Matthew Schlanger, Black Hammer co-founder - along with Andrew Hunt, has been an interactive media and game developer for many years. In his role as president of Black Hammer, Matthew is responsible for overseeing direction for the company's business development, marketing and account management. In addition to managing the organization's overall corporate strategy, Matthew contributes to development and project management and directing the production staff in order to ensure customer satisfaction and quality control. Matthew has also continued to contribute as programmer, game designer, animator and writer. His contribution is apparent throughout the work on this site.
Along with Nikita Mikros, Matthew founded Black Hammer Game in 2001 to create Nintendo Game Boy Advance titles. Together they formed a team to complete 2 GameBoy titles and a 3D turnbased strategy game: Supremacy: Four Paths to Power for the PC.
Prior to founding Black Hammer in 1995, Matthew was creative director and senior programmer for the award-winning CD-ROMs "Ocean Voyager," developed for the Smithsonian Institute and Times Mirror; the interactive game "Gahan Wilson's The Ultimate Haunted House"; and the Robotoid Assembly Module for "Isaac Asimov's 'The Ultimate Robot,'" published by Byron Preiss Multimedia and Microsoft Home.
Matthew's work in multimedia follows a career in television production and video art. His video art works have been exhibited worldwide. Two of these pieces - "Lumpy Banger" and "Before the Flood" - were part of the 1987 Biennial show at the Whitney Museum. In addition, Matthew was responsible for both art direction and videography for The Museum of Jewish Heritage's Video History Project, an archive of interviews with concentration camp survivors, many of which are now on permanent display. He was also a consultant in designing the Behind the Screen video installation currently showing at the American Museum of the Moving Image.
Matthew's video hardware development work for the Experimental Television Center, and for Design Lab, included a significant contribution in building the last generation of custom analog and digital image and sound synthesizers currently installed at the Television Center.
A graduate of the State University of New York at Binghamton, Matthew has lectured about video art at both the Binghamton and Buffalo SUNY campuses, as well as at Rutgers University, Ithaca College, and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. He has lectured on game development at SVA MFA, Mercy and Ramapo College. He has taught graduate courses in interactive programming and video for the School of Visual Arts' M.F.A. degree program in computer art, video in SVA's Film department, and is currently teaching courses in game design and programming at Mercy College. Matthew's video art can be found in several collections, including Société Berlin, which represents him. His work was included in the Donnell Media Center of the New York Public Library. "Image + Process," a collection of Matthew's video art, is available from The Kitchen. His works is also distributed by LIMA in the Netherlands.
