SCOTT SONA SNIBBE
Biography
Scott Snibbe was born in 1969 in New York City. He holds Bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Fine Art, and a Master’s in Computer Science from Brown University. Snibbe studied experimental animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and his films have been widely shown internationally. He has taught media art and experimental film at Brown University, The San Francisco Art Institute, the California Institute of the Arts, The Rhode Island School of Design, and U.C. Berkeley. Earlier in his career, Snibbe worked at Adobe Systems as a Computer Scientist where he made substantial contributions to the special effects software Adobe After Effects, and research projects at Adobe Research. Snibbe also worked at Interval Research, performing basic research in haptics, computer vision, and interactive cinema. As a researcher, Snibbe has published numerous articles and academic papers, and is an inventor on over a dozen patents.
He is a media artist, filmmaker, and researcher in social interactivity. Whether on mobile devices or in large public spaces, his interactive art spurs people to participate socially, emotionally, and physically. His works are strongly influenced by cinema: particularly animation, silent, and surrealist film; and sometimes mix actors’ filmed performances with real-time audience interaction. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and The Museum of Modern Art (New York). His work has been shown in over one hundred solo and group exhibitions since 1989 including the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), The Berkeley Art Museum (California), InterCommunications Center (Tokyo); and Ars Electronica (Austria). His has received grants and awards from the National Science Foundation, Renew Media, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, Prix Ars Electronica, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He is the founder of two organizations: Snibbe Interactive, Inc., which distributes social interactive media; and Sona Research, which engages in educational and cultural research.
Choice of media
He is one of the first artists to work with projector-based interactivity, where a computer-controlled projection onto a wall or floor changes in response to people moving across its surface. His works are frequently requiring viewers to physically engage with diverse media that include mobile devices, digital projections, and electromechanical sculpture. By using interactivity, He hopes to promote an understanding of the world as interdependent; destroying the illusion that each of us, or any phenomenon, exists in isolation from the rest of reality.
An example of his interactive work which uses the floor as a media is Boundary Functions.
In his interactive artwork, he usually portrays the interdependence of beings with their environments and each other through bodily interactions. Many of his works do not function unless viewers actively engage with them—by touching, breathing, or moving—so that viewers are essential to a piece’s existence as art. Furthermore, although the works involve state-of-the-art technologies, viewers’ experiences more typically occur in the context of human-to-human social interactions. In social settings, the public works provoke communication among the viewers that, more than a mere reaction to the work, becomes its very essence. For more intimate works, the experiences can be ones of concentrated creative attention more frequently associated with artists than with media consumers.
In one of his statements, he wrote “Humans often think of themselves as embodied beings acting separately from their environment and other people. However, when we examine the object most of us take to be “me”—the body—we find it composed entirely of non-self elements: skin, cells, our parents’ genes, food, water, atoms originating from ancient stellar explosions, and these, as far as we know today, made up of pure energy. Furthermore, our bodies’ parts are in constant exchange with our environment and with others’ bodies through eating, respiration, immunology, and genetics. Similarly, the contents of our human minds are dependent: language, thoughts, memories, and preferences only emerge from our interactions with others. Even while alone, the imprints of our lifetime’s interactions propel our thoughts and memories. Such a view of interdependence has long been central to Buddhist philosophy, and has recently gained widespread validation from neuroscientists, social psychologists, and philosophers of emergence, chaos, and complexity theories.”
BLOW UP
by Scott Snibbe
When a “sender” blows into the first device, “receivers” experience the magnified breathing patterns over their entire bodies. When he stops blowing, the wall continues to play back the most recent breathing pattern, captured in an amplified loop, until someone inspires a new pattern.
In his statement, he said that “the physical world, we become aware of our bodies through transactions with other phenomena: we hear our voices via the vibration of air, we see our faces via the bending of light. Breath too is as essential attribute of one’s person, whose existence we only infer through other media: the sight of our chest rising and falling, the sound of air rushing into our sinuses, the disturbance of the atmosphere near our skin. We mentally label this evidence-of-breath as “my breath”. Yet what distinguishes ”my breath“ from mere air and, further, what distinguishes my breath from me?”
Blow Up’s simultaneous processes of recording, translation and amplification is meant to increase the breath’s salience and legibility, while detaching the breath from the body that allegedly produced it. The process of observing this translation and translocation of respiratory activity may prompt the sender to consider the connection between one’s person and the air it exchanges, and, more broadly, the existence of any self independent of the air signaling its presence
I personally find this piece of installation an interesting one because it did make me think of these questions, what distinguishes my breath from me? What can I tell from my breath? What’s the difference between my breath and others? Every human beings start breathing even when we are inside our mother’s womb but do we see it as an essential attribute? It is a rather thought provoking piece of installation to me.
TRANSIT
by Scott Snibbe
Transit is a large-scale video installation in the Los Angeles International Airport’s Tom Bradley International Terminal that plays on fifty-eight back-to-back HD monitors curving above the arrivals waiting area. The fifteen-minute video features hundreds of pedestrians in silhouette who take part in a loose narrative grounded in their ceaseless movements left to right. Against this backdrop, travelers occasionally put down their bags and break into exuberant dance routines in styles that reflect L.A.’s diversity: from Hip-Hop to Salsa, Ballet, and Punk.
One of the many stories in Transit is about a little boy and his mother. The little boy runs out across the monitors. His mother soon follows, calling him to return. Eventually, he turns and rushes back but once again breaks free.
Mid-way through, the high-definition story shatters into abstracted fragments as multiple copies of travelers wipe forward across the screens; moon-walking travelers float backwards; crowds spew out from single travelers.
Lady in Red appears performing a majestic folklorical dance, who is soundly ignored passers-by
The silhouette video of Transit was shot in front of a green screen. The project is a collaboration with choreographer Francesca Penzani, and videographer Noah Cunningham. The California Institute of the Arts Center for Integrated Media offered substantial facilities and support for the project’s production.
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