H. Scott Roth (b. 1989) is a visual artist and cinematographer who makes digital works in a style he calls “soft op”, creating subtle gradients and looping motion that blur the line between the seen and the unseen. Based in Oakland, California, he trained in film at California State University, Long Beach, and later studied art and sound design in Hamburg, Germany.,
His dedicated digital practice took root while he lived in Hamburg from 2011 to 2012. There he began treating Photoshop as a generative engine, pushing filters, layers and algorithms to produce optical effects.After returning to California and settling in Oakland in 2012, he balanced freelance cinematography and video production with a personal digital studio practice.,From 2013 he began translating his still soft op images into time-based animated GIFs, extending illusory motion into gentle, looping cycles softened with gradients, fluid transitions and restrained color shifts. His practice centers on how vision constructs reality and how digital space can evoke states of expanded awareness associated with psychedelic experience. From 2022 he has used AI-assisted experimentation as a collaborator to generate new perceptual fields and gradient behaviors.He has minted and exhibited NFT series on Ethereum since 2020 and on Tezos since 2021.,
His series Light Suggestions comprises seamless looping GIFs made in collaboration with Sgt. Slaughtermelon's chaos render patterns, with entries dated June and August 2021, May 2022 and 2023.,,Earlier animated GIFs made between 2012 and 2017 included the numbered series Portals and Circle Test alongside the standalone pieces Sediment Layers and Fractaldensity.Roth has also produced lenticular prints, among them Glimpse Forward, 2020, and Phase-Shift, 2019, each in an edition of two.
