Showcase
Alessandro Zancan
Alessandro Zancan is a Marxist transdisciplinary artist.
Their art relates their personal experience by placing it within a larger, socioeconomic context and using it as a lens through which to expose class dynamics, raise class consciousness, conduct dialectical materialist analysis and foster a revolutionary praxis.
MatGen was initially conceived to help structure and organise my art projects, as well as take care of the infinite admin that comes with being a transdisciplinary artist.
By leveraging MatGen's semantic folder system and writing a few scripts which will be integrated into future art-based modules, I can automatically get all musician info from my musician database, and keep all my sheet music (in MuseScore) up to date with their details and instrumentation, as well as create gig-specific sheet music packs, containing setlists, each piece exported to PDF and MP3 mockup, technical details such as guitar effect presets and drum kit setup diagrams, and more.
On top of that, the very same data was used to automatically create title cards in DaVinci Resolve for each piece. I've also laid the groundwork for a function that takes a special stave in MuseScore and uses it automatically cut the video in DaVinci Resolve according to notated instructions.
Once I've finished developing my website, all the metadata for my projects will be automatically uploaded to it and kept up to date.
Rational Productions
Rational Productions is a company that provides admin, content generation and workflow management services to artists, businesses and companies.
Rational Productions provides services to clients exclusively using MatGen, and is an example in practice of its efficacy.
The data on the website is parsed from its database and specifically uses teh Business module.
All prices for services are computed dynamically, and are the same rates that are used to automatically create quotes and invoices for clients.
The Forms module is used to create an online onboarding form for new clients to give their public data, which is then stored in the database and automatically used in the Clients section.
Iskra Books
Iskra Books is a nonprofit, independent, scholarly publisher—publishing original works of theory, history, ecology, and art, as well as edited collections, new translations, and critical republications of older works. We focus specifically on the progressive and avant-garde nature of working class thought—moving critical scholarship and arts forward in innovative and practical ways. Our mission focuses on moving intellectual production outside of the academy and into the hands of the organizers, activists, educators, and students most actively engaged in real-world struggles for liberation, justice, and equity.
The Publication module was built from the ground up to facilitate typesetting for Iskra Books.
Text, images and diagrams are all separate semantic entities, which MatGen puts together and typesets automatically, following user-defined stylesheets and using LaTeX as its engine.
Editors can use any text editor, from Microsoft Word, to Google Docs, and MatGen automatically converts the document to work in its semantic database, allowing its information to be automatically used on websites, social media posts, posters, any output you can think of.
While the Publication module is not ready for release yet, it does currently support multilingual typesetting, including multiple scripts and LTR + RTL (as can be seen in the typesetting for Haggadah for Believers and Heretics ), complex tables and diagrams (as can be seen in Unequal Exchange and the Prospects of Socialism ), automatic page references, ToC generation, semantic styling, automatic hyperlink generation (and validation) and autoamtic PDF optimisation. EPUB generation is currently in the works too.
MatGen
MatGen is a dialectical knowledge management and content creation system.
By leveraging a clean, semantic database structure, it allows users to keep all their data in one place, track any change semantically and automatically, and fully integrate with different functionality, such as project management, website generation, automatic typesetting and much more.
This very website is built with MatGen.
Each section on the homepage, in this Showcases section, in the Features section are all rendered dynamically from semantic entities mapped to HTML views.
Styling is entity-based, as you can see from the HTML source. The information for each of these showcases is actually a symlink from their profile folders on each of thir own MatGen databases, so if either one of these entities updates their social media links, for example, this website will also update automatically, as the data is literally the same. Transclusions are a core element of MatGen.