PORTFOLIO MATT COLANGELO 233 WYTHE AVENUE #2 BROOKLYN, NY 11249 978-870-9636 COLANGELO.MATT@GMAIL.COM MATTCOLANGELO.COM
I was born and raised in suburban Massachusetts, which accounts for the subtle hints of Mark Wahlberg you might hear in my voice. After getting a Master’s in English from Oxford, I moved to New York City, where I learned important life skills like how to dodge taxis and avoid eye contact with people. I also scored a job as a strategist at Y&R (the ad agency, not the Young and the Restless). After two years of strategizing, I convinced my bosses to let me do a project called 90 Days of Making, where I forced myself to make something creative every day for ninety days. Based on this project, I was invited to speak at SXSW 2014 and allowed to start a Nashville office for Y&R specializing in non-traditional advertising. After a year in charge of that office, I took time off from advertising to focus on my writing, and have since been published in Vice, Tasting Table, Medium, and the culture magazine Native.
WRITING Nineteen published articles this year
To pay rent, you have to freelance write a lot:
“Zen and the Art of Food Preparation” Native, September 2014
“The Other Significant Other” Human Parts, January 2015
“Kentucky’s Whiskey Fungus Problem Is Out of Control” Vice, November 2014
…
The deer was going to die, it was just a matter of time. It was lying on its side and it had one of Gunnar’s yellow arrows stuck in its neck. Of all the deer we killed that spring, this one seemed to be the most comfortable with the fact that it was going to die. It didn’t put up a fight. It didn’t panic. It just waited and stared at something far away, the way people do when they’re deep in thought. We kept a few steps back and watched as death submerged it in a slowly rising tide.
Fiction
“Clean him up,” my boss said and handed me one of his hooked knives. I had seen Gunnar field dress a deer before, so I more or less knew what to do. I slit the throat first and drained the blood, which had started to clot and turn purple in the deer’s neck. “Good job,” he said. He watched me with his arms folded and I pretended not to find it disgusting. Next I opened up the stomach cavity, carefully so I wouldn’t pierce any of the internal organs and spoil the meat. “Good, Dax.” Once I made the incision, Gunnar helped me pull out the deer’s insides, and we left them in a steaming heap on the recently thawed ground. “You’re going to be good at this,” he said with a smile that was almost paternal. He didn’t have any of his own children to apprentice for him, so I, his neighbor’s fourteen year-old son, was the next best thing. We slung the still-warm carcass over our shoulders and Gunnar took the heavier end with the antlers. Whatever we killed in the woods that spring, we carried back to town and sold at the market. There people would be waiting for us with things to exchange for the meat. The potter usually brought a small bowl or a plate and asked for shoulder meat; while the carpenter preferred ribs and would bring over some wood or rope depending on what Gunnar was fixing around the house. They would be there when we got back.
90 DAYS OF MAKING A project a day for ninety days
A sampling of our daily projects:
“Fan of the Stock Market� Installation that connects the tangible, physical world with the digital, hypothetical world of the stock market. Green sand drips meditatingly onto a white foam board, forming a pile over time. Beside it is a fan whose on/off switch is connected to the performance of the S&P 500. If the market is down for over an hour, the fan turns on and blows away the pile of sand.
“Time Machine� Film-based installation designed to challenge our perception of time. We filmed the office for exactly one hour (5:15 - 6:15pm), then screened the footage on a TV the following day, so that the action on the TV (from yesterday) lines up with the action in real life (from today). When standing in front of the time machine, it becomes difficult for our subconscious minds to differentiate between the past on the screen and the present in the room.
“Gene Roddenberry� A 3D-printed bust of the man who popularized the idea of 3D printers (Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek). We started by sculpting the bust out of plasticine, which you can buy at your local art supply store. Then we scanned the bust digitally with 123Catch (free app) and edited the files with free CAD software to remove unsightly deformations and make them 3Dprintable.
We spoke about these and other projects at SXSW last year
Y&R MOONSHOP Satellite office specializing in non-traditional advertising
Social Soundscape was an online experience for SXSW 2014 that transformed Austin, TX, into a giant 3D synthesizer—turning location data from tweets into music. My creative partner and I came up with the concept and helped art direct the project. Users "played" the synthesizer by tweeting about SXSW while in Austin. Longitude (West to East) established a tweet's temporal relationship to other notes, while Latitude (North to South) corresponded with pitch (high to low). Tweets were "played" multiple times before being deleted from the score, and digital instruments were chosen and changed in real-time by an algorithm. With no app to download and no login necessary, anyone with a web browser could view and listen to the music as it was generated. This project won three FWAs (Favourite Website Awards), which included Site of the Day, Mobile Site of the Day, and Adobe Cutting Edge Project of the Week. It was also a finalist for a Cannes Lion, Awwward, and Clio Award. Tech: PHP/ZEND, CSS3D, Javascript, Twitter Streaming API —————————————— Shortlist, Cannes Lions 2014 Shortlist, Clio Awards 2014 Adobe Cutting Edge Project of the Week, FWA 2014 Mobile Site of the Day, FWA 2014 Site of the Day, FWA 2014 Honorable Mention, Awwwards 2014
Tired of listening to the ambient sound of hipster cafes and rainforests? Us too. That's why we created the Ballpark Sizzler app and alarm: the first ambient noise machine that lets you listen to the sound of meat cooking. Choose your favorite Ballpark meat, grilling temperature, and grilling method… and listen to a high-fidelity recording of that meat cooking… at that specific temperature… on that specific type of grill. (If you want to watch the meat cooking on a loop, you can do that too.) HOW IT WORKS Simple. We record the sound of each kind of meat cooking at each specific temperature, every permutation possible. Then we load these recordings into the app. If the app is popular and people want to hear different tracks, we can record those after and make them available as upgrades.