We're excited to introduce the cohort making up NEW INC's 2024-25 Art & Code track, a partnership between Rhizome and NEW INC.
NEW INC is the New Museum's 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 reexamine digital and cultural landscapes through internet-based practice. Rhizome serves as track partner, working to support and amplify the cohort over the course of the year. Writer/curator Eileen Isagon Skyers will return as track mentor.
Learn about the 2023-2024 Year 10 cohort members.
Introducing the 2024-25 Art & Code cohort!
Avneesh Sarwate & Sumanth Srinivasan
Sumanth is an engineer, visual artist, writer, and musician. His work thus far has centered around digitizing human imperfections and playfulness in art, and the presentation of noise and degradation as an aesthetic.
Avneesh is a programmer, musician, visual artist, and improviser. His work focuses on using real time computer systems to enhance the gestural and impulsive elements of the creative process. A guitarist since childhood, “jamming” with computers has been a goal of his from the minute he started making art with them.
Spurred by our own adventures and challenges with making and sharing software-based multimedia art, we want to build browser based tools and software libraries that allow artists to more easily design, collaborate on, and share digital work.
Dan Gorelick is a creative technologist, musician, and organizer living between Brooklyn and the Bay Area. Dan creates audiovisual performances, blending his lifelong classical cello practice with live-coding to create music with code. He explores what is uniquely possible when combining acoustic and electronic practices to develop improvisational pieces that can evolve and respond to the energy of a space. He investigates the healing nature of sound and the relationship between music and the different timescales of the natural world.
He also teaches workshops about live-coding and speaks about the creative possibilities of technology, with a goal of helping more people access their creative potential. He values growing with the community and is a co-founder of the Bay Area live audio-visual performance collective AV Club. He is also an organizer and member of the LivecodeNYC collective and was a member of the NEW INC Year 10 Art & Code cohort.
Hiba Ali PhD shares their digital art in the form of immersive digital environments, sculpture-based installations, moving images, garments, and sound. They developed the term, digital somatics, to embody the body-mind-spirit connection to the principles of game design, worldbuilding and narrative storytelling. They use virtual reality, 3D animation and augmented reality to slow down time and create portals of solace and care and consider the digital portal as a liminal space where they call forth more loving and healing into our world. Their work has been presented in VBKÖ (Vienna), Deichtorhallen Internationale Kunst und Fotografie (Hamburg), re:publica (Berlin), Centre A (Vancouver), Horse Hospital, 15 Folds (London), Ars Electronica Festival, Onassis Stegi (Athens), Chicago Architecture Biennial (Chicago), Portland Art Museum (Portland), Interaccess, Trinity Video Square, Images Festival (Toronto), Alserkal Avenue (Dubai), Dhow Countries Music Academy (Zanzibar), Rehnsgatan 3 (Stockholm), Medrar for Contemporary Art (Cairo), UMAM D&R (Beirut), Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (Oberhausen), Belladonna, Index NYC (New York City), imc5533 (Istanbul) and File-Electronic Language International Festival (São Paulo.)
Ivan Zhao is a poet, designer, and web artist interested in nonlinear narratives, forms, and mechanics that reckon with digital, diasporic, and queer identity. His work interrogates individual agency, the notion of time, and our capacity to find meaning in the absurd. Websites as alternative lives. Typefaces as diasporic families. Game making as self discovery. Attention as love.
Mattaniah Aytenfsu is an artist and creative technologist. Her interdisciplinary practice investigates the interplay of computation, consciousness, and expression. Her work seeks to externalize the internal, visualizing both technological processes and emotional states. Using code as her primary medium, Mattaniah develops artifacts and experiences which explore the expressive use of computation and its connection to other fields that range from science, music and design.
Munus & Niktari
Munus & Niktari is the research, design, and development (R&D&D) practice of Munus Shih and Nikki (Niktari) Makagiansar. In their practice, they recognize code as an agent for augmenting research, communication design, and artistic experiences in new and meaningful ways. They adopt open-source values in their process in pursuit of fostering transparent, equitable, and intentional collaboration.
Munus co-organizes with SpOnAcT!, a Taiwanese queer art and code collective, and co-hosted the 2023 Processing Community Day in Taiwan. Nikki co-organizes with SPICY, a collective that works in between art, justice, and cultural archival. Together, they teach interaction design and creative coding at Parsons School of Design and The Cooper Union, and contribute to open-source projects at the Processing Foundation.
