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"Was there a mentor who really inspired you or a time and place where you realized you were headed down the creative road that you're on now? (from J. Butler)\n\nSUZANNE TICK: My father owned a third-generation scrap-metal yard, so I grew up running around there. And my mom was a stay-at-home mom who worked in the local theater department and did set design. So, I was around a lot of creative people my whole life. Early on I knew I was going to be an artist.\n\nTHEO RICHARDSON: In high school I was sort of awakened to the idea that industrial design was a profession that one could follow. This was around the time Marc Newson was doing the 021c concept car for Ford, and that opened my eyes to the many potential career paths in the field.\n\nPAUL COCKSEDGE: Ron Arad was my professor at the Royal College of Art. He's iconic. He was looking for things that he hadn't seen before. He wanted to see something new and fresh, and that put us on the edge, and we really had to work hard to impress him. That's how it started for me.\n\nJENNIFER STEINKAMP: At Caltech I had a teacher in video art class who showed us some of the first computer animation, video installation, and structuralist films. His name was Gene Youngblood, and he wrote this book Expanded Cinema, which was about taking film and putting it into architecture. I was totally inspired by his ideas.\n\nDo you think there's an element of playfulness or humor in your work? (from R. Philips)\n\nPAUL COCKSEDGE: I'm interested in things that don't sound funny or humorous, like electricity or magnetism. But then I create pieces or scenarios that require people to interact with them\u2014and a kind of humor comes out. It's not there at the beginning, but it seems to happen at the end, which is a bit surprising for me.\n\nQuestion for Paul: Your work almost seems to perform magic tricks. Can you talk about that? (from C. Murphy)\n\nPAUL COCKSEDGE: The pieces are based on natural properties, like the fact that a flower can conduct electricity. So when you place a flower in a vase, a light's turned on. And when that flower dies, and the liquid in the vase slowly dries up, it takes the light with it. People ask, \"Where's the complicated technology?\" But actually, I'm collaborating with nature."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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