JASON BRUGES
The Ingenious Installation Artist
If he builds it, they will come. No baseball here, but London-based multidisciplinary artist-designer Jason Bruges is a leader in site-specific works that sit between the worlds of architecture, installation art and interactive design. The studio he launched in 2002 is comprised of architects, engineers, industrial designers, computational designers, electronics specialists and more, who team up to create what he calls “moments of theater” via a high-tech mixed-media palette. His works aim to inspire positive change and each work come to life as an adaptation to their surroundings. And when COVID kept Jason offsite (pretty important for creating site-specific works), Twitch streams and Oculus headsets brought him there virtually to get the job done. Now that we’re “out” of the pandemic, he says, he’s more energized than ever to build a more visual, engaging world in the future.
Projects
Jason Bruges’s Rotation Index is housed in a pedestrian bridge at Denver’s Colorado State University, serving as a “living canvas” created by real-time data from two labs on campus — one that studies water and the other food and agriculture. Thermal cameras, sensors and other technology send the data via a cellular surface, altering an animated matrix of rings that were inspired by the state’s circular fields. In Japan, Jason’s The Constant Gardeners highlighted the artistic potential of robotics, featuring four mechanical arms that drew images in the gravel canvas beneath them. The robotic artists in this futuristic Zen garden got their “inspiration” from a series of algorithms created from video footage of Olympic and Paralympic events. Gold-medal worthy, if you ask us. Then there’s The Centre, which Jason created for the Museum of the Future in Dubai. The ever-evolving immersive environment uses choreographies of liquid light to encourage a moment of stillness.
