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Useless Programs, Useful Programmers, and the production of Social Interactive Artworks Interview
with Scott
Snibbe
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SS:
My parents were both sculptors engaged with technology (at
that time, in the 1970s, this meant plastics). I grew up
with a shop and no television – our entertainment was
making things. I knew I wanted to work with art and
technology since I was 4 years old, combining broken can
openers with Lucite. When I saw an Apple computer running
Logo in middle school I remember being completely entranced
with the shade of orange that it drew. I got a computer when
I was eleven and was programming interactive graphics even
back then – at that time, when you bought a new
computer, you would turn it on and there would just be a
flashing cursor – the computer just came with
programming manuals and that was entertainment. As
an undergraduate, I studied Art and Computer Science at Before
I considered my interactive experiments as “art”,
I jokingly referred to them as “useless programs”.
Programs whose sole purpose was to tickle the mind, to open
possibilities, particularly to show the computer screen as a
blank dynamic canvas of infinite possibility, rather than a
cluttered simulated office with fake “windows”,
“folders”, “desktops”, etc., which
seemed needlessly limiting: imagine the computer screen as a
movie – would you really want to compose the frame in
this way with icons and folders? I found the
“hero” of this movie in the cursor – the one
place where your body appears on the screen; this character
had life, personality, unpredictability, and was different
with every person who sat down. It became the central figure
of my first experiments with recording hand gestures and
became the “Motion Phone”. I
did not realize these experiments were “art” until
I showed them at SIGGRAPH 1995 and several curators invited
me to art shows, particularly Ars Electronica, which changed
the course of my career, now that I knew my hobby had an
audience and name. Once I began showing in museums, I
realized that the primary way anyone engages with art is by
approaching it with their whole body. I then aspired to
create artwork that is engaged entirely this way – by
walking and moving through an “aware” space that
responds to you. Boundary Functions was my first
artwork that operated in this way, drawing lines between
people as they walk on a large floor, lines that demarcate
their ever-changing personal space. dd:
Digital art (or new media art) is an intriguing hybrid
combining two fields that, despite occasional influences and
alliances, have always represented quite different interests
and perspectives on reality. In light of the technological
revolution in the 19th century, artists had complained that
their role (and popularity) in society is being taken over
by the engineer. Does digital art reconcile art and
technology? At whose expense? SS:
I am not sure about this. My own engagement with digital art
has, in general, little to do with technology. Thematically,
the work is about interdependence, perception, social
interaction, attention, awareness, concentration, metaphor,
and spirituality. What seems to make the work successful is
that viewers are unaware of the technology. And I believe
this is the characteristic of most successful artwork –
to transcend the medium, becoming more purely the idea being
transmitted. On
another note, art and technology indeed are in an
intertwined dance. Van Gogh’s paintings were only made
possible by the innovation of putting paint in tubes so that
the artist could go out into the wilderness and
spontaneously experiment with color. These interconnections
continue today, for example, with Richard Serra’s
Torqued Ellipses which are only possible due to specialized,
monumental steel fabrication technologies. As time passes we
forget that these are technologies – as soon as
something becomes available in the hardware store, it moves
from the innovative to the quotidian. Working
as a combination of artist and software engineer is really
like being two people. As the artist I will conceive of the
work and let my mind range widely, often having no idea how
I will create the work, in some ways like a scriptwriter.
Then, working as the engineer, I become a faithful servant
to the artist, trying my best to achieve the artist’s
vision and adding some small details of the
“performance” based on my experience and
intuition, like an actor. The minds are so different for the
two processes that this is the only way I can work. Now
that I have software engineers working with me, I am more
and more comfortable purely using language to get across my
message. Based on a sketch and some talking and hand-waving,
a good engineer can get 95% of the vision we’re
shooting for. Then I step in for the last 5% and make some
subtle programming adjustments dealing usually with timing
and pacing. This is directly analogous to a traditional
artist’s assistant who will prepare canvases, paint
rough blocks of color, and so on. With really good
communication even that is unnecessary – just using
language to explain the necessary changes. I’ve just
completed the first piece done this way – where my
engineer built the whole project from start to finish with
only my verbal feedback. dd:
Could you describe the way of a project from its beginning
to its exhibition? How do you get an idea for a project?
