Matazone
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Matazone is the collective name for "The Other Side" webart and flash-animation website and the attached forums, "Matazone: The Other Side". Matazone is the creation of web animator and webartist Matazone Haggis (popularly "Mata").
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[edit] History
Matazone began in the spring of 2001, as a piece of webart in two sections (still available on the site). Mata branched out into animations shortly afterwards, following a nightmare about zombies, which provided the inspiration for the first "Mittens" animation. The focus of the website switched to the animations when they proved to be vastly more popular than webart.
[edit] Animations
The site now hosts about fifty full-length animations, each lasting up to two minutes, plus a number of flash-based games and shorter animations. The animations, the focal point for the website and the common interest of most forum members, are produced with the popular Flash animation programme. Output of new animations stands now at about six per year, their length making them extremely labour-intensive. The loading screen for each animation usually contains a foreword about the animation or its theme from Mata.
The themes of most of the animations revolve about four separate sets of characters, and the majority use relatively basic cartoon-style graphics. Matazone's first character-set was "Mittens and Snowdrop", two androgynous cats who partake in a total of twelve animations, most with a subversive, satirical theme. Following this came "Mr Snaffleburger", a fictitious corporate mascot in the shape of a purple dinosaur head. The Mr Snaffleburger cartoons have been the most forthright of Mata's politically-themed animations, taking a left-leaning stance on issues such as corporate morality and consumerism. "Little Goth Girl" (shorthand "LGG"), the subject of twelve animations, is a troubled teenage girl called Sarah with malevolent, uncontrolled magical powers, expanding from a simple reality as the series goes on to reveal that, unlike the vast majority of goths in the world, Sarah comes by her outlook on life quite naturally; her father is Satan, and there are hints that she is the Antichrist. The Little Goth Girl animations have been some of the darkest of Mata's animations, exploring Goth culture and the recent trend towards high levels of depression among First World adolescents. "Samurai Lapin", the subject of the least number of animations (four), is a toy rabbit who defends his owner in a series of bloody nocturnal actions. Each Samurai Lapin animation is accompanied by audio quotations from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, voice-overs being provided by Mata.
Polls on the forums have shown Sarah the Little Goth Girl and Mr Snaffleburger to be by far the most popular characters, with about equal support among the "forumites". Both of these series were also featured on MTV2 Europe for a period of two years.
Many of the shorter animations have a festive theme (e.g. Hallowe'en, Christmas), while the games are loosely related to the longer animations. Character voices are provided by Mata himself (Mr Snaffleburger, Samurai Lapin, anonymous Snaffleburger Corporation executive) and by his female partner.
New animations once appeared every two weeks; however, they have become more and more infrequent, due to their increasing technical complexity and to constraints on Mata's time.
[edit] Other Creations
Mata also runs a film orientated website called StickScene, which provides puzzles in the form of images to test people's knowledge of popular films. The images on the site are created both by Mata and by member of the public. Shortly after its creation, StickScene diversified, and PunScene, a sister website was launched, with puzzles of common expressions being to topic. The site was featured in 2006 in a programme by the BBC.[1]
Mata occasionally sells original paintings on eBay.
[edit] The Artist
Born Timothy Haggis on February 4, 1977, he changed his name to "Matazone" after a character in a play by Dario Fo. His practice of generally referring to himself as "Mata" has led many people to mistakenly believe that the website's name is a contraction of "Mata's Zone", rather than being his full first name. While a student at university, Mata encountered a webart site by Future Sound of London, which inspired him to create Matazone in its original, webart form.
Mata lives in Winchester in the United Kingdom. He has recently finished writing his thesis for a PhD on cyberculture. He has claimed on the Matazone forums that most of his ideas come in the form of dreams and that the inspiration for several of his art pieces have been based upon shapes observed in the folds and shadows of his bedroom curtains, usually seen when he wakes up.
"Actually this is true, the light hits my curtains in a particular way each morning and for some reason it shows me new strange characters every day. Unfortunately I don't get the time to draw all of them..." - Matazone Haggis, Dec 2 2004.
