Scott Snibbe was featured in a half-hour program last Sunday on CNN’s The Next List, which profiles forward-looking thinkers in the fields of technology, science and social change.

Host Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and producer Tracy Dorsey brought her crew to Snibbe’s studio in San Francisco for a three-day shoot that resulted in an intimate and extensive portrait to discuss, among other projects, recent work with James Cameron’s interactive “Avatar” exhibition at the EMP Museum, Bjork’s breakthrough Biophilia App, and the future of interactivity.

Scott Snibbe is a media artist, filmmaker, and researcher in interactivity. Whether on mobile devices or in large public spaces, his interactive art spurs people to participate socially, emotionally, and physically. His works are strongly influenced by cinema: particularly animation, silent, and surrealist film; and often mix live and filmed performances with real-time interaction. Snibbe's artwork is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York) and The Museum of Modern Art (New York); and has been shown in several hundred solo and group exhibitions worldwide, including a solo retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. His large-scale interactive projects have been incorporated into concert tours, Olympics, science museums, airports, and other major public spaces and events, and he has collaborated on interactive projects with musicians and filmmakers including Björk and James Cameron.

CNN THE NEXT LIST, DECEMBER, 2011

“The mobile app gives us the chance to return to falling in love with music. Because an app fills our visual and tactile senses in a way that goes far beyond a cardboard sleeve, we’re able to give it our undivided attention.”

THE GUARDIAN, OCTOBER 21, 2011

“An app can demand all of your senses and attention at once. That’s something exciting for musicians. A lot of them lament the demise of the album experience due to digital distribution. But one thing about the app-album is it reclaims people’s attention for an entire album.”

SCOTT SNIBBE, CNN THE NEXT LIST BLOG, DECEMBER, 2011

“Apps are not just a return to our interactive past. They also represent something fundamentally new. With the ability to create an experience that is neither as open-ended as an instrument, nor as closed as a music video, apps let us play in a customized, highly designed world created by a musician that never existed before. Like the birth of cinema or opera, musical apps represent a synthesis of formerly separate media—videos, instruments, interactivity, and performance—into a seamless whole.”

SETH SCHIESEL, THE NEW YORK TIMES, OCTOBER 24, 2011

“’Biophilia’ is among the most creative, innovative and important new projects in popular culture. ‘Biophilia’ essentially turns an album into a sort of audiovisual game, delivering a miniature production studio into the world’s willing hands.”

Scott Snibbe talks at Dublin's Science Gallery on interactive art and app art

After fifteen months of development, and three months of teasing, Björk’s full Biophilia App Albumis now available in the iTunes App Store – the world’s first App Album. Enjoy the six new apps: Thunderbolt, Sacrifice, Mutual Core, Hollow, Solstice, and Dark Matter, as well as the already-released Virus, Moon, and Crystalline.

NPR MORNING EDITION, OCTOBER 10, 2011

"Scott Snibbe says he and Bjork communicated regularly, sometimes exchanging dozens of emails a day. They also worked with scientists to make the apps as scientifically accurate as they could. "

M MAGAZINE, OCTOBER, 2011

“Interactivity is something new. Games aren’t something new, they’ve been around for a long time and there is a certain language and goal-orientated logic to them. But games are a subset of interactivity. Interactivity itself is a new medium. It’s a way of incorporating a person’s movements, gestures, choices into any type of experience, not just something where you are driven forward relentlessly, short term goal after short term goal.”

After more than a year’s stealthy work–from Iceland to Brooklyn, London, Paris, and Cupertino, not necessarily in order of glamour–it’s been exciting to see Björk’s Biophilia App Album reach the world. Today, Biophilia’s second interactive single, Virus, is available from within the Biophilia mother app. If you don’t have Biophilia, which is free, download it now from the iTunes App Storeand watch the preview below:

JASON TREUEN, THE VINE, AUGUST, 2011

“Scott Snibbe is Biophilia’s executive producer, but not the usual studio knob-twiddling type. The award-winning interactive artist, who’s produced music apps like Bubble Harp and OscilloScoop and worked with art galleries, the Beijing Olympics and James Cameron in the past, spent 14 months working with Bjork, Apple and various app designers.”

DIE ZEIT, JULY, 2011

“Björns Biophilia Projekt ist jetzt das erste von mir, das eine popkulturelle Masse anspricht. Und Björks Fans haben sehr wohl verstanden, dass Technologie ein Kanal für Emotionen und Inhalte ist.”

OLEG STAVITSKY, F5, SEPTEMBER, 2011

“Музыка всегда развивалась по алгоритму, у нее всегда была четкая математическая структура, даже тысячи лет назад. У гармонии есть формула, понимаете? Но сейчас, с появлением iPad, сама идея интерактивной композиции вышла на новый уровень.”

TYLER FLYNN DORHOLT, THE A.N.D. PROJECT, SEPTEMBER, 2011

“There’s an ulterior motive with these apps: to create certain positive states of mind in people like concentration, and contentment; states where one is not regretting the past or anticipating the future, but just seeing one’s mind’s reflection. These apps are kind of a form of meditation, to see the gentler, contented part of the mind reflected on the screen.”

ELECTRIC PLAYGROUND, SEPTEMBER, 2011

“Björk wanted to make an intimate, interactive experience with the whole universe.”

CHRIS CHANG-YEN PHILLIPS, CBC NEWS, AUGUST 9, 2011

“What was the app of the 19th century? It was sheet music. People would take it home, they could play it on their piano, could play it on the violin. They could make a song 10 minutes or two minutes long. They could change the words, sing with their family. That’s the way music’s meant to be.”

FILIP VISNJIC, CREATIVEAPPLICATIONS.NET, AUGUST, 2011

“Physics engines are a bit like poetry engines – to really get the precise behavior you want, you need to implement from scratch.”

JOHN PAVLUS, FAST COMPANY DESIGN, AUGUST, 2011

“Biophilia places interactivity on equal footing with music, not merely an illustration of the music, and also not purely an instrument, but a highly curated, crafted experience where you can have a unique, personal, creative audiovisual experience.”

STEPHEN WHELAN, DAZED AND CONFUSED, AUGUST, 2011

“One way to define Biophilia is a love of nature. More accurately, I think it’s about the infinity of nature in all its scales, and how music relates to that. People forget that math is a way of modeling nature, and they overlook the beauty and joy of that.”