mattsly.com: some stuff i made

FutureMe.org allows you to send an e-mail to yourself in the future, as well as read the public (and anonymous) future letters of others. As of 6/20/05, close to 300,000 letters have been written and 25,000 delivered. FutureMe has been recognized by hundreds of media outlets, including the Los Angeles Times, WebMonkey, The Associated Press, San Francisco Chronicle, Yahoo! Pick of the Day. I have been interviewed on CNN, NPR and dozens of local radio stations. A book based on "the best" FutureMe leters will be published sometime in early 2007. (2002-5)

Salary Adjusted Baseball Standings adjust Major League Baseball standings to reflect team performance as a function of salary. The prediction equation is based on a logarithmic regression of data from the past five years. "Real" records are pulled from Yahoo! sports on a nightly basis, and then corrected according to reflect how well a team is playing relative to its expected winning percentage. (2004)

My Undergraduate Senior Thesis was an interactive art installation. I created a "virtual" private dwelling with various artifacts to explore and interact with. As users explore the space, the space, in ways humorous, confrontational, or downright subversive, explores the user -- collecting data (text/audio/video) and incorporating it into the room. As different people interact with the project, it evolves into a composite character sketch. (1999)

VirGal is a software tool that I created in collaboration with Williams College art history professor Nancy Mathews. It allows students to create and save art exhibitions inside a "virtual" representation of a gallery space. (1999)

Buddha's Self-Solving Sliding Puzzle is Stupid Web Game #1. I wrote it one day to prove to the skeptics that Director Lingo could actually handle tree traversal and searching algorithms. (2000)

The The Connect 4 Playing Punk is Stupid Web Game #2. It began as a LISP AI assignment, and then became a shockwave game. I have no reason not to believe this was the first and only port of LISP code to Lingo. (1999)

Designing An Interactive Game was a summer program course that I taught to in which middle school students collaborated on the design and creation of their own video game. (1997)

The Dancing Baby Jukebox is Stupid Web Game #3. [No longer available...legal stuff...] I created this in the spring of 1997 just when the 'Dancing Baby' was gaining web acclaim due to its appearance on Ally McBeal. I attached an animated .gif of the baby to a shockwave jukebox I created (which might well have been the first web-based mp3 player, back when .swa meant .mp3 and before all the Napster controversy). So the baby danced to the likes of James Brown and Madonna. Much to my surprise, and I'd even say embarrassment, the dancing baby jukebox ended up being very popular, at one point receiving close to 100,000 hits per day. The site was featured in a New York Times article about the baby phenomenon. It was also exhibited in the Getty Museum in Los Angeles as part of their exhibit on digital multimedia. (1997)

Artifacts was my very first web project (in collaboration with Jason Gladstone). It imagines a futuristic archeology endeavor in which we interpret our present methods of information storage. (1997)

The Legacy of Red Rider (37 M qt movie) is a video montage project (made before "Bowling for Columbine" thank-you-very-much) that probes the relationship between violence and the media following the Columbine tragedy. (1999)