With whom do you discuss it? How do you realize it? How do
you get it presented to the public? SS:
An idea begins, always, away from the computer. Walking,
thinking, on a plane, talking to a friend, or even in
meditation or on retreat. It generally comes entirely and
all at once. I will then sketch the idea in my sketchbook.
If it still seems interesting after a few months, I will
then move towards a visualization of the proposed piece.
I’ll create, or have someone create for me, an
illustration that shows exactly what the piece will
look like. Often down to a real person in a projected space.
And underneath it some copy, written like gallery copy,
which describes the work as if it’s complete. I’ve
found that curators and anyone besides my closest colleagues
need to see exactly what the piece will look like in order
to evaluate it. I will then often let this sit, sometimes
for years. From time to time I will show the proposal to
friends, colleagues, curators and my staff to see what they
think of the idea and get feedback. Eventually, someone
likes it enough to invite it to an exhibition or commission
the piece. Lately,
I have also been working more and more collaboratively with
my studio staff when we receive a commission. I sit down
with all of the staff and we discuss the needs of the client
and the conceptual basis of the piece. Everyone is invited
to contribute ideas freely and we have a lot of fun. After
this process, I take all my notes and distill the ideas into
a single concept, write up the notes, and produce, or have
produced the illustrations and proposal describing the work. I
am part of an artist’s group that meets quarterly and
includes Most
of my ideas come from what I have been inspired by in other
artists and writers. My primary influence is experimental
film and animation which strongly determine my aesthetics,
movement and conceptual approach. In terms of ideas, most of
my work is inspired by spirituality – especially
notions of interdependence, love, compassion, humor, social
engagement, transcendence, awe, wonder, profound surprise. I
don’t know if you’d consider humor spiritual, but
I do – humor breaks down people’s boundaries so
that they can be completely open to what comes next, whether
or not it is part of their familiar world view. I like to
create moments that are so powerful that you completely
forget your sense of self and literally become the
experience. For a short while you forget the past, stop
anticipating the future, and become completely present. My
work is realized through a straightforward process. I am a
professionally trained software engineer – I learned
the most about this discipline when I worked at Adobe –
so we just follow standard engineering discipline. I have a
large library of code that we build our pieces upon, and we
use all the standard software methodologies of quality
control, object-oriented programming, etc. In
terms of public presentation we have two avenues. The first
is through temporary exhibitions that come to us requesting
work, such as galleries and museums. These we have a process
for fulfilling using my staff – I have staff members in
a few locations around the world to make it easier to
install without too much travel – people in dd:
Can one live from making interactive art? Or to put it this
way: Is there a market for such kind of art? Who wants to
buy interactive installations and why? SS:
In general, I would say that for an individual artist it is
very difficult, close to impossible, to make a living
creating interactive art. Due to the high costs of this type
of work, the clients of interactive art expect a
relationship like that of a software company to provide
support and customer relations to them and to provide
assurances that their work will keep on working and be
upgraded as technology changes. There is a growing market
for this type of work because it is so emotionally
satisfying – you would never see someone jumping up and
down in front of a painting in a lobby (however sublime).
