Scott Snibbe website: http://www.snibbe.com
Scott Snibbe statement excerpt: “The purpose of my work is to bring meaning and joy to people’s lives. My work is frequently interactive, requiring viewers to physically engage with diverse media that include mobile devices, digital projections, and electromechanical sculpture. By using interactivity, I hope 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.”
Work Examples:
Interactive Video
“Make Like a Tree” (2006)
Screen Series “Shy” (2003)
Benevolent Use of Surveillance Technology
“You Are Here” (2004)
“Cabspotting”
Interactive Sound Sculpture
“Circular Breathing” (2002)
“Blow Up” (2005)
- Quote from Usman Haque regarding radical cybernetics:
“It is not about designing aesthetic representations of environmental data, or improving online efficiency or making urban structures more spectacular. Nor is it about making another piece of high-tech lobby art that responds to flows of people moving through the space, which is just as representational, metaphor-encumbered and unchallenging as a polite watercolour landscape. It is about designing tools that people themselves may use to construct – in the widest sense of the word – their environments and as a result build their own sense of agency. It is about developing ways in which people themselves can become more engaged with, and ultimately responsible for, the spaces they inhabit.” - Snibbe’s Interactive Videos – allow audience to “create cinema” with their bodies as well as refer to early cinema when camera/developing/projection were contained in one one vessel. Qs: Is this actually interesting cinema? Does the aesthetic deaden the experience? Does this only refer to homeostasis in a way? – not allowing for more reflexive or emergent directions?
- Snibbe’s Surveillance Technology – An uncritical and possibly celebratory view of the possibilities in surveillance technologies. Q: Do the pieces contribute to a greater sense of agency? Do the anonymous tracking systems give a false sense of privacy that is basically counter-intuitive to the basic premise of surveillance? Is it more than data visualization? and should it necessarily be more?
- Snibbe’s Fan pieces – Interactive sound sculptures that record and amplify human breath using electric fan technology. The pieces draw attention to a physical relationship between that which is emitted as human and that which is received by the machine in an interactive cycle. The “breath/wind” is then circulated through the gallery in an entropic way. However, the unification between our breath, wind, and machine can create unique aesthetics. (reflexity/ermergence – ambiguity, allusion, metaphor.) Q. Is this an example of an emergent or open system? Does the inclusion of something physically emanating from a human (breath) make this more interactive than just moving around one’s body? Does the machine/body metaphorical connection work better? Does the amplification move the work in a direction more concerned with agency and some sort of enlightenment regarding human’s ability to effect the environment? or not?