Luminous Digital Bacteria Creeping Out of Your Screen
The alluring contagion of Christine Sugrue’s Delicate Boundaries
Giulia Vola
Normally you can’t seen them with the naked eye, but you feel the consequences later. Christine Sugrue’s, on the other hand, are white, luminous, animated and wander everywhere, but are entirely innocuous. Though it has to be said, at first sight they don’t exist.
These merry technological bacteria, luminous viruses or Delicate Boundaries, as the artist calls them, will infect anyone who sees them immortalized on screen. There’s no escape. And once you’ve got them, there’s no way of getting rid of them. They crawl onto your hand, round your fingers and up your arm, not bothered by the hairs, then get stuck in your hair and roll onto your face. Contagion is guaranteed: in a couple of seconds the person next to you will want to see them travelling up their shirt sleeve, or down their pony tail or proudly displayed on their chest. And then the next person. And your friend’s friend. And the epidemic takes off.
It comes as no surprise that the young American artist Christine Sugrue, who lives and works in New York, garnered the 2008 SHARE PRIZE for this work.
Delicate Boundaries captivates because it does away with the slippery, too often ignored confines between man and machine: and while the two systems try to get to grips with each other and enter into contact, new scenarios of responsibility and intimacy spontaneously begin to emerge.
And it all happens in a disarmingly natural way. The software is simple and the interface could be operated by the most digitally challenged. It is impossible not to see how it works and what happens, and it is impossible not to be charmed. Here digital technologies, increasingly embedded in daily life, blurring the dividing line between real and virtual a little more each day, create a space in which the binary universe has the intrinsic capability of penetrating the physical one. In short, it becomes material without being matter.
In Delicate Boundaries, Christine blows human breath into cyberspace, transforming and disorienting our perception: the ants/bugs/bacteria, these delicate boundaries, reset our sense of touch, sight and hearing to adapt to new sensations. It is almost as if, after 2,300 years, Plato’s images came out of the cave and went for a walk in the woods.
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Chris Sugrue is an artist, designer and programmer living in New York City. She has recently received her Masters of Fine Arts in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design, and, in the spring, exhibited work in a show at the Chelsea Museum of Art. Chris has worked in print, web and interaction design. She has been involved in several educational projects with the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
