Scott Becker
has produced for over three decades his vision in the dominant medium of the day. Originally trained in the fine arts as a sculptor and printmaker he matriculated into the world of publishing and graphics where he assimilated the skills of photography, design and video production into his working repertoire. Each skill serving for a time as the basis for exploring new creative possibilities within his own work. The advent of the personal computer in the midst of the1980’s found him in the role of an early admirer. His work shifted into creating digital tableaus concurrent with all the successive releases of software technology. One that soon evolved into a comprehensive form of expansive narrative dialogue reflecting the observation of his writings.
His anarchistic self-produced videos first appeared upon Chicagos’s WTTW’s Image Union program in the early 1980’s. In1983, he on his own, conducted a three year photographic documentation of the historically rich Lexington Hotel and worked as an active board member in Sunbow Foundation’s attempt to save it from the wrecking ball. He mounted another self-inspired project that documented the 1984 Chicago International Art Exhibition’s, Mile of Sculpture , subsequently producing a pilot for a prospective educational film entitled Art Inside and Out. His initial work upon the personal computer was seen at various museums and galleries in Florida, Minnesota, and Chicago in the early 1990’s. His own site-specific computer environment, Virtureal, debuted at the original incarnation of, Around the Coyote. His prints and interactive’s would soon be found in such venues as University of Brighton’s, ArCade, Siggraph’s Guerrilla Gallery and the Commune di Riccione’s Bit.Movie’1996 in Italy. In 1997 he won the Grand Prix Award for Troyes Pixel 1997 in France for his first major computer CD-ROM interactive called, Catacombs of the Mind. His work has been reviewed in various computer magazines including, Mondo 2000, Pixel, Creator Numerique, Computer Artist, La Repubblica delle Donne, and EFX. He was invited in the Fall of 1998 by the editors of Zoom Magazine, an international photographic quarterly, to submit work at their first digital exhibition, (R) EVOLUTION held at the Museo della Sciensa e della Tecnica Leonardo DaVinci in Milan, Italy. Over the last half decade, he has been a major contributor to many different online Internet environments including the Artnetweb.com and Kanonmedia.com.
In the last decade, this has led to fifty or more different Quicktime™ based movies, 44 of which that were collectively released in 2003 under the title of Desktop Cinema. Five major computer interactive disk based productions have also ensued. The collection of same both in total and in part have toured internationally at various festivals and exhibitions. During the Summer of 2002, he became a regular contributor to Seattle’s longest running poetry venue, Red Sky while simultaneously mounting various Internet based sites, including, In Seattle and Triumverate, two flash based forums of poetry and political satire.
The artist received the Best Foreign Artist at award at Computer Space 2001 in Sofia, Bulgaria for his piece on 911. Last year, two other desktop video pieces have aired at media festivals in Melbourne, Australia; Barcarena, Portugal and San Francisco. Most recently, his work was shown at Rencontres Internationales Rotario Paris/Berlin in 2003 and picked up a Best animation Award at Computer Space 2004. He currently teaches animation and multimedia courses to college level students while continuing to produce his own eclectic brand of short duration computer sequenced imagery.
Scott Becker is participating in
Video selection
curated by Rogier van Benteghem
curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne
Memorial for the Victims of Terror
curated by Agricola de Cologne