DEMO DAY

Saturday, May 7
3pm-6pm ET

Description:

Demo Day is NEW INC’s annual showcase previewing the exciting creative projects and enterprises developed during the year. Sponsored by Meta Open Arts, this year’s event features twelve presentations from NEW INC’s Year 8 members, and will explore topics ranging from cursed Internet aesthetics and immersive virtual design to community-oriented creative practice and radical collective economics. Now in its eighth year, Demo Day continues its tradition of introducing cutting-edge thinking to an audience of funders, creative directors, curators, and industry leaders.  

Watch the Demo Day presentations on Saturday, May 7 from 3:00–6:00 p.m. via livestream. Featuring NEW INC members from the Art and Code track (partnered with Rhizome): Roopa Vasudevan, Cassie Tarakajian, Carrie Sijia Wang, the Collective Abundance track: Johann Diedrick, Eliza Evans, Laudi CoLab; the Future Memory track: R.I.C.O. R.O.B.O., Good Mirrors, Ariana Faye Allensworth, and the Extended Realities track: Peter Burr, Brandon Powers, Adelle Lin. The afternoon will close with a keynote from a special guest witness of the day.

Project presentations will run from 3-6pm (split in two parts with a half hour break). ASL interpretation will be provided on site by ASL Interpreting services provided by Body Language Productions. Demo Day is an invite-only but we invite the public to watch live online.

This year’s Demo Day is sponsored by Meta Open Arts, and will announce the 10 recipients of the inaugural $10,000 Next Web Seed Grant. The awarded projects push forward arts-driven research on the potentials and models for a decentralized internet. Learn more about NEW INC's partnership with Meta.

About NEW INC

As the first museum-led cultural incubator, NEW INC was conceived of as a not-for-profit platform for furthering the New Museum’s ongoing commitment to new art and new ideas. Now in Year 8, NEW INC’s membership model continues to support a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing new creative projects and businesses. In 2020, NEW INC launched ONX Studio, an XR accelerator for artists, in partnership with the Onassis Foundation. NEW INC was cofounded by New Museum’s Toby Devan Lewis Director, Lisa Phillips, and former Deputy Director, Karen Wong, in 2014.

About New Museum 

The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum was conceived as a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building, designed by the 2010 Pritzker Prize Laureates, SANAA, on the Bowery in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a hub of new art and new ideas, and is a place of ongoing experimentation about what art and arts institutions can be in the twenty-first century.

About Meta Open Arts

Meta Open Arts’ Mission: Creativity is our common language; it enables us to transcend boundaries and celebrate our differences. As a company dedicated to bringing