After a joyful meeting with Jim, the next day of 17th Oct, I met another great artist – Scott Snibbe. I was invited to meet Scott in his studio – Snibbe Interactive, Inc. where I strongly felt the professionalism of passionate experts. I first wonder how Snibbe mange to run an interactive media production house in this impressive way.
Riding on the open ended discussion with Jim about interactivity, my assumption is that is it true that there are inherent difficulties to employ interactivity to express personal emotion especially self-interaction like what cinema does. However, what interactivity is doing is exactly away from or intermediated with cinematic experience. Therefore, it is undergoing an alternative pathway with opened possibility for exploration, while practitioners are working in their own emphasis. Scott Snibbe, is of course one of them. So, I am curious what particularly he is exploring in terms of interactivity.
Scott focuses on the experience of interactivity that is open-ended in which is the big differentiation of what he does to other people do. He thinks when interactive works fail for him is the discrete cause and effect (participants do a discrete action to have a discrete result). But, in his physical interactivity exploration, the way people interact with each other is continuous with gesture, speech, music and so on. What he is trying to do, as an artist, is to work with interactivity in a continuous level, and to try to look at people naturally move continuously, speech continuously and engage with each other continuously. Thus, most of his works are trying to make a sharp line between discrete interaction and continuous interaction. Even some artists or companies are using body interaction, but they still think the media as if a computer screen, which only has one point of input. i.e. Your body gets transited through the mouse into the screen that rely on the mouse click. Like other practitioners, he is also exploring how to move to the continuous interaction through the whole body with the language of digital cinema.
I further ask Scott’s opinion about the earlier discussion with Jim regarding the human and computer relationship that is always about control. He said that all he will argue is that what Jim is talking about is the subset. For something to be about controlled, someone has to care about controlling. And, in general, everything about scientific and technological progress is about control. However, he thinks there is a way to design the experience, so that it might not be that kind of explicit control like “I do this, I get this response.” (Interactivity become commanding or single-focus). He thinks it is all about dimensionality and processing, and the magical part is the computer, then what type is the input, what type is the output. Therefore, he think that the language is really infinite, and that can be a interactive piece that all about giving, generosity, patient, repeat, love or kindness. It is all depends on how the person design the work and also how the person seeing it. Because someone can think of your piece is still about control, even you attempt to something else. So, there is always interaction between the piece and the person, and there is no 100% fix interpretation for any work, even you want it to be generous or to be selfish. He concluded with there is no way to fix an interpretation like that to say interactivity is always about control or never about control. People can have there own way of thinking about the work, but the way of the pieces design can encourage the way of thinking.
It is to me an interesting philosophy of interactivity: the discrete versus continuous, and the one-point-input versus multi-input by body movement, which are strongly shown in his works especially in his shadow interactive works. Take “Cause and Effect” as an example, the continuity of body experience may relate to when people get into his work, their body movements instantly become the materials of the work, and re-appear, as a representation on the screen. Eventually, it becomes a collective experience in which participant provided a representation in a continuous visual-stream. At the same, recursively, the visual-stream also link-up/interacts with the new participants in a here-and-now, but collective situation. Frankly, I do think a lot of motion detection works out there are kind of “changing content with the old form” in which allows you to play with something appear on the screen and encourage you to wave your hands. What I think Scott works unique in is that it is minimal but powerful. The interaction is not emphasized in the virtual space (it is actually white), but is in the participant themselves towards the others on the screen, while sometimes is another self-representation on screen in which encourage different degree of thinking during the play.
I then ask Scott does he think there is any disability of new media art or interactive art to emotionally express personal feeling or certain content in a sensational level like film does. He response was no. He doesn’t think there is a disability of the medium. It is more about the practitioner and the budget of doing it, and he thinks there is one thing that new media is great at is the emotional engagement. At least in his pieces, or works from Camille Utterback or Brian Knep, people are very emotionally engaged in which probably the number one response. People jump up-and-down, excited, and communicate with each other. So, in the level of emotion engagement of this medium probably more engaging than anything except cinema. But, then the question is how you move something closer to cinema where there is more complicated emotion and expression, and more neuron rather than just simple cause and effect interaction. So that is about developing a language of the medium, and all the practitioners are trying to do that. He summarize his view with, this is an expensive medium, and requires collaboration between people in different disciplines, which is kind of the same with cinema that needs quite some time and budget for development as it involve a lot of technology.
