Hugh McGrory innovates at the intersection of emerging media, art and technology. His work as an artist has evolved from film and photography through virtual reality and artificial intelligence. Hugh navigates these spaces searching for opportunities to enhance rather than replace human creativity. He is inspired by efforts to democratize the media production process and enable more people to have access to simple, inclusive, affordable and transformative tools. Hugh believes that creativity is healing and that broader access to these technologies can have meaningful societal impact. His art aims to start conversations around how we could bring the best of our human creativity, imagination and compassion to work in tandem with machine intelligence. Hugh was born in Derry, Northern Ireland and now lives in Vermont, USA.
“We have been accustomed to thinking that we must spend long years learning how to operate our software applications. Our outlook has been limited by mostly focusing on mastery of the skills required to communicate effectively with our poorly designed tools. We are rapidly entering an age where the tools understand us and can move beyond simply understanding what we want them to create to now being able to co-create with us. We need to shift our focus and open our imagination. And all of that starts with meaningful conversations.”
Hugh ran Make, a film and animation studio in collaboration with computer artist Glenn Marshall in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where he directed and produced award-winning experimental short films. Moving to New York City in 2008, he curated audiovisual interactive installations during Art Basel and Volta Art Fair in New York, Miami and Switzerland. Highlights include screening work by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) in 2011 - 10 years before he sold an NFT at Christie's for $69 million. In 2011, Hugh also brought the partners together for The Andy Warhol Film Digitization Project, featuring over 500 films by Warhol, developed in collaboration with The Moving Picture Company and Technicolor and described in the NY Times as “the largest effort to digitize the work of a single artist in MoMA’s collection.”
Technology
Hugh has led teams from ideation to execution on four web-based software applications; Morph (for data art), TwoTone (data sonification), Geometric (virtual reality) and Airfield (spatial audio). Hugh was a Finalist for the Gannett Foundation Award for Technical Innovation in the Service of Digital Journalism in 2019 and Winner of the Online News Association’s Journalism360 Award in 2018. As co-founder at Sonify, Hugh leads creative development for TwoTone, the free web-based open source tool that allows users to turn data into sound without writing a single line of code, built with support from Google News Initiative. His recent projects include Data-Driven Storytelling: Making Civic Data Accessible with Audio, a year-long initiative based in Wichita Kansas that empowered newsrooms to create data-driven sonification podcast stories working with advisors from the blind and visually impaired community.
