SCOTT SNIBBE

ARTIST STATEMENT

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.

In my interactive artwork, I usually portray the interdependence of beings with their environments and each other through bodily interactions. Many of my 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 meditators and artists than with media consumers.

Interaction is by nature time-based, and my artistic process is rooted in my training in film and animation. The frame-by-frame creation of movement is based on an understanding that even a thirtieth of a second changes the perceptual and emotional impact of a cinematic moment. I apply a similar methodology in creating time-based interactions between humans and technology. My artistic vocabulary is comprised of the subtle changes in timing that unfold as images or objects react to viewers. These changes are encoded not as frames of film but rather as computer instructions that constantly reinterpret and update the temporal conditions of the work.

Although the ideas that my interactive art attempts to convey are complex, my artistic practice is minimalist. My working process is subtractive: removing elements until only those essential to convey a work's meaning remain. I combine this approach with the principles of phenomenology: the philosophy of how a body “thinks” through unmediated perception, rather than through reason and language. Often participants construct the meaning of my works not through analytical processes, but through their physical awareness, which, in the words of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “gives us at every moment a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things, of our hold on them.” As applied to interactivity, this approach rewards viewers with an immediate, visceral sense of presence, while simultaneously inducing them to understand the motivation and meaning behind an individual work of art.