The first thing I noticed about this artist is that he uses projections to project his art and not only that but they are also interactive. He usually projects his art on to the floor or the ceiling and the projection then changes in response to people moving across its surface. The first full size piece of interactive art created by Snibbe was called Boundary Functions (1998); this projection was on the floor. This piece was 4*4 meter and what happened was when people walked over it Boundary Functions used a computer, a camera and a projector to draw connecting lines between all of the people on the floor.
People interacting with Snibbe’s Boundary Functions installation. You can see the voronoi shapes on the ground representing their personal space
When all of the lines are connected they form a Voronoi Diagram, at first the lines may not make any sense (I had no idea what the lines represented when I looked at it first), but if you take a minute to try and understand the work you may notice that the lines surrounding the peoples bodies each represent the individuals personal space – the area of space closer to that individual than anyone else in that room. Quote by Snibbe himself states that this work “shows that personal space, though we call it our own, is defined by others and changes without our control”. As simple as it may sound, this is very true.Snibbe has an undergraduate and masters degree in fine art and computer science from Brown University.
Snibbe also went on to study abstract film at the School of Design in Rhode Island with Amy Kravitz. He made many short animated films using hand drawn images, and I guess it was this which finally made him settle in to interactive art as his final artistic medium.
This is what voronoi shapes are, they are like fractal images of crystals. These are the type of shapes that surround the people when they interact with Snibbe’s Boundary Functions
Snibbe’s work has been exhibited in galleries world wide; it has been shown at the NTT Intercommunication Centre (Tokyo, Japan), the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London, United Kingdom) and the Kitchen (New York, USA) – and this is just to name a few.
Amazingly his work is not only restricted to art galleries, his work has also been collected and shown in science museums such as Paheno Science Centre (Germany), Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie (Paris, France) and Exploratorium (San Francisco, CA) – this is just name a few.There was also this piece by Snibbe called Three Drops (2006) which caught my eye. As you can see from the image below, the projection of water with air bubbles rising to the top. Now here’s the fun bit, the viewer can actually interact (using their shadw) with the simulated water and the bubbles. Snibbe started and finished this while he was working with Sonar Research.
Someones shadows interacting with the water
To create this he wrote up his own custom C++ code, he used OpenGL for the 3d graphics, OpenCV for computer vision and some of their in-house and commercial physics simulation engines.
This installation was on view at the Expolatorium in San Francisco in 2006 and was really popular with the people. It was also featured in one of the newsletters of Nanoscale Informal Science Education Network.
His work has touched people so deeply that it has gone far enough to allow him to receive grants from the likes of the Rockafeller Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts; he has also received awards at the Prix Ars Electronica Festival, the Black Mariah Film Festival and even the Stuttgart Trickfilm-Festival.
Snibbe has also taught media art students at the UC Berkley and the San Francisco Art Institute. And he didn’t just stop there, he worked as a computer scientist at the Adobe Systems from 1994-1996, where he also contributed to the making of Adobe After Effects (whatever contributions he may have made he did a good job of it, that software is fantastic). He also worked at Interval Research from 1996-2000 where he worked on Computer Vision, Computer Graphics and Haptics research projects. Snibbe currently resides in San Francisco, California where he has settled down with a job and his own personal studio to work in.
The Artist himself
