"Motion Phone" by Scott Sona Snibbe is an installation for two users which offers a new medium for a non-verbal personal conversation.

The "Motion Phone" is an experiment in pure visual communication. It is an attempt to open up the language of abstract animation to a general audience by allowing spontaneous human gestures to be captured in all their subtlety. The program draws its inspiration from abstract film and uses its language of two-dimensional animated shape and color. The quality of work created with this tool is strikingly human ­ in stark comparison to the work created with most computer art and animation programs today.

The "Motion Phone" is a program which runs on a graphics workstation. When first approached, the program presents palettes of colors and shapes and a wide blank canvas. When a user draws upon this canvas the speed and location of his marks are entered into a digital animation loop. By pressing on the keyboard or on the graphics tablet, the shape, size and color of the marks can be simultaneously changed. As he continues to draw, her marks are added into the same animation loop, allowing him to sequentially layer multiple rhythms of form and color.

Even the most naive of users can create unique and visually fascinating animation within a few minutes. Once users make the connection between their hand gestures and the motion on the screen, they quickly learn to control the subtleties of their motion. By building on earlier visual themes and combining prior motions into complex rhythms, the user creates a rich animated composition. People are astounded by the beauty of their natural motion when they see it sampled over time, rather than the instantaneous slice of reality we are used to.

The inspiration for the two-dimensional language of the "Motion Phone" comes from the history of abstract film. In the 1920's, several European filmmakers sought to expand the new abstract language of painting into animation. These first pioneers included Oskar Fishinger, Walter Ruttman and Hans Richter. They created films which expanded on the abstract languages being developed by Kandinsky, Klee and others. By adding a temporal element to abstract forms, they believed that they could create "visual music". The temporal structures developed in their films were often direct visual analogs to existing musical structures, expressed with shape and color rather than tone and rhythm. These films were painstakingly created over the course of years by creating successive drawings and photographing them onto film. This process, by its nature, lacked a key element of music ­ the spontaneous nature of live performance.

The users of the "Motion Phone" can collaborate over a network to create animation on the same shared plane. Each individual can zoom in and out of the shared world to an arbitrary degree. With this capability, improvisations and visual conversations can take place in many locations and scales at once. One can zoom out and have a god"s eye view of the complexity of many different animations. One also can zoom in on what appears to be a single dot and find a complex abstract dance in progress.