Biography
Scott Snibbe is a new media artist, author, and meditation teacher whose work dissolves the illusion of separateness—between self and other, art and audience, body and nature. His pioneering interactive art, held in the collections of New York MoMA and the Whitney Museum of American Art, has been exhibited worldwide in museums, public spaces, concert tours, and immersive installations. He has collaborated with Björk, Philip Glass, Beck, and James Cameron, creating innovative intersections of art, music, and technology.
Snibbe has received the Webby and Ars Electronica awards and grants from the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He holds over thirty patents and has served as an advisor to The Institute for the Future and The Sundance Institute. He has held teaching and research positions at UC Berkeley, NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics, San Francisco Art Institute, and California Institute for the Arts.
As a leading figure in digital interactivity, Snibbe produced several groundbreaking art apps, including the world’s first “app album,” Björk: Biophilia. He was an early developer of Adobe After Effects and spent years at Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corporation researching interactive music, video, computer vision, and haptics.
A longtime student and teacher of Tibetan Buddhism, Snibbe is the executive director of the nonprofit Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment and hosts its widely followed meditation podcast. In 2024, he released his first book, How to Train a Happy Mind, featuring a foreword by the Dalai Lama. His work bridges ancient wisdom with cutting-edge technology, shaping new forms of engagement with consciousness, ritual, and community.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
The purpose of my work is to bring meaning and joy to people’s lives. Often interactive, my art invites viewers to physically engage with diverse media including mobile devices, digital projections, and electromechanical sculpture. Through interactivity, I hope to promote an understanding of the world as interdependent, challenging the illusion that we each exist in isolation from anyone else or the rest of reality.
Humans often perceive themselves as embodied beings acting separately from their environment and others. However, even the body each of us identifies as “me” is composed entirely of non-self elements: skin, cells, our parents’ genes, food, water, and atoms forged in ancient stars. These parts are in constant exchange with our environment and other bodies through eating, respiration, and genetics. Our minds are similarly dependent, shaped continuously by language, thoughts, and memories that only emerge from our interactions with others. Even in solitude, the imprints of our lifetime’s interactions propel our thoughts and memories. This view of interdependence, long central to Buddhist philosophy, aligns with recent insights from neuroscience, social psychology, and complexity theory.
Much of my interactive artwork explores this interdependence through physical engagement. Many pieces only function when viewers participate—by touching, moving, or breathing. This makes viewers essential to the work’s existence as art. While my projects often incorporate advanced technologies, they are not about technology, and viewers’ most profound experiences occur through human-to-human interactions. In public settings, the works provoke social connection, transforming human connection into a vital part of the artwork itself. In more intimate contexts, the experiences encourage concentrated creative attention, reminiscent of meditation or artistic practice.
The inherently time-based nature of interactivity reflects my background in film and animation. The frame-by-frame construction of cinematic movement taught me how subtle changes in timing influence perception and emotion. I apply this principle to human-technology interactions, encoding responses not as frames of film, but as dynamic computer instructions. These instructions continually reinterpret and adapt, creating experiences that evolve in real time based on viewers’ presence.
Although my work conveys complex ideas, my process is minimalist and subtractive: I gradually remove elements until only those essential to a work’s meaning remain. I combine this approach with the principles of phenomenology: the philosophy of how a body “thinks” through unmediated perception, rather than through reason and language. Participants experience the meaning of my works primarily through visceral, intuitive awareness, which, in the words of the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty: “gives us at every moment a global, practical, and implicit notion of the relation between our body and things.” This approach rewards viewers with an immediate sense of presence, fostering openness and curiosity that invite them to explore a work’s motivation and meaning.
The artists who inspire my work also share a passion for time-based minimalism and phenomenology. First and foremost are experimental and abstract filmmakers like Len Lye, who created direct cinema by scratching and marking celluloid film directly with his body. Lye and other abstract film pioneers like Oskar Fischinger and Moholy-Nagy, revealed that it is possible to create sophisticated, emotional time-based work without resorting to representation. The minimalist art of light and space, most notably that of Robert Irwin and James Turrell, has also guided my exploration of how subtle changes in an environment can make deep impressions on the viewer. Building on these traditions, I create interactive environments, both on screens and in physical space, that respond meaningfully to viewers’ presence and encourage focused awareness.
Ultimately, my art aspires to dissolve the boundaries between self and other, art and audience. By fostering interdependence and presence, I hope to inspire human connection and a deeper understanding of our shared reality.