Michael Scroggins

Michael Scroggins built the CalArts Videographics lab, and is a videoart pioneer.

A brief, though somewhat scattered bio follows:

Experimental Animation; Director, Computer Animation Labs received his MFA from CalArts and has been a faculty member since 1978. He studied video under Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe, with whom he worked on the construction of the historic Paik/Abe Video Synthesizer. He has been working in realtime videographic animation since 1970, non-realtime 3D computer animation since 1983, and realtime 3D computer animation since 1992. His absolute animation works have been widely screened internationally, including exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Union of Filmmakers, Moscow; Seibu Ginza, Tokyo; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. His work has also been honored at numerous festivals, among them; the Sony-AFI National Video Festival, Washington DC; ARS '83, Helsinki; Annecy '85 International Animation Festival, Annecy; Hiroshima '87 International Animation Festival, Hiroshima. His video compositions, Power Spot, and Solaire, commissioned by composer Jon Hassell, share the distinction of being the first music videos acquired by ECM Records. In addition to his recorded work, Scroggins has created live interactive video performances at multimedia events such as Telos et Koine at the Manca Festival in Nice and Mata-Pau at the Rendez-Vous Musique Nouvelle '92 in Metz. He has been active in the field of immersive virtual reality, and in 1992 received a grant from the Banff Centre for the Arts to produce a VR work, A Topological Slide, which premiered in 1994 at The Fourth International Conference on Cyberspace. His most recent work investigates the potential of gesture capture in creating realtime absolute animation in immersive VR.


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