However, that’s one of the common reactions to our
work! It’s hard to make people excited and engaged in
public space and that is the unique quality of my
studio’s work. People are hungry for a “third
place” besides work and home to connect with friends
and strangers. dd:
A special branch of new media art is interactive art. While
in non-interactive art the audience looks at an object and
thinks about it, in interactive art the audience is engaged
on a physical level to generate or finish the artwork. Thus,
the body plays a special role, maybe the main role, in
experiencing the artwork. You once said: "The body thinks
differently than the mind," and: "The process is the
product. You don SS:
When I was a child having just mastered language, I used to
perform two thought experiments. In the first, I would look
at my hand as I held it in front of my face, and speak to my
hand, saying: “Hand, move!” The hand doesn’t
move. This I found peculiar. Learning language gives you
profound and unique power – to say “no”, to
demand what you want, and so on. And yet you cannot control
your body with language. How is it that we control our
bodies? Through a strange and magical, maybe mystical
process of simply being and doing. My second experiment also
had to do with language. Though I call it my hand, if you
look very closely it’s impossible to find the border
between the hand and the arm. You can’t identify one
cell that is “hand” and one right next to it that
is “arm”. Since this is certainly so (I’ve
asked many a biologist since then), it calls into question
the very existence of the hand. If you can’t say where
it begins and ends, then can you really say it exists at
all? Of course you do have a hand – it can pick things
up, pat someone on the back, and so on. By its conventional
function we can label it a hand – the word really
refers to the functions performed by the hand, rather than
any intrinsic “hand-ness”. And of course the hand
is only made of non-hand elements – skin, bones, blood,
hair, etc. The hand isn’t the sum of the parts, nor is
it any single one of them. These two ideas came with me as
an adult and also were enriched by learning about Buddhist
philosophy. When I became an artist I wanted to focus almost
exclusively on these areas of exploration – how can I
make a work of art that is experienced viscerally –
perceived directly with the body in the same way that we
inhabit space. And thematically, to explore this idea of
Emptiness – how things are “empty” of
inherently existing on their own side as object, hand, body,
self, etc., but really composed of parts that have causes
and only become a solid “thing” when labeled by a
mind. Interactivity so clearly communicates this idea
because an artwork is literally incomplete without the
viewer’s engagement. What’s
funny about all this deep thought is that the result is
often, literally, a joke. Kids immediately understand the
work the same way they understand jumping into a swimming
pool – effortless joyful fun. Adults start this way, in
their gut, and then the piece bubbles up to their mind
– first thinking about the social and spatial effects,
then more and more about the philosophical implications. For
example, with Boundary Functions, the first reaction
of everyone is to step on the lines that are drawn between
themselves and the other people on the floor. These slip
away, of course, and that adds energy to the space, creating
a social stirring. Then adults start to contemplate the
meaning. What’s inside those lines? My personal space.
But it’s only defined by others and changes without my
control. What a funny name for something that doesn’t
even exist without my relationship to others – my
“personal” space is really purely defined by an
intertwined social relationship to others. The
body thinks differently from the mind. The body understands
and feels. The mind analyzes. In making interactive work I
often try to make the process the product.
That what you are doing is what you are creating –
completely intertwined and inseparable. The line between you
and someone else is the relationship, constantly
changing. Moving is doing is creating. dd:
Are you saying kids who just and immediately have fun
understand the piece better than adults who contemplate its
meaning? Don’t you want your audience to understand the
more philosophical or spiritual ideas that you are trying to
communicate in the work? SS:
Oh, sorry! Not at all, quite the opposite! What I’m
saying is that the pathway to understanding this piece
begins in our body viscerally, then moves to the emotional,
and then finally to the analytic. For a child, they often
never get past the body and emotional awareness. It’s
only through an adult’s mature mind and education that
the other ideas of the piece emerge. I’m quite
confident that most adults have a satisfying intellectual
experience with this piece. But the piece is an experiment
and a question. They may well not come to the same
conclusions I did about the piece’s meaning. But I
think they will all be contemplating the same questions
– about boundaries, our bodies and personal space. And
that’s really the purpose. There is also an argument,
too, that the kids do get the piece, but they
can’t articulate it the way the adults do. There is no
way I could have articulated, or maybe even spoken to anyone
at all about my “hand” experiments as a kid. But
as an adult looking back at these experiments I have a
phenomenological and intellectual framework in which to
finally articulate something that I only felt viscerally and
emotionally at the time. Here’s a quote from
Merleau-Ponty that inspired me greatly when I began this
body-centric work: “[Our
body] applies itself to space like a hand to an
instrument, and when we wish to move about we do not move
the body as we move an object. We transport it without
instruments as if by magic, since it is ours and because
through it we have direct access to space.”
dd:
David Rokeby, also a prominent representative of interactive
art, points out in his 1996 essay Transforming Mirrors: "The
structure of interactive artworks can be very similar to
those used by Cage in his chance compositions. The primary
difference is that the chance element is replaced by a
complex, indeterminate yet sentient element, the spectator."
