Background Mr Scott Hessels is an American filmmaker, sculptor and media artist who explores new relationships between the moving image and the environment. In over 30 years, he has released artworks in several different media including film, video, web, music, broadcast, print, kinetic sculpture, and performance. His recent series of large-scale kinetic public sculptures Sustainable Cinema were exhibited at Ars Electronica, the Ford Presidential Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Taipei, and the Los Angeles Convention Center. He had produced some of the first experiments in the fields of online streaming and locative media and holds four patents for GPSFilm, a mobile cinema system. His data-driven works include Celestial Mechanics, a planetarium-based immersive work that has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in science museums around the world. His films, including the alternative documentary The Pikme-up, have been shown in international film festivals (Melbourne, Berlin, New York, Cannes, Rotterdam) and on global broadcast television networks (CNN, NBC, MTV, the Cartoon Network). His work has been included in several books on new media art and in popular magazines like Wired and Discover.
Hessels is currently the executive producer of City Unviersity’s Extreme Environments Program which organizes expeditions to environmentally significant sites where interdisciplinary student teams collect data and return to interpret their findings as new media artworks in public exhibitions. He has produced and led art and science expeditions to Antarctica, Tibet, Hainan (China), the Mojave Desert (USA) and remote cave networks in Vietnam.