Caroline Song-Looking Outwards-08

Eyeo 2015 – Chris Sugrue from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.

For this post, I decided to look at Chris Sugrue, who is currently based in Paris, France, teaching at Parsons Paris. She describes herself as “an artist, developer, and programmer” who creates installations which are interactive. Sugrue seems to be particularly passionate about where technology can meet art, a lot of her projects having to do with exciting storytelling, eye-tracking, artificial life, and optical illusions. She has a Masters in Fine Arts and Technology from Parsons.

One of the projects of Sugrue’s that I most admire is her piece: Delicate Boundaries, the video I have embedded below. Bugs made of light crawl on the digital screen, and when putting the user’s hand on the screen, the bugs move towards the hand and eventually cross over from the screen onto the hand. This installation dealt with both digital and physical space and the crossover that objects can have in between, which is the idea I most admire. This idea is particularly interesting for me because the interaction between digital and physical space is what I have currently been studying in design and the cross over that can happen between objects going one virtual space to a physical space is an idea that I had not considered before, and yet is intriguing to think about and explore.

The biggest strategy that Sugrue seems to use in her presentation is how she shows her decision making process. She shows the audience both her installations, and all the decisions and choices she made in order to create it. Sugrue answers all the questions of “why” she chose to go in this direction with her installation, which allows the audience to be further convinced in supporting her installation because they understand the intent she had in her decision-making. Using those observations, I see how important it is to explain your choices in a design and being able to communicate that with the audience will help them be swayed to support your idea.