Matthew Flores

A room-sized website.

As a radio enthusiast and amateur radio operator, much of my time in the studio is finding ways to compare radio technology with visual design, and to see how each can tell us something about the nature of communication.

A particularly niche activity in the Ham world is EME Moonbounce, where you use the Moon itself as a giant reflector dish, bouncing your signal to the other side of the globe. I always wanted to go to the Moon, so I made a self-portrait, encoded it into a format for radio fax transmission (it sounds a little like dial-up), and recorded it to cassette for a future moon bounce transmission.

Published as 90 minute cassette

Series of nine prints

In December 2024, I was invited to participate in the <a href="https://www.instagram.com/thing.tube/" target="blank">@thing.tube</a> NO-THING 24 hour livestream.

This livestream was organized around the theme of "nothing", so my contribution was to spend the day coding a website with the full text of Herman Melville's "Bartelby, the Scrivener", taking requests from the chat for CSS style tweaks.

Radio fax technology employs high-frequency radio waves to transmit black-and-white images. By encoding images as discrete audio tones, radio fax enables the wireless transmission of visual data. To capture this image, please configure your receiver to accept a WEFAX-IOC576 transmission at 240 lines per minute.

https://renatura.bandcamp.com/album/re-natura-04-ther

I spent much of 2024 finding ways to avoid using Adobe Creative Cloud software (I optimistically called it "My Year of Alternative Tools") as both a protest against Adobe's increasingly pushy use of generative AI, but also as a way to think through my process as a designer and user. Caesar's Palace Jump in particular is an experiment in finding a complicated workaround in order to make a simple book layout.

Alternative tools workflow:

download video using semi-legal internet tools ➡️ extract frames using ffmpeg command line tool (I think the command was something like <code >ffmpeg -i knievel.mp4 -qscale:v 1 exported-frames/frame_%04d.png</code >) ➡️ create the page layout using Finder and Keynote, adding page numbers and images ➡️ printing on the mailroom Xerox (don’t tell the IT department)

Sorry, Mom!

A collaboration with the supremely talented Justin Barker

I wanted to learn how to design and manufacture (have manufactured, I suppose) PCBs, so I used a very simple box that plays Buddhist prayer songs on loop, and added my own circuitry so that it played a slowed down, choir version of the Talking Heads "Heaven".

Army Man (tagline: "America's Only Magazine") was a comedy magazine published in the late 1980s by George Meyer, who went on to be a writer for The Simpsons.

The magazine consisted mostly of very short and surreal jokes, along with cartoons. Each issue also featured Jack Handey's "Deep Thoughts", as well as other pieces written by him.

From the Estate of Barbara and Don Rickles

A website that erodes over the course of 100 years. 100 Year Erosion is a website that's designed to slowly erode, turning the mountain to dust over 100 years - but only as long as the page is live in your browser. All it takes is a single line of CSS! .mountain { animation: fadeOut ease 3153600000s; }

Finder Jürgen is an experiment in alternative publishing that asks whether a book can be laid out and read within a Finder window.

Rather than a fixed sequence of pages, the publication exists as a live, ephemeral system: files, folders, and metadata become typographic and structural elements. The content continuously changes in response to how the user resizes, sorts, opens, and navigates the window, making interaction an integral part of reading. By treating the operating system interface as simultaneously a medium and a layout tool, the project reframes publishing as a dynamic, user-driven process rather than a static object.

Somebody once told me it's impossible to look cool while you're making explosion sounds with your mouth.

I’m Feeling Lucky is an experiment in direct-to-consumer art.

A viewer purchases an original print through Paypal, which triggers a series of automated server processes - the code randomly selects animage from Google, applies a pre-made template (with my signature),and sends the file to be printed and shipped. The customer doesn’t know what print they’re buying until it arrives, and I never see what images ultimately are being sold with my signature attached (really, I don’t want to see it. Please don’t tag me @matthewflores with any purchased prints with my name on them).