Nicole Yi Messier and Victoria Manganiello would like you to talk to their textiles. Just pick up the phone and tell him a story. Nothing fancy, a simple story will do. The textile in question is a few meters away, 18 panels of fabric suspended from the ceiling. As you speak, ChatGPT will decode emotions, which will then be displayed as colors on the optical fiber running through the fabric. The system is constantly evolving, but depending on the circumstances, red can mean joy, blue can mean frustration, and purple can mean sadness.
“Ancient Futures”, as it is called, is one of the 33 installations on display through June 20 at 161 Water Street, a Financial District office tower that was recently is reborn as a collaborative workspace and suspended culture. All were created by soon-to-be-graduated members of New Inc, a “cultural incubator” run by the New Museum that will move into the highly angular addition designed by Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, next year.
Participants in the year-long program pay up to $150 per month to be part of an arts and technology community – New Inc is big on community – that includes mentors and alumni as well as staff and fellow participants. What they get in return has more to do with career guidance than artistic creation.
Art is what is visible to Demo2024, New Inc’s latest annual showcase of its members’ work. This is where Messier and Manganiello, who work together in a studio called Craftsmanship in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, show what they can do with fabric and electronics – materials that evoke the physical and the digital, the blur and the hard-edge, the past and the future. Just down the hall, Dan Gorelick has set up a listening station where you can hear live air traffic control chatter from Tokyo, New York, Mexico City or Zurich, Switzerland, overlaid with algorithmically generated soundscapes – dark, brooding compositions punctuated by a very technical dialect.
Around the corner, Mexico-born VR artist and developer Alfredo Salazar-Caro features 3D printed clay models – prototypes of fantastical homes that could be built simply by pressing “print”. And the architectural designer Jeremy Schipper critiques the gentrification of the East Village with an elaborate model surrounding the 1888 Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park. But at New Inc itself, the emphasis is less on creating art and more on creating in a way that allows the artist to make a living.
“I think the days of starving artists are over,” the 34-year-old New Inc director said. Salome Asega, said laughing. “The rent is due!” »
The craft experience is typical. “Ancient Futures” was developed with the support of Cultural Huba common program of La MaMa ETC, the Lower Manhattan Theater Company and the Seoul Institute of the Arts. Messier and Manganiello joined New Inc the following year.
“We came in with a lot of uncertainty about what we wanted to get out of it,” Manganiello admitted. This began to change when they were matched with their mentor, James Rohrbach, partner at the real estate company Alchemy Ventures and artist. The three met once a month to develop a business plan, budget and communications strategy. “There’s this myth that the art world perpetuates, which is solitary visionaries in the studio,” Manganiello said. “But things are often more interesting when multiple minds are involved.”
By the end of this year, New Inc will have graduated 653 people and helped create or sustain 324 businesses since its founding ten years ago, the brainchild of New Museum Director Lisa Phillips and Deputy Director of the time, Karen Wong. This takes inspiration from the tech industry, which for nearly 20 years has had incubators for fledgling companies and accelerators for those that have moved beyond the scribbled-on-a-napkin idea phase. Gone are the days of two geniuses in a garage; Companies like Airbnb and Dropbox got their start in a cocoon of know-how – mentoring, partnerships, entrepreneurship, fundraising – created by companies like Y Combinator, Techstars and Betaworks. New Inc offers a similar approach to technology-focused artists and designers.
As with technology incubators, the objective is to help people develop a sustainable economic model. Candidates are told that at a minimum they need to have the basic tools to succeed: a plan, a goal, a pitch deck, a mission statement, a website, a way to make money. These are not things you get from an MFA program, where the emphasis is on artistic creation.
New Inc presents itself as the first cultural incubator be led by a museum, but it is not the only initiative of this type. MIT has a Artistic startup incubator; cities like New Orleans and Chicago and even Fargo, North Dakota, also have artistic incubators, generally as part of an economic development program. And many people have established themselves as online art coaches. But few if any of these programs work on the scale of New Inc, which spent nearly $1.7 million in its last fiscal year.
