like a visual programming language, with a similar interface to quartz composer. Objects which represent chunks of code are placed on the canvas. These objects have inputs and outputs through which they send and receive data in the form of numbers, strings, and audio signals. Some graphic interface elements call also be added to control applications.

Starting to work with Pure Data is a little intimidating. Objects added to the stage are blank and you have to type into them what object the should be. Until you understand what the basic objects are and how they interact trying to get anything working isn’t easy. For at least a good while I’ve been opening up Pure Data every few months only to put it away again after beating my head against it for a while.

For my recent flash game, Pulsus, I decided to create the sound using Pure Data to force myself to learn the program. I managed to cobble together a basic understanding and build a few synthesizers and sound generators.

I used this first patch to create most of the sound effects in the game. For a number of oscillators the pitch and envelope can be changed. The pitches can create harmonics, harmonies, or dissonant chords. The envelope, the volume over the course of the sound, creates pulsing tones, short beats, and any other type of tone. I also added an amplitude modulator and a global envelope to add some more control.

In my next experiment I created a simple mono synthesizer. Key inputs, from my computer keyboard, are mapped into midi notes. When a key is pressed the frequency slides to that note if another note is still playing. Key presses trigger the envelope generator which reads data from an array (top right). The synth also has frequency and amplitude modulators and reads the waveform from a table to include harmonics.

Next I build a polyphonic synthesizer which has a separate oscillator for every note in the scale.

Here are the pure data files for these patches in case they might be useful to anyone, but again they are not super efficient, organized, or annotated.

• tone generator
• monosynth
• polysynth
• polysynth tone (an abstract for the polysynth)

These are my first moderately successful explorations with Pure Data. Some things, I realize, are not done as efficiently as possible, but I’m working things out in the next iteration. My next frustration is to find a way to control the instruments I build. I need a midi sequencer with which I can construct songs that could then send the midi info to Pure Data. I tried using a garage band plugin to output midi info from garage band but It came out pretty garbled in PD, I could be doing something wrong though. Any thoughts on how I should go about this?