About Sue

Sue Slagle (SUE-C) is an award-winning artist, engineer and educator whose work in “real time cinema” presents a new, imaginative perspective on live performance. Her evolution as a new media artist began in late-90s San Francisco where she was an influential member of the electronic music scene, owning the experimental record label Orthlorng Musork, organizing audio-visual cultural events and teaching the first creative coding classes in Max Software. After finishing her masters degree in engineering at UC Berkeley she moved to Oakland where she became co-owner of the Ego Park gallery and helped launch the First Friday art walks. 

Her performances blend cinema and technology into an organic, improvisational and immersive act, created from live cameras, light pads and video algorithms. She has always pushed the boundaries of human-computer interaction, employing emerging technologies and inventing many of her own, both through performance and tinkering with hundreds of students in her well-established teaching practice. 

This trajectory has led her to begin development of a new audio-visual instrument that will allow the performers to create fantastical visual and sonic worlds, manipulated both by machine learning software and their human hands. Physical elements of the story will trigger the worlds they inhabit, with the performers augmenting the narrative with voice, gesture, text and sound. The result will synthesize a high-tech cinema, full of perspective shifts and immersive worlds, all created in real-time from the camera, video clips, photographs, drawings, machine-cuts, handmade paper and everyday objects. 

Sue is a Creative Capital awardee and MacDowell Fellow and has been covered in The Wire magazine, BoingBoing and the MIT Press book Programming Media. She has performed at the Library of Congress, REDCAT, Ars Electronica, MUTEK, SONAR, Ann Arbor Film Festival, NPR’s Tiny Desk and Transmediale, collaborating with musicians such as Morton Subotnick, Luc Ferrari, Laetitia Sonami, AGF, Paul DeMarinis, Wobbly, Ava Mendoza and Negativland. Her video installations have been exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, LaBoral and Marco Museum. She has held adjunct positions at George Mason University, Mills College, California College of the Arts, Portland Community College and the San Francisco Art Institute and has lectured at Stanford, UCLA and internationally. She is supported by the Maryland State Arts Council as a member of their Touring Artist Roster and has toured the west coast, southwest and east coast in 2021–22, in addition to the UK/EU in 2019.