Meeting Scott Snibbe

NEW ALBUM 'RED NIGHT' OUT NOW ITUNES, AMAZON, BLEEP THITH Zine The Hundred In THITH Shop Archives The Hands Meeting Scott Snibbe At the Creators Project in San Francisco earlier this year, we were lucky enough to sit down for a meal with groundbreaking media artist Scott Snibbe. His work is interactive, complex and deeply centered on the connections between people and the world they share. Most well known perhaps is his work with Bjork on the Biophillia app-album. The conversation over dinner pretty much blew our minds, thinking about new ways to approach art-making and days later we were still transfixed and had to get in contact again to go a little deeper. THITH: Your background is actually in experimental film; can you speak a little to how you made the transition into what you do now and how this influences your work? Scott Snibbe: In fact, computers came first for me. When I saw an Apple II computer when I was ten years old running Apple Logo, I knew that I wanted to spend my life making interactive graphics and sound. Once I got a computer for myself, I spent nearly all my free time programming on my computer while listening to early-80s New Wave. I was one of the few people who got the in-jokes of New Order’s floppy-disk-shaped album covers. Actually, there’s one thing I remember about animation as a kid. I think it’s pretty stupid when an animator says, “I loved cartoons when I was a kid.” Who didn’t? But I remember once my mother took me to the New School in New York City and left me alone while she was in an appointment. I walked into a classroom and it was completely dark. Everyone was sitting at desks, silently taking notes, and up on screen they were playing a Bugs Bunny cartoon. I thought that’s what I want to study. My parents introduced me to experimental film when I was a teenager. I remember feeling completely mind-blown watching Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus with my dad at the French Library in Boston. And that made me start systematically going through the history of film at places like Harvard’s Brattle Theatre – especially with the great directors who treat the film frame as art, like Stanley Kubrick and Alfred Hitchcock, and then, in college, studying Experimental Film and Animation at RISD and Brown. That’s where I learned about Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Norman McClaren, The Quay Brothers, and those types of filmmakers who treated animation as an art. I feel very grateful for that comprehensive education in film, because that is the material I draw on when creating interactive work: film is a mature time-based medium one can learn from quite quickly. If you look to computers for inspiration, still what’s out there is rudimentary and re-inventing the wheel a bit. THITH: I’m fascinated by the connections between apps and early cinema. I love those Victorian ideas of spectacle and novelty that fetishised the machine and gadget almost as much as the images they produced. The seemingly endless devices and “-scopes” Kinetoscope, Praxoscope, Zoetrope, Phantasmagoria, Magic Lanterns and Robertson’s entertainments as well as older forms of pre-cinema like Javanese shadow puppets all seem to have very direct parallels to the state of design and marketing for tablets and I-phones. Is this a connection you exploit or what parallels in art do you see? SS: Yes, I freaked out too when I first saw that stuff too – that was at the Boston Children’s Museum, and then I got all kinds of kits and flipbooks to start playing myself. The Victorian era was a golden age of visual poetry – where mainstream and parlour entertainment revolved around science curiosities like Leyden Jars, and visual poems told with Magic Lanterns. What I do tries to rekindle this love of visual poetry – where visual experiences tickle your visual and narrative perceptions, without smashing them over the head like a video game or a Hollywood film. Shadow theatre too is a huge influence. Lotte Reininger is someone who influenced me enormously. She made the first animated feature in 1926: The Adventures of Prince Achmed, despite Disney’s insistence that it was Snow White. It’s an incredibly delicate, articulate, and moving Odyssey. This film is in the public domain now and many musicians have re-scored it – you guys should do a set with it some time. “Make Like a Tree” Scott Sona Snibbe Javanese shadow puppet “Bubble Harp” (1997) Scott Sona Snibbe THITH: The early trials with cinematic form included all kinds of strange ways to showcase the picture and enhance the integration of image and experience; things that seem more like installation art than what we think of cinema. I’m thinking of early experiments with multiple projections and how to stage a film spectacle; the most famous example being the Phantom Rides where train cars acted as projection rooms, films shot from the front of trains were shown and viewers took a trip to nowhere. It took roughly ten to fifteen years before the theater was adopted as the essential way to view movies. That defined rigorous space established the singularity of experience narrowing the potential for unique interactions but creating a universal language to discuss infinite possibilities. In broad terms, will art made for the I-Phone/Pad need to establish similar rules of interaction or are we fundamentally dealing with a totally unique medium? SS: I think that question alone could earn someone a masters’ degree! Yes, I do think art made for the iPhone and iPad needs its own unique language. I always thought that this language should borrow from that of film, rather than that of a desk. Seriously, what is more boring than a desk? Now with the iPhone and iPad, Apple’s set forth an interface language based on cuts, dissolves, wipes, zooms, squash-and-stretch, ease-in and ease-out, and many other principles of cinema and animation, and baked them right into their operating system. But then what does it mean to touch a movie? That’s where people like me get to experiment and invent. My personal bias is towards continuous interactivity – interaction that depends on gesture, movement, and timing, rather than taps and pokes. People don’t have discrete buttons you push to interact with each other, but rather interact through continuous speech and movement. So that’s the model I enjoy exploring – I think we have a few years to define it. That installation you mention sounds like the precursor to motion rides like Disney’s Star Tours. I too do a lot of installation work with cameras and projectors, which reminds me of those Victorian installations you mention. There’s a great recreation of one in the Altman film Vincent and Theo, where Vincent Van Gough and his prostitute partner go to a 360- degree panoramic diorama of a beach-scape, and it’s so realistic she walks into the sand and takes a pee. I’d actually love to be a part of standardizing an interactive immersive platform like this one day. It’s a big hassle today making unique configurations of cameras, screens, and projectors at each site. THITH: Just as the theater was slowly adopted, the language of film also needed to borrow from older models in literature and drama on the road to developing a distinctive language that essentially changed the way we think of narrative and visual art while defining the imagination of the last 100+ years. It would be almost impossible to imagine the capacity of cinematic potential while seated at the Lumiére brother’s screening, and I wonder is it possible for this new art to go through a similar process? What would “The Greatest Story Ever Told” look like in an app? SS: You know, I actually think Méliès was so far ahead of his time. He immediately grasped that there is an infinite amount of time between two movie frames. You can take as long as you like to draw a picture for the next frame and create animation; you can stop the camera and take something out or put it in; you can pain the film itself; speed it up, slow it down, re-expose it, and so on. However, you’re right in terms of narrative structure – his stories were primitive. This seems like a great analogy to where we are with apps – most of the apps I make are like these early “trick films” – inventive and poetic, but just a fragment, a step towards building a language. Björk’s Biophilia is a first step towards feature-length interactivity; though it is more like a compilation of dozens of small experiences together that work in conjunction like a great story collection, rather than a coherent “novel.” I feel lucky that I’m only 42 and will get to be a part of building up this language – I think our best interactive works are ahead for sure! I do have some big ideas on interactive narrative, but getting them made depends on convincing deep pockets and big names to work with me, which I’m hacking away at. It’s easier now after the Björk and Avatar projects. THITH: A lot of people bemoan the loss of cover art as music has shifted to mp3′s but, if you look at the history of the album cover, from it’s origin as simple sleeves in the 20′s, to actual albums to store 78′s through to the 60′s, it actually took quite awhile for the cover itself to move from being purely utilitarian to being treated as a piece of art.

Load more