Scott Snibbe

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".



Impression
preserves the silhouettes of the bodies that move across its surface. As a person move into a projected rectangle, the profile of his shadow displaces the screen horizontally, so that one side of his silhouette is formed in light along the opposite edge of the screen. The screen absorbs the forms of the bodies that push against it – like clay it holds an impression.

After some time without any bodies within the projection, the screen’s edges slide back into their initial rectangular shape.