Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Interactive installation, generative art, digital painting, app
Website: snibbe.com
Scott Sona Snibbe was born in 1969 in New York City and has lived and worked in San Francisco for most of his adult life. He received dual undergraduate and master’s degrees in computer science and fine art from Brown University, where he studied with computer graphics pioneer Andries van Dam. Early in his career he was one of the developers of Adobe After Effects, and spent years at Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corporation researching interactive music, video, computer vision, and haptics. He has held teaching and research positions at UC Berkeley, NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics, the San Francisco Art Institute, and the California Institute of the Arts. His work is in the permanent collections of MoMA New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
His awards include the Prix Ars Electronica, the Webby Award, and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Science Foundation. He has collaborated with Björk on her interactive app album Biophilia — the first downloadable app acquired by MoMA — and with Beck, Philip Glass, and filmmaker James Cameron on AVATAR: The Exhibition, which premiered at Seattle’s Experience Music Project. Between 2000 and 2013 he founded several companies, including Eyegroove, acquired by Facebook in 2016. He studied Tibetan Buddhist thangka painting under Tsherin Sherpa in San Francisco beginning in 2002, and is the executive director of the nonprofit A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment and host of a widely followed weekly meditation podcast. His first book, How to Train a Happy Mind (2024), features a foreword by the Dalai Lama.
Snibbe is a pioneer of interactive, immersive, and generative art — work that is co-created with its audience. His practice has evolved across three phases. His first produced landmark interactive floor and screen installations using camera, computer vision, and projection to make social dynamics and personal space physically perceptible. His best-known early work, Boundary Functions (1998), uses a projected Voronoi diagram to make each person’s personal space visible in real time — demonstrating that personal space exists only in relation to others. His second phase produced groundbreaking interactive apps, including Biophilia with Björk (the first app acquired by MoMA) and Gravilux (number one in Apple’s App Store). His current phase, Hidden Geometries (2023–ongoing), centers on digital and hand-painted works inspired by the geometric grids underlying Tibetan Buddhist thangka painting, bridging his art and spiritual practices across a single body of work.
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