The openness of this question has been way more widened. Of course, time is a big issue that hopefully something will come out and say no disability of the medium. I believe it too, and it is too early to say there are not. I agree that the question is how close we want to stay with the complex cinematic experience or should we do so. Or, we probably can go for the complexity of interactive experience which also emotional. Another important argument I would raise is the spectatorship. In cinema, spectator is passive. We see and hear, we perceive, we interpret, we influenced and we experience and so on. That’s why we will cry, shock, thrilling and think. In new media, especially interactive, spectator is like playing sport. We act, move, think, react to the match, relax and express. You rare seen people cheer like wining a basketball game in cinema. While it is difficult to find a sport require complex thinking process and interpretation like film evoked, but still there are some sport like snooker will require. Therefore, there is actually a differentiation of spectatorship. Nevertheless, tracing back to the history of new media art, the relationship of cinema and new media art was strongly established at the beginning, which was unavoidable inherent in the form. Moreover, also the encounter of multi disciplines like Internet, programming, machine, science, etc… And, we intent to mix them, and this makes new media art the most hybrid art form ever. As what Snibbe said, we are all developing the language of it, but can language make this hybrid form more stable? When it got stable, is it still new media art in which encourages contemporary art practice. Or, should we create “sub-languages” for different genres, so that it can serve different purposes.
Then we discuss how abstract animation influence Snibbe’s works. He said he was exposed to Oscar Fischinger and Len Lye in which their films are so emotional, but there is no figure in the imagery. However, he will have strong emotion when seeing the movie, like feeling of joy and sadness. He was fascinated by that, and curious on how it provoke human emotion when we are not seeing a person or a situation or somebody is hurting somebody. He questions why would we have an emotional respond to imagery like that, and what is it connected in our mind. That is what inspires him to try to explore that language in which there are something inside us that respond purely to movement, and to light and shadow. For instance, “Boundary Function” that using abstract imagery combining with the social element in which light, shadow and human interact together. He also mentioned his interest in structural film like Ernie Gehr’s works, which try to focus on your mind and experience when you are watching the film. One thing that structural filmmakers said, he really pick up on, is that they are not trying to make a picture of something but rather something in its own. So that is what Snibbe is exploring in his works with repetition, simplified imagery, and something that is an experience rather is a picture as cinema. He mentioned lot of other interactive art works is cinema that you interact with, and you see that it (cinema) is some other world. But, he tries to make pieces that cinema is part of your world, which you integrate with the experience, and you don’t think it is a picture or a story that has been told to you.
As Snibbe also interested in exploring body experience, I further asked him about his philosophy of it. Basically, he think there is something unique while we perceive with our body like the way we interact with each other in-person is different than that on the phone, and he believe that it is the most important thing that we perceive thing. Even interact with the computer, we just shrinking and shrinking it down to just our eyes and our fingertips, but still we are using our body. Furthermore, he described his little experiment when he was a kid while he was learning how to speak, and he order his hand to move by voice, but he couldn’t do it. Therefore, there are some levels of body-control are beyond language. The visual interaction that we engaged to the world or even to the computer is what he interested in his exploration as a language. Riding on the visual in interaction, he also talked about Phenomenology that close to spirituality with examples of some philosophers like Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who wrote about mystical aspect of our body and to our experience of space. There is something interesting to Snibbe that is special and profound of phenomenology is about raw perception like “without naming”, for instance, without saying that is a “door”, but back into the sensory experience. Then he further interpret this 19th century philosophy to different tradition – Buddhism, another spiritual tradition that encourage opening up one’s mind to raw perception, and let you realize that what you have seen is not an objective reality but reflection, for instance, we are not really seeing each other, but perceiving two upside-down images in our eyes. So, our perception is just like a reflection of something like the water reflection of the moon. The question is what is the object in which our experience reflected, and if we really look into it that is only consciousness. Then he touched on the table and said, “I am not really touching the table. I am just feeling the sensory impulse that interpret by my brain and reflected.” and he pointing at me and said, “you are really a illusion, cause I am getting signal in my five senses from you. Mostly sight, sound and a little bit of smell… Then my mind integrating those, and putting a label on the illusion that this is you.” This is what informed his work in which a secular way to try to get a transcendent beautiful luminosity of experience.
After Scott described his philosophical concerns of body experience, I have a different conceptual understanding of his works in which the relationship of the representation of players and the players themselves are what exactly he means about the raw perception of object. How we perceive the images and motions are what we intergraded in our mind, and that I consider is the most openness element in his pieces. I do admire how Snibbe able to collaborate theory and practice in a generous and joyful domain. What has informed me in this conversation are that the concept of continuity of interaction, the social emotional interaction of interactivity and the balance between conceptual and artistic concern. Through the discussion, the issues that did bring out are all about the perceptual possibility of new media art, which I would say we are all uncertain of, but interesting. This reminds me when I was discussing my Final year project with my professor, Hector Rodriguez about applying cinematic issue in my work, and he once feel uncomfortable with that as he may question why should we back to the cinematic perception when we are moving towards a new art form. Of course, I understand that he would like to push me forward to think about the language of new media art, but I still doubt with should we do it or not, as the uniqueness of cinematic experience are what fascinating me and transcend human perception. Anyway, wherever we should go, I think the most important thing is to follow the direction for your idea. Leave your idea out there, and it will tell you where to go at the end. All I want to do is to create works that interesting, and with particular conceptual concern at that certain piece.
Posted by ericsiuacc 
Posted by ericsiuacc 
Posted by ericsiuacc 