Both chance art and interactive art diminish the role of the
artist in the process of creation. As Rokeby continues:
"Whereas Cage
SS:
Before I became explicitly involved in Buddhism I was very
interested in “ego-less” art. Art that falls
outside of the art mainstream of an artist painting,
filming, drawing, photographing, mutilating, and writing
about him or herself and his or her friends and patrons.
Film naturally falls into this category. I was always
shocked that “I did it for myself” is often the
highest praise for a fine artist when talking about their
own work. “How pointless!” I often think. In my
own mind I can create infinite universes of light,
transparent beings, infinite sources of love, worlds full of
laughter, concerts on the moon, thousand-armed gods, the
most beautiful and grotesque beings, etc. What is the need
to physically manifest what so effortlessly appears to my
mind? On the other hand, filmmakers are always considering
their audience – how will this work make the audience
feel, think and understand? So that’s my training and
background – in film and all about the audience. In
fine art there are some examples that influenced me. In
particular James Turrell and Robert Irwin, who focused on
creating environments that reveal that art is constructed
entirely in our minds – creating works of art that
change as your mind and awareness change, tuned by our
mind’s continually shifting perception of space, time
and our biology. Every image we see is not out in the world,
but upside down, tentatively correlated stereo pairs in our
retinas that our conditioning and neural programming then
makes big guesses about. A scientist recently explained to
me that there are an infinite number of solutions to the
visual “puzzle” presented to our brain each
moment. Our brain then does a statistical correlation to
come up with the most likely interpretation that fits our
past experience. That’s why we can be startled by a
stick, thinking it’s a snake!
And
here’s where Buddhism comes in because that is one of
the canonical Buddhist examples of Emptiness. In this
case, we see that whether we see a stick or a snake is not
dependent on the outside world, but on our inner
conditioning. So, given an infinite number of choices of how
to perceive the world, as a Buddhist, one strives to
condition oneself to see the world in a way that is both
profoundly true and beautiful. True, in that the world is
revealed to not be made of discrete, distinct objects, but
an inseparable, ever-changing, interdependent continuum.
Since all material and mental events are intertwined, we
start to realize the insanity of self-centeredness. Thich
Nhat Han said, “You are only made of non-you
elements.” Bits of your parents, everything you ate,
the air around you. We’re breathing in parts of our
friends and family and strangers right now. And mentally
everything we know came from somewhere else. I’m not
using a single word I made up as I answer these questions,
nor really any idea that’s uniquely mine. Accept this
and life becomes blissful. It only makes logical sense to
live your life with as much love and compassion for others
as you can. Happiness comes from benefiting others, and
suffering from thinking about yourself. The Dalai Lama says,
“If you want to be selfish, by all means do so. But be
intelligently selfish. To bring yourself true happiness,
cherish others”. So what a wonderful view in Buddhism
– an intellectual mystical understanding of reality,
that leads to common sense logic to be a kind and loving
person. And you still get to have a personality, friends,
chocolate cake, whatever. Just do so with a sense of
profound generosity, gratefulness and love. dd:
If I understand you correctly, you see interactive art as
selfless art that does not impose the artist’s
perspective on the audience. What if the audience
wants to be exposed to the artist’s idea? What
if the audience expects the artist to come up with a
specific perspective to engage with? SS:
It’s not intrinsic to interactivity to be selfless.
