We're excited to introduce the cohort making up NEW INC's 2023-24 Art & Code track, a partnership between Rhizome and NEW INC.
NEW INC is the first museum-led cultural incubator, which supports a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing creative projects and businesses. The Art & Code track is a space for artists, designers, researchers, and technologists to redefine the artistic landscape through internet-based practice. Celine Wong Katzman, Co-Director at the School for Poetic Computation, was a mentor for the 2022 and 2023 cohorts. This year, Eileen Isagon Skyers, Co-Founder at Gemma will serve as a mentor.
Learn more about the 2022-23 Art & Code cohort below:
Chia Amisola is an internet / ambient artist from Manila, Philippines. Their (web)site-specific art is an act of worldmaking constructing spaces, systems, and tools that posit worlds where creation is synonymous with liberation. Ambience functions as a political practice: their work deals with visibility, placemaking, organizing, archives, infrastructure, identity, labor, and ubiquity to radically reimagine our ecologies. Chia is the Founder of Developh, a critical technology institute in the Philippines founded in 2016. They also steward the Philippine Internet Archive, a publishing / research project and series of new media artistic inventions based on the premise that the history of the Filipino internet is a history of Filipino people.
Simply put, they wish to gather all the people they love in one place and build a poetic internet that might be that place.
elekhlekha (Nitcha Tothong and Kengchakaj) is a Bangkok-born, Brooklyn-based collaborative artist practice focusing on research that examines and decoded past histories by creating, using code, algorithm, multimedia, and technology to experiment, explore, and define decolonized possibilities.
elekhlekha has received a City Artist Corps Grant for their first collaborative project, Jitr (จิตร), a performative audio-visual that utilizes historical research, Southeast Asian sound cultures, and live coding tools to reconcile Southeast Asia's shared heritage, along with funding from Queens Council on the Arts and Babycastles. In 2022, they were awarded The Lumen Prize Gold Award.
Dan Gorelick is a musician, creative technologist, and organizer who is based in the Bay Area and has a presence in Brooklyn and Berlin. He graduated from Boston University with a degree in Computer Engineering. Dan creates live audiovisual performances, blending his classical cello experience with the practice of live-coding: creating music with code. He explores what is uniquely possible when combining the acoustic and electronic practices to create live expressive and improvisational works. He also teaches workshops about live-coding and speaks about the creative possibilities of the practice.
He values growing with community and is a co-founder of the Bay Area live audio-visual collective AV Club. He is also an organizer and member of the LivecodeNYC and TopLap Berlin collectives. In addition to working on various creative research projects, he is now developing a new project called Club Code, a non-location-specific collection of artists focusing on live-coding performance.
Born in Beijing, Banyi Huang 黄半衣 (they/them) is an artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. Their interdisciplinary practice combines animation, digital fabrication, and writing to explore queer reenactments of Chinese mythology, folklore, and spirituality. Through the creation of digital-ambient environments and talismanic ritual devices, they address themes of shame, alienation, and intergenerational wounds within the Asian diaspora, creating a feedback loop of healing, unblocking, and recursive transformation.
Their work has been shown at Smack Mellon, The Soto Velez Clemente Center, Special Special, Artist’s Space in New York, and the Flat Earth Film Festival in Seydisfjordur, Iceland. Banyi has contributed writings to the Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic, Spike Art, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum China, Performa, Frieze Magazine, and has realized curatorial projects at the Musée des Arts Asiatiques in Nice, France, PRACTICE Yonkers, and Assembly Room in New York.
Lauren Lee McCarthy is an artist examining social relationships in the midst of surveillance, automation, and algorithmic living. She creates performances inviting viewers to engage. To remote control her dates. To be followed. To welcome her in as their human smart home. To attend a party hosted by artificial intelligence. Lauren is the creator of p5.js, an open source programming language for learning creative expression through code online with over 10 million users worldwide. Lauren is a Professor at UCLA Design Media Arts. She has been recognized as a United States Artist Fellow, Sundance New Frontier Fellow, Eyebeam Fellow, and Creative Capital Grantee.
Maya Man is an artist focused on contemporary identity culture on the internet. Her websites, generative series, installations, textiles, and posts examine dominant narratives around femininity, authenticity, and the performance of self online.
Our Friend the Computer is the research-based creative team of Camila Galaz and Ana Meisel. Highlighting lesser-known histories of computing and technology, Our Friend the Computer develops engaging historically grounded podcasts and multimedia projects promoting digital and historical literacy. With Camila's background in research-based video art and writing, and Ana's background in creative coding, curation, and online learning production, Our Friend the Computer creates audio and video projects based on a belief that an understanding of the ideas and dreams that came before can lead people to imagine tech futures beyond our current paradigm. Their eponymous monthly podcast is a sister project of the Media Archaeology Lab at the University of Colorado.
Processing Foundation’s mission is to promote software learning within the arts, artistic learning within technology-related fields, and to celebrate the diverse communities that make these fields vibrant, liberatory, and innovative. Our goal is to support people of all backgrounds in learning how to program and make creative work with code, especially those who might not otherwise have access to tools and resources. We also believe that some of the most radical futures and innovative technologies are being built by communities that have been pushed to the margins by dominant tech. We hope to support those who have been marginalized by technology in continued self-determination by providing time, space, and resources. Our New Inc team members are comprised of Suhyun (Sonia) Choi, Tsige Tafesse, and Rachel Lim, with project leads and their mentors, as well as board members based in other parts of the world.
RaFia Santana is a Brooklyn-born multidisciplinary artist using repetition, self portraiture, and music performance to self-soothe, seek pleasure, and crack jokes throughout their experiences with mental illness, chronic fatigue, sensory overload, and everyday racial violence.
RaFia uses bright saturated colors and rhythmic productions to stimulate energy and attention. They use hashtags and slogans as both memorization practice and call to action. RaFia constructs audio and visual loops that "breathe" which simultaneously represent and calm their anxiety. With their compulsion to edit and visualize the self, RaFia is in full control of their display.
Across all mediums RaFia's focus is rhythm, repeat, rest and reflect.
Ruby Thelot is a designer and researcher based in New York. He is the founder of the award-winning creative research and design studio 13101401 inc. His work focuses on the interactions between humans and artificial intelligence, the metaverse and the implications of being-on-line. He has given talks and shown works in Tallin, Berlin and Abuja, amongst other places.
Babette Thomas is a radio producer, artist, writer and PhD student at Yale University in the departments of African-American and American Studies. They’ve worked at institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of African American History, SF MOMA and NPR. In their work, they explore how new media (specifically sound media) can be used to tell Black history and Black stories in ways that are tangible, educational and accessible.
They produce podcasts, radio stories, and sound works about Black history and culture. They also use their research skills and knowledge of histories of cultural production to digitize in-house exhibitions at museums and cultural centers.
Space Type is a studio practice that specializes in typographic design in the form of custom typefaces, large-format murals, digital experiences, and riso-printed publications. Run by Lynne Yun and Kevin Yeh, their work focuses on nurturing meaningful typographic relationships that highlight the rich histories of languages and fresh perspectives beyond traditional methods.
Their work has been recognized and presented internationally and installed in public galleries, exhibitions, and open-air sites. In addition to their exploratory practice, they collaborate with students, educators, organizations, and galleries to incorporate new technologies and diverse typographic influences into their practice. They regularly engage with communities and institutions through traditional and experimental workshops, classes, and open-source tools and resources.