Creating Cinema with Your Body

When Scott began his lecture at the School of Informatics last Wednesday, he stated that his work was better understood when viewed, rather than explained, but the explanation found on his biography page sums it up nicely:

"Scott Snibbe creates electronic media installations that directly engage the body of the viewer in a reactive system. His works are designed to have specific social effects: to create a sense of interdependence, to promote friendly interaction among strangers, and to increase viewers’ concentration".

Personal Space
He showed demonstrations of some of his earliest works, notably "Boundary Functions" (1998) and "Interaction" (1999). A space in the shape of a square was defined by outside boundaries. When just one person stepped inside, no visible changes took places. As the next person stepped in, a white laser line appeared on the floor and become the defining boundary for each person's "personal space". As the people moved about in the square, so did the lines. The demonstration illustrates that personal space is thought to belong to the individual, but actually is defined only in relation to others. He used the term “proximecs”, which is the study of distance and how people use, manipulate, and identify their space. A video demonstration can be seen here (QuickTime required for viewing).

Viewers create cinema with their bodies
My favorite part of the lecture was the “screen series”, where viewers create cinema with their bodies, either with projections that respond to viewers or with projections that record viewer’s movements. While present day technologies (computer vision, simulation, and digital projection), are used in this series, there is an acknowledgement of the history of cinema and light, specifically back to the days of shadow theatre and magic lantern productions when silhouettes were routinely used.

All of the examples in this series start with a rectangle of pure white light projected on to a wall. When the viewer steps between the screen and projector, a silhouette or shadow of that person’s body is projected. In “Shadow”, the viewer’s shadow’s movements are replayed over and over until it fades away. In “Concentration”, the white light collapses around the viewer’s silhouette, resulting in a halo effect. When viewers or their shadows touch lightly, the result is a flickering light, like you might see with a loose light bulb. A stronger touch results in the white light expanding from one person to another, so that both silhouettes are surrounded.

In “Shadow Bag”, the viewer’s shadow is captured and re-projected onto a screen, but this time the results are unpredictable interactions and behaviors. Sometimes their shadow follows them, sometimes it comes at them from the other side. When the viewer’s current shadow touches the replayed shadow (which can be their own or a previous viewer’s), the replayed shadow collapses like an empty bag. The title of “Shadow Bag” refers to the theory that compares the body’s shadow to a bag that holds all of our human animal instincts.

Scott Snibbe’s art and demonstrations were the perfect illustration and wrap up of our study of immersion and interactivity. Although I could not attend the lecture, I watched it on-line and spent some time exploring his website, reading more about his thoughts and observations of his work.