Two years ago, New Inc received a boost from the Mellon Foundation – a $1.5 million grant over three years to support, as the foundation’s website puts it, “the vision of Salome Asega “. A first-generation Ethiopian American who grew up in Las Vegas, Asega was named director of New Inc in 2021 after four years as a technology researcher at the Ford Foundation – where she was hired by poet Elizabeth Alexander, who became director of Mellon . Founded shortly after. The vision Mellon supports includes the three-day Demo Festival, previously a one-day affair. But ultimately, Asega’s vision involves “re-worlding,” as she calls it: “reimagining, re-envisioning, re-worlding.” Which I think is wonderful, because it’s about thinking about things on a structural level.
“She really views what she does as social sculpture, using the community as a medium,” Karen Wong said.
Asega has also secured grants and partnerships from the Simons Foundation, which supports efforts in mathematics and basic sciences, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and global consulting firm EY and its Metaverse Lab. Her predecessor, Stephanie Pereira, partnered with the Onassis Foundation to create Onassisan art accelerator with a sophisticated digital studio, free for artists, in the Olympic Tower on Fifth Avenue.
All of this has made New Inc attractive not only to beginning artists and designers, but also to well-established ones. One of this year’s members is Lauren Lee McCarthy, professor of design and media arts at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose “saliva bar” at Demo encourages people to leave a little spit in a small tube and maybe go home with that from a stranger.
“It started out as kind of an absurd idea,” McCarthy said, “but it almost becomes a lubricant for talking about things like bodily autonomy and data privacy. So a lot of it is people that negotiate, like, what can and can’t be done with your saliva? Could it be used for weapons? Could it be used to trace DNA or create a clone?
McCarthy credits New Inc with helping her develop the saliva project, but the main reason she signed on was to learn how to run a lab she’s starting with a colleague at UCLA. “Just like, what do you think about the legal or financial aspects? or fundraising or awareness or all these different parts of your practice? New Inc has done a really good job supporting all of this.
New Inc also managed to do well with less established artists upon their arrival. The multimedia artist Rachel Rossin was commissioned to create an installation at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2022 and completed another at a recent fundraiser for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. John Fitzgerald and Matthew Niederhauser work as Chief Innovation Officer and CTO respectively at Onassis ONX and co-founded Sensoriuman extended reality studio whose credits include a dramatization of the George Saunders novel “Lincoln at Bardo” for the New York Times Magazine. Stephanie Dinkins turned her investigations into bias in artificial intelligence into a $100,000 grant from LG and the Guggenheim Foundation and playing a role in the former Google CEO’s $125 million initiative , Eric Schmidt, with his wife Wendy, to ensure that AI benefits society.
“I think art is a really interesting and magical space,” Dinkins said, “that allows us to think freely. “It’s like playing in the AI space without full knowledge of AI, which allows me to ask a two-year-old questions” – questions that are the technological equivalent of why the sky is it blue?
In an age where reality is regularly reshaped by hardcore billionaires whose claim to humanity may seem dubious, this sort of thing may offer a corrective. “This can help us keep these technologies human-centered, so that the technology works for us and we don’t work for the technology,” said John Borthwick, managing partner of New York technology accelerator Betaworks.
A former digital content pioneer who now sits on Rhizome’s board of directors, Borthwick tells the story of visiting Jenny Holzer with a very early art and technology site that he had helped create. The year was 1994. Internet speeds were painfully slow. Borthwick was strategic: “The reason I chose Jenny was the text, right? Holzer’s response was blunt: “I have no idea what (expletive) you’re talking about, but if you’re in New York, you can show me your Internet and I’ll cook you some chili.”
It’s very New York, this kind of cross-cultural exchange, reminiscent of Bell Labs engineer Billy Kluver, working with Robert Rauschenberg in the 1960s. Then came the pocket protection set bringing together renowned artists; now it’s the artists learning the technology so they can speak the language of AI, data collection and digital surveillance and perhaps help find the narrow, half-hidden path that leads to unprecedented rewards that were promised to us and not to dystopia.
“San Francisco is very good at building tech companies,” Borthwick said. “In New York, we have a different way of doing things. »
