MIXMATTER / 2.2.0 AI ART DIRECTION FOR EXISTING IMAGERY

MIXMATTER

Photography in.
Art direction out.

MixMatter reads the photograph you give it, decides what must survive, and rebuilds the rest through crop, flat fields, halftone and torn-paper collage. The place stays recognizable. The image becomes designed.

Install MixMatter See 12 plates
Runs in
Claude, ChatGPT, Codex
Needs
No account, server or MCP
License
MIT, open source
MixMatter result: Metro station sign rebuilt with halftone ceiling slats, a red field and torn blue paper Original photograph: a metro station sign with arrows and service icons
PLATE 01 / METRODrag across the image. Left is the photograph, right is MixMatter.

01 SOURCE → RESULT

Same photograph.
New hierarchy.

Nine sources, nine different results. Each keeps the evidence that makes the place itself and spends everything else on structure.

MixMatter result: Metro station sign rebuilt with halftone ceiling slats, a red field and torn blue paper Original photograph: a metro station sign with arrows and service icons

02 HOW IT READS

Five silent decisions
before any texture.

MixMatter does not run a filter. For every source it makes the same five structural decisions, quietly, and only then picks materials.

  1. 01

    Identify anchors

    Find the one to three structures that make the scene recognizable: a tower silhouette, a coastline, a window grid, a sign that names the place.

  2. 02

    Disassemble

    Stop treating the photograph as one intact picture. Break it into components that can be moved, cropped or dropped.

  3. 03

    Recompose

    Build a new hierarchy through crop, scale shift, overlap, displacement and compressed depth. The camera’s layout is not sacred.

  4. 04

    Reassign states

    Some regions stay photographic, some become printed halftone or duotone, some turn into flat graphic fields, some are collaged.

  5. 05

    Reduce

    Cut until there is a dominant zone, a secondary zone and real quiet. Color comes from the source, so unrelated photographs never share a template.

03 SEE IT RUN

One photograph,
one sentence.

A real session in ChatGPT, trimmed to half a minute: attach a photo, choose how far to push it, get the reconstruction back.

04 PLATES

Twelve sources.
No house template.

Open any plate to inspect the halftone and paper edges at full size. Where the original photograph is available, switch to “Source” to see it.

01MetroSOURCE + RESULT
02AerialSOURCE + RESULT
03ShibuyaSOURCE + RESULT
04WindowRESULT
05DanceSOURCE + RESULT
06Chang’anRESULT
07TrainSOURCE + RESULT
08SkylineRESULT
09ShelfSOURCE + RESULT
10MuseumSOURCE + RESULT
11TempleSOURCE + RESULT
12XiamenSOURCE + RESULT

05 STEER IT

Talk to it
like an art director.

Attach a photograph and ask in plain language. You steer direction, structure and intensity; revisions keep what already works. Tap a prompt to copy it.

AStart

BDirection

CStructure

DIntensity

If the host can generate or edit images, MixMatter makes the image. If it can only read images, it returns a source-specific brief to paste into your image model instead of pretending to render.

06 SOURCE-TEXT POLICY

Zero new text
by default.

  • Source text is content. It may be kept, cropped, obscured or reduced to texture.
  • Identity-critical wording, like a station name or a storefront, is preserved where feasible.
  • Nothing is translated, duplicated into a bilingual layout, rewritten or replaced with pseudo-text.
  • If you supply exact wording, only that wording is added.

07 INSTALL

Runs wherever
Agent Skills load.

MixMatter is an open-source Agent Skill. The host model does the image understanding and, where available, the image generation. No MCP server, account or backend.

Add the marketplace, then install the plugin:

/plugin marketplace add galokme/MixMatter
/plugin install mixmatter@mixmatter

Then call it with /mixmatter:mixmatter, or just attach an image and ask. You can also copy the skill folder directly:

git clone https://github.com/galokme/MixMatter.git
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && cp -r MixMatter/skills/mixmatter ~/.claude/skills/

Zip the skill folder so that mixmatter/SKILL.md sits at the top of the archive:

git clone https://github.com/galokme/MixMatter.git
cd MixMatter/skills && zip -r ../../mixmatter-skill.zip mixmatter

Upload mixmatter-skill.zip under Settings → Capabilities → Skills and switch it on.

The ChatGPT listing is in review. Until it is live, the repository also works as an OpenAI plugin (plugin.json, .codex-plugin/plugin.json). For local Codex testing:

codex plugin marketplace add galokme/MixMatter --ref main

Any host that loads Agent Skills:

npx skills add galokme/MixMatter --skill mixmatter

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