“Motion Sketch (1991) evolved out of an exploration of how to make cinema with one’s body. In film school, I had been extremely inspired by two experimental animation pioneers. The first, Oskar Fischinger, pioneered a cinema of pure abstraction. His earliest films are simply black and white forms, drawn frame-by-frame in charcoal. Yet the resulting movements, such as in Study Number 7 (1931), have incredible emotional power. The second pioneer, Len Lye, pioneered “direct cinema,” created by marking directly on the film surface with pens, inks, or by scratching emulsion off of black leader, as in his masterpiece Free Radicals (1957).

I was searching for a way to make a hard-edged abstraction like Fischinger’s by using my body directly as Lye did. In an epiphany one evening staring at the computer, I realized that the cursor was the most interesting object on the screen. Here was the only place that my body, through the mouse, came into the computer. Based on this understanding, I created Motion Sketch, which attaches the movements of ones hand to the movements of abstract forms. These forms exist in a short one-second loop. The temporal complexity comes from the continuous layering of these forms, creating a rich motion painting.”

-Scott Snibbe,

This is sick.. you click and drag your mouse and it creates this kaleidoscope..

The Motion Sketch site no longer exists, but MotionPhone, an extension of the original project, is available as a downloadable app.