Scott Snibbe talks about 20 years of interactive art and music that poetically reinterpret our universe, including creating the first app album with Björk: Biophilia; and interactive experiences created for James Cameron’s movie Avatar.

Building an iPad App for Björk: a Creator’s Project documentary on interactive artist Scott Snibbe.

The “Passion Pit: Gossamer” App is is a new interactive music app for iPad and iPhone released in conjunction with their new album Gossamer. We started with a project at the Webby Awards a couple months ago, doing a video backdrop to their new single “Take a Walk.”

MotionPhone, a new app for the iPhone and iPad, enables a unique form of visual communication, allowing people to create animations together on iPads and iPhones. The app, created by Scott Snibbe Studio, is the company’s first release since producing Björk’s groundbreaking Biophilia App Album last year, and is a similarly innovative combination of interactive visuals with music.

Scott Sona Snibbe licensed his first software at the age of 11 and his career has never stopped soaring. This brilliant Interactive Artist and Software Composer has achieved International acclaim for his work. His exhibits have appeared throughout the United States and Europe and he continues to push the edge of Interactive Art. Here's your chance to hear his story, his thoughts about art, his mentor Gary Kildall's influence, his initial work and his meteoric rise in the world of Art & Technology. One of Scott's latest artistic ventures is with Icelandic Performance Artist Bjork which he discusses during his presentation. Recorded in March 2012 at the Creative & Technology Expo on the Monterey Peninsula in California.

I just came back from New York for the Biophilia Concerts and was blown away by the power of her performance that, at times, had me in tears. Marching from end to end of the 360 degree stage, with the 24 choir girls of Graduale Nobili following in otherworldly accompaniment, her songs tell an entrancing story of the power of nature and our ability to connect to her through technology.

MotionPhone is now available as an app for the iPad and iPhone. The app lets people create abstract animations together over a network, choosing colors, shapes, and forms that follow their fingers’ most subtle movements. By moving again-and-again in the same animated canvas, people can create layers and rhythms of abstract form and color, much like musicians layer track after track of audio in the studio sessions.

Scott Snibbe was featured in a half-hour program last Sunday on CNN’s The Next List, which profiles forward-looking thinkers in the fields of technology, science and social change.

Host Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and producer Tracy Dorsey brought her crew to Snibbe’s studio in San Francisco for a three-day shoot that resulted in an intimate and extensive portrait to discuss, among other projects, recent work with James Cameron’s interactive “Avatar” exhibition at the EMP Museum, Bjork’s breakthrough Biophilia App, and the future of interactivity.

Scott Snibbe is a media artist, filmmaker, and researcher in 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 often mix live and filmed performances with real-time interaction. Snibbe's artwork is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and The Museum of Modern Art (New York); and has been shown in several hundred solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including a solo retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His large-scale interactive projects have been incorporated into concert tours, Olympics, science museums, airports, and other major public spaces and events, and he has collaborated on interactive projects with musicians and filmmakers including Björk and James Cameron.

Scott Snibbe talks at Dublin's Science Gallery on interactive art and app art

After fifteen months of development, and three months of teasing, Björk’s full Biophilia App Albumis now available in the iTunes App Store – the world’s first App Album. Enjoy the six new apps: Thunderbolt, Sacrifice, Mutual Core, Hollow, Solstice, and Dark Matter, as well as the already-released Virus, Moon, and Crystalline.

After more than a year’s stealthy work–from Iceland to Brooklyn, London, Paris, and Cupertino, not necessarily in order of glamour–it’s been exciting to see Björk’s Biophilia App Album reach the world. Today, Biophilia’s second interactive single, Virus, is available from within the Biophilia mother app. If you don’t have Biophilia, which is free, download it now from the iTunes App Storeand watch the preview below:

It was 1989 and I was roundly ignoring a verdant spring day in the HVAC hermitage of Brown University’s Computer Science Lab, when Henry Kaufman yanked me up from my workstation to say I must see Merce Cunningham’s dance company perform. Who’s that? I blurted to my friend as he pulled me out the lab’s card-keyed door.

Over the past few days my first three apps became available on the iTunes store: Gravilux, Bubble Harp, and Antograph. I’ve been dreaming of this day for twenty years: a day when, for the first time, we can enjoy interactive art as a media commodity no different from books, music, and movies. But is there a market for this new medium?

Scott Snibbe Selected Interactive Works DVD 1995-2005 — Scott Snibbe - Interactive Art

Early Influences
Catalog essay by Scott Snibbe
Uijeongbu Digital Art Festival. South Korea, October, 2003

Body, Screen and Shadow
by Scott Snibbe
Published in the San Francisco Media Arts Council (SMAC) Journal. January, 2003.

Computation and Improvisation
Scott Snibbe
ICC Journal, Tokyo Japan, Fall, 2002