Scott Snibbe

Scott Snibbe
Scott Snibbe at MIT Media Lab (2009)
Born	(1969-08-20) August 20, 1969 (age 47) New York City
Nationality	American
Education	Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design
Known for	New Media
Movement	Interactive Art

Scott Snibbe (born 1969 in New York City) is an interactive media artist, researcher, and entrepreneur. He is one of the first artists to work with projector-based interactivity, where a computer-controlled projection onto a wall or floor changes in response to people moving across its surface, with his well-known full-body interactive work Boundary Functions (1998), premiering at Ars Electronica 1998.

In this floor-projected interactive artwork, people walk across a four-meter by four-meter floor. As they move, Boundary Functions uses a camera, computer and projector to draw lines between all of the people on the floor, forming a Voronoi Diagram. This diagram has particularly strong significance when drawn around people's bodies, surrounding each person with lines that outline his or her personal space - the space closer to that person than to anyone else. Snibbe states that this work "shows that personal space, though we call it our own, is only defined by others and changes without our control".

Snibbe has recently become more broadly known for creating some of the first interactive art apps for iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch). His first three apps—Gravilux, Bubble Harp, and Antograph—released in May, 2010 as ports of screen-based artwork from the 1990s Dynamic Systems Series, all rose into the top ten in the iTunes Store's Entertainment section, and have been downloaded over 400,000 times. Snibbe collaborated with Björk to produce Biophilia, the first full-length app album, which was released for iPad and iPhone in 2011.

Snibbe received undergraduate and master's degrees in computer science and fine art from Brown University, where he studied with Dr. Andries van Dam and Dr. John Hughes. Snibbe studied animation at the Rhode Island School of Design with Amy Kravitz. After making several hand-drawn animated shorts, he turned to interactive art as his primary artistic medium. His first public interactive work, Motion Phone won an award from Prix Ars Electronica in 1996 and established him as a contributor to the field.