Featured Presenter: Scott Kildall

Scott Kildall is a friend that we know through Brown University, the San Francisco social scene, and Scott Snibbe and the Scott posse.  Kildall makes video, installations, performance art, sculpture, and virtual art, sometimes teaming up with his fantastic wife Victoria Scott (who unfortunately was out of town and could not make the December salon).

Kildall showed us his latest project “afterthought”, which I believe he is working on as one of Eyebeam’s resident artists.  He shows a series of images to a willing subject, who is wearing a device to measure brain activity.  For each of the pictures that causes agitated or extremely relaxed brain activity, Kildall substitutes video.  The result is a playback of a “personalized video” that may or may not agitate or relax the brain when watched later by the subject.  He calls it “a unique video portrait of people’s emotional state” and played back one that he had made for me personally from an earlier session (aren’t I lucky I checked him out at the Eyebeam open studios last fall?).  Although to others this may have looked like a collage of random video clips, I did actually feel stirred by it. Pretty cool!

Kildall has an entertaining blog of his own and I’m hoping that sometime soon he will tell us more about the afterthought project in one of his posts.