Sue Huang is an artist working at the intersections of new media, installation, and social practice. Her current research investigates our complex techno-cultural relationships to nature, exploring the ways that tactile, sensorial experiences are mediated through emerging technologies. Her past works have been presented at national and international venues, including the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati; Ars Electronica in Linz; and Kulturhuset in Stockholm, among others. She has previously received project funding from Rhizome, the Artist’s Resource Trust (the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation), Creative Scotland (NEoN commission) the SCHARP Development Grant (UConn Humanities Institute and the Office of the Vice President for Research), and the Robert Black Foundation, among others.

Huang received her MFA in Media Arts at the University of California, Los Angeles and her BS in Science, Technology, and International Affairs from the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. She serves as a board member of the New Media Caucus and member of the Services to Artists Committee for the College Art Association. She is currently an assistant professor of Digital Media and Design at the University of Connecticut.

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Oh Dear Me was created as a commissioned work for NEoN (North East of North) in Scotland. This is a video documentation of the performance which took place in 2016 at West Ward Works and Verdant Works in Dundee, Scotland. In this performance, the public was invited to chat through a distributed hybrid digital/analog musical messaging system that activated the acoustic geography and industrial history of Dundee.

A series of musicians were situated along a path winding through the historic jute mills of the Blackness area of Dundee. Visitors were invited to type a message into a computer console at either endpoint of the path, and their words were digitally encoded via fragments of The Jute Mill Song (Oh Dear Me), a folk song written around 1920 by Dundee mill worker and labor activist Mary Brooksbank. The musicians subsequently passed the music to one another by ear until the message was decoded on the opposite terminal. Along the way, the melodies cascading through the city reverberated in urban spaces associated with Dundee's industrial past, connecting historical textile production with the contemporary labor of our culture of computation.

Supported by Creative Scotland