We're excited to introduce the cohort making up NEW INC's 2021-22 Art & Code track, a collaboration between Rhizome and NEW INC, now in its second year.
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 artisic landscape through internet-based practice. Celine Wong Katzman, Web Manager at Rhizome, independent curator, and co-organizer at the School for Poetic Computation, will serve as a mentor for the 2021-22 cohort.
Learn more about the 2021-22 Art & Code cohort below:
Carrie Sijia Wang is a New York-based artist working with interactive experience, video, installation, and performance. She is interested in how systems, rules, and regulations affect cultures, beliefs, and rituals. In her multimedia performance—The System, she created a fake government department that tests candidates’ ability to generate system-compliant content. She is also the creator behind ALEX, a fictional artificial intelligence HR manager that uses gamification as a subtle tool of control in the workplace. The juxtaposition between the real and the fictional, the rational and the absurd is a recurring theme in her work. Wang is a 2020 Mozilla Creative Media Award recipient and the winner of the Special Mention Jury Award at Filmgate Interactive 2020.
Cassie Tarakajian is an Armenian-American technologist, educator, and artist based in Brooklyn. Their work centers around creating accessible and inclusive tools for making art. They currently work at the Processing Foundation as the creator and project lead of the p5.js Web Editor, an open-source in-browser code editor for creative coding in p5.js. They are also an adjunct professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program (NYU ITP), teaching creative coding, web development, and making memes. In the past they have worked as a software engineer on Max/MSP at Cycling ‘74, and held residencies at NYU ITP, Pioneer Works, and the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon. Past artistic projects range from generating sonnets from Wikipedia contributions to teaching computers how to love as a member of the band Lullabies for AI.
Cassie is joining NEW INC in partnership with the Clinic for Open Source Arts at University of Denver.
Lai Yi Ohlsen is an artist and the Director of Measurement Lab, one of Code for Science Society's sponsored projects. She is a 2019 Artist in Residence at Movement Research and was a Spring 2020 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works. In 2019, she was in residence at Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation, rehearsal and MANCC's Forward Dialogues as Kim Savarino's collaborator. Her work has been shown at Tech Zine Fair, Movement Research’s Fall Festival, New York Art Book Fair, the Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web Summit and Our Networks. She is the author of 100 Scores: movement inspired by computers and tends to her creative practice at Soft Surplus, a collective warehouse space in Brooklyn. Her current research interests include the proliferation of movement through crappily compressed images, the resistance of automated ‘best practice’ bodies, and how analog forms move in resistance against digital power.
Roopa Vasudevan is an American media artist, computer programmer and researcher. Her work examines social and technological defaults; interrogates rules, conventions and protocols that we often ignore or take for granted; and centers humanity and community in explorations of technology’s impacts on culture and society. Her work has been supported by Eyebeam (Brooklyn, NY); the Sachs Program for Arts Innovation (Philadelphia, PA); the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives (Haverford, PA); SOHO20 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY); the Arctic Circle Residency (Svalbard); China Residencies; SPACES (Cleveland, OH); and Flux Factory (Queens, NY). She is currently a member artist at Vox Populi, a 30+ year old collectively run arts space in Philadelphia. Roopa received an MPS from the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2013. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is researching the relationships between new media artists and the tech industry.
Rosalie Yu is a Taiwan-born artist and researcher. Rosalie experiments with feminist interventions into the process of phototechnics to probe interpersonal relationships and create participatory experiences. She is especially interested in the unstable nature of digital artifacts, and how they might communicate ambivalent emotional states. While her work takes on many forms—from collaborative workshops, resin sculptures, to data visualization—the core of her practice concerns how to question power by documenting our interactions with technologies and each other. Her recent projects have examined subjects such as the reframing of digitizing tools as digital crafts and the ongoing relationship between maintenance and obsolete technologies.
Stephen Kwok makes experimental events that incorporate live performance, digital technology, sculpture, and text. He was an artist-in-residence at Delfina Foundation’s Performance as Process program in London, and has exhibited his work at Seoul Museum of Art, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn. Through Recreational Meetings, Kwok develops experiential online events designed to utilize virtual engagement platforms as a tool for embodied experience and creative agency. Held on commonplace platforms such as Zoom, FaceTime, and Google Drive, each Recreational Meeting is created in collaboration with a creative practitioner from a diverse field. Meetings hybridize platform-specific protocol, performance art strategies, and their collaborator’s practice, producing interactive, artist-led experiences for audiences to inhabit remotely. Recreational Meetings are not simulations of in-person events. Rather, they explore what is made possible by an expansion in remote technology, uncovering new opportunities for creativity and social connection within them.
Woody Sullender is an artist based in Queens, NY. His pieces encompass a myriad of media including sculpture, music, performance, theater, installation, architecture, origami, and sonic weaponry. His recent work intertwines mediated and physical space as a site for performance utilizing video game environments modeled on existing architecture. Sullender has performed internationally at venues including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), the Schindler House (Los Angeles), the River to River Festival (NYC), The Kitchen (NYC), amd Les Instants Chavirés (Paris). He is founding co-editor (with Bill Dietz) of the sonic arts publication Ear Wave Event.
Yehwan Song is a Korean-born artist, graphic designer, and web developer. She designs and develops experimental websites and interactive graphics driven by content structure instead of static templates and web design conventions. Through her projects, she tries to flip the general understanding of web design and subvert common user-experience behaviors which oversimplifies user behavior. She pursues diversity above consistency and efficiency. Her ongoing project, "Anti User-friendly," challenges the concept of user friendliness by creating a situation in which users need to learn, explore, understand and become conscious before they can use the website, instead of repeating the same behavior they’ve been trained to do, as a form of self care.
Image: Screenshot of Yehwan Song's website design for the 2018 Typojanchi Biennale. Courtesy of the artist.