Naomi Lilly is the founder and CEO of Brij App, a company dedicated to improving representation and opportunities for marginalized groups within the media industry. Located in New York, Naomi has had experience at Viacom, Live Nation Entertainment, Radio One, LinkedIn, Forbes Tate Partners, and Depop.
Naomi was a participant in the Class of '22 Techstars Music program. Lilly’s formal background is in Communications, Marketing, Gender Studies, and African American Studies. Lilly currently serves as the Director of Marketing and Storytelling at Girls for Gender Equity. Lilly hopes to use these experiences to create an inclusive and engaging environment within entertainment.
Searcy Kwon is an independent publisher, cybersecurity professional, designer, and pilot-in-training. Her work is fueled by a sense of urgency to confront and respond to our loss of security in all forms, reflected in her creative exploration and analysis of threat detection and incident response. She is the co-organizer of Multi-Factor Authentication reading and research group, a collective grounded in cognitive linguistics and critical theory, that investigates the construction and linguistic expression of narrative and memory in the technological age. She also loves hydrangeas, steel guitar, and the experience of being lost.
Spencer Chang is an internet artist and engineer stewarding and making computers as communal environments and creative infrastructure.
Their interdependent practice spans open-source tools, internet playgrounds, and computing-infused objects that offer alternative forms of digital being and invite & empower visitors to make their own technology. Their focus on collective infrastructure embodies a practice of longevity by imagining, realizing, and maintaining technological patterns that nurture agency, intimacy, and solidarity.
Ultimately, their dream is an internet that feels like a home made for, and tended by, all of us—a patchwork of cozy websites, playful interactions, and communal libraries.
Their work has been featured and supported by the de Young Museum, Gray Area, CultureHub, MIT Technology Review, and Frieze.
Tara Rose Morris is a mixed desi VJ, new media artist, and creative technologist from Toronto, Canada. She creates animated, interactive, and immersive works that explore emerging technology as a medium for connecting more deeply with ourselves and with each other. Her areas of inquiry include generative divination (connecting code and spiritual practice) as well as the digital embodiment of community, culture, and history (visualizing communities through dance, simulations of surveillance, AI as a medium for identity construction). They are currently developing an onchain tarot web application called NFTarot, leveraging energy exchange with the blockchain to center abundance and presence in a space oriented towards scarcity and distraction.
Trevor Van de Velde is a composer, sound artist, instrument builder, and creative programmer based in NYC. Trevor's work focuses on exploring the relationship between technology, play, materiality, and hybridity through a combination of "hacked" electronics and live performance.
Tuerhong Guliniali (گۈلنىھال) is a Uyghur Chinese designer, researcher, and radio producer from Urumqi, Xinjiang, China, currently based in Brooklyn. Tuerhong applies her critical media studies research interest into the intersection of design and technology. Tuerhong’s design research focuses on technology & machine learning, race as technology, and poetic storytelling in understanding reclamation of self within and beyond digital media. As a radio producer and curator, Tuerhong interviews young emerging artists around the global internet through her show gtalks! radio, a bi-monthly interview show that shares stories to inspire and connect with like minded people, at dublab.
About the Y11 Track Mentor
Eileen Isagon Skyers is a writer, curator, and artist based in New York. She has nearly a decade of experience contextualizing media art and producing online exhibitions across non-profit and contemporary arts institutions, among them, David Zwirner, Rhizome, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Through her extensive directorial experience at web3 organizations including Foundation, Feral File, and Friends with Benefits, Skyers has facilitated high profile partnerships with distinguished collaborators including bitforms gallery, Almine Rech, the Museum of Modern Art, LVMH, Artist Rights Society, and Uniswap. Her critical writing on digital art and culture has been published in Hyperallergic, Outland, Frieze, Spike, and Dirt, and in printed catalogues including the Net Art Anthology, Pioneer Works' Software for Artist's Day publication, In Poetic Coalition, and Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon. Skyers is currently a mentor for NEW INC's Art and Code cohort, and acted as an advisor for The Kitchen’s L.A.B. Research Residency x Simons Foundation x SFPC.