And I hope you don’t misunderstand me to think that I
have personally achieved any level of selflessness –
it’s just that I’m interested in the perceptual
and social as my realm of artistic inquiry. A close
colleague of mine described my work as “generous”
which I was very flattered by and I think is a great way to
express my overall artistic philosophy. It’s
completely possible and there are many examples of
interactive works that portray the entire spectrum of
artistic inquiry beyond my narrow interests – sublime
beauty, obsession, fashion, politics, confusion, anger,
violence, self-observation, portrait, narrative, poetry,
abstraction, etc. I dip my toe into some of these areas too.
This is a new medium with the same possibilities as any.
Camille Utterback’s work is a wonderful example of an
abstract painter’s engagement with interactivity. Her
sublime and beautiful abstract aesthetic is created and
overlaid on the movements of people around her works to
create, for example, futurist visions of time in Liquid
Time, or social abstract expressionism in her
Untitled series. dd:
Deep Walls [see This
work was inspired by two main sources. The first is a book
by architect Christopher Alexander called, “A Pattern
Language”. This book is like a bible of ideas for ways
that people can live in space that brings them meaning and
satisfaction. The book is divided into “patterns”
from the small (where to place furniture) to the large (how
to build cities). One of the patterns in the book is called
“thick walls”. An idea for interiors where walls
are thick and “carveable” so that people can
gradually modify their own environments – cutting
shelves, doors, windows, etc. Gradually the contents of the
house and the inhabitants’ ideas and possessions are
absorbed into the walls. I took this as a metaphor for
Deep Walls where what happens in space gets
immediately recorded onto the walls themselves – a
space where a wall absorbs the ephemeral activities in front
of it. In the morning at SFMOMA I found this piece filled
with sixteen images of a janitor mopping the space in front!
A perfect use for the piece – a structuralist
masterpiece created by the museum staff. Which brings up the
second influence: structuralist film. Films from the 1970s
such as Ernie Gehr’s Serene Velocity that
present a sometimes phenomenally “boring” yet also
experientially powerful effect on the viewer. Structuralist
films are often said to “be something” rather than
a picture of something. An experience of their own, rather
than a fantasy of somewhere else. I wanted to make an
interactive artwork with these same qualities. And also some
of the aesthetic aspects of this movement such as
minimalism, long takes, contemplative aspects. However, I
also like to add a large dose of humor and joy. Sometimes
people say my work is more like a joke about minimalism. But
really they are minimalist jokes. dd:
So, you intend to produce work that is structuralistic
without being boring? A kind of double-coded work that can
be experienced and enjoyed on the surface level of physical
interaction as well as on a deeper level of cognitive
interaction? SS:
That is truly hilarious. I think the simple answer to
your question is yes. For someone like me who is generally
very much caught up in the mental realm, and enjoys
concentrating, thought experiments, meditation, these
structuralist films are fantastically engaging. However, the
majority of people, I think, are very much rooted in their
bodies and so my work is an attempt in many cases to explore
the same ideas as structuralism, but to deliver these ideas
kinetically through the body rather than through a
contemplative experience. dd:
In one of your papers you state the intent to make a piece
work on different levels of experiencing art: the kids just
having fun, intellectuals looking for the intellectual end
and the emotional person getting a more spiritual message
from the piece. What would be the level of experience of the
kid, the intellectual, and the emotional person with respect
to Deep Walls? SS:
For a child, Deep Walls is a playground to experience
for hours (and what a great break for the parents). A
visceral lesson, a way to make a movie with one’s own
body and friends. The intellectual analyzes the structure
and begins to reflect on time, space, geometry, and the
shadow. There should be a bench nearby because these
thoughts can go all the way back to Plato and all the way
forward to the end of our own brief lives, or the universe
itself. Repetition, music, visual music, pattern,
structuralism, Andy Warhol, celebrity, anonymity, time,
eternity, impermanence. The reactions are nearly endless and
it’s so stimulating for me to listen to people’s
comments which are always varying. To the emotional person,
the piece is usually about joy, delight, presence,
immediacy, eyes shining bright with a sense of now. And a
sense of warm engagement with friends and strangers.
Sometimes also a sense of loss as memories quickly fade. dd:
You call Deep Walls "a projected cabinet of cinematic
memories". Given that every recording is erased after 16 new
recordings have been produced one could also consider
Deep Walls a piece about oblivion, which attaches a
rather pessimistic aspect (the intellectual level?) to this
joyful (the kid SS:
I love your reaction to Deep Walls and its notion of
permanence. The work deliberately rejects recording. I
actually did try recording once and I reviewed the
recordings. They stink! It’s all about the situation. I
remember a story once about Godard waking up in the middle
of the night with a fantastic idea for a film. He quickly
finds a paper and scribbles the idea. When he wakes up he
looks at the paper. It reads, “Boy meets girl”.
This does not deny his experience. It was phenomenal at that
moment, but that moment passed. All we have is the present.
The past is gone, the future’s not here yet. The
present’s the boundary of a wave, impossible to catch,
but we are riding it. How do we become aware of the present?
Well, lots of ways, but one is to make an interactive
artwork in which the near past briefly remains –
while hovering at that magical boundary with the present,
our physical awareness of what just occurred. In our
fascination we create more and more little pasts, yet in our
excitement the old ones are overwritten, showing the
ephemeral nature of our existence. If I let this piece
record for a very long time, or gave viewers a database of
recordings, they’d become anxious and obsessed,
introverted and fussy. The point of these pieces is an
emotional one and in order to keep this powerful joy and
sense of presence, we must let go of the past! dd.
What piece are you working on right now? What would you like
to do in the future? SS:
For some time I have been completing a piece about Mary
Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, which is known
for its belief that we can heal ourselves without going to
the doctor. It’s a narrative silhouette
“film” that is affected by, and advanced by, our
bodies. As the piece moves forward, we see Ms. Eddy
“discovering” Christian Science after a serious
fall while ice skating. Your body plays a progressively more
intimate role in the story as it advances, moving from
catalyst to character. My long-term vision is to pioneer a
new medium of interactive cinema – experiences that are
as engaging as a movie, but in which people maintain their
awareness of themselves and the people around them – a
combination of profound fantasy and sincere presence. I
would like my works to be source of joy, inspiration, and
meaning for everyone that encounters them and to foster a
more engaged, present and generous state of mind. dd:
How did new media change the hierarchy, system and concept
of art during the last ten or twenty years? Do you have an
intuition about new media art ten years from now? SS:
I do not think new media is currently a significant force in
the art world, but rather a small sub-culture. It’s
populated by sincere, dedicated practitioners that are for
the most part separate from the commercial,
“fashion”, desire and political arenas that
dominate mainstream art. New media art is difficult or
impossible to collect due to its size and ephemeral nature,
so it doesn’t receive the same marketing that more
easily collectible work does. Current high museum culture is
driven by publicists and high-powered galleries that
aggressively market their artists (many of them fantastic
and deserving, of course!). New media is quite a special and
beautiful subculture. New media art will probably become as
ubiquitous as video art over the course of the next ten
years and become established as a mainstream art form
through the pioneering efforts of a few curators. It’s
usually the efforts of a few pioneering critics and curators
that produce certain groundbreaking exhibits which canonize
a group of artists and baptize the field. Christiane Paul at
the Whitney is a great example. The “Bitstreams”
show at the Whitney in 2000 was the first of these
pioneering shows, which brought SS:
As I learn in Buddhist teachings on impermanence: Birth
is the cause of death. Meeting is the cause of parting.
Beginning is the cause of ending. And being new and fresh is
the cause of being old and tired! It’s inevitable. If
we can really accept this it’s not at all depressing.
It’s fantastically beautiful to appreciate this moment
of obscurity, newness or avant-garde right now and enjoy it
fully. Better than to look back 20 years from now at today
and recall in sad hindsight that these were the great times
that we didn’t appreciate then. On that note, thank you
for the opportunity to answer such thoughtful questions, it
was wonderful speaking to you. The causes for our
conversation seem to be ending! dd:
Thanks a lot for the permission to bug a creator of
interactive art with all the question an analyst of it
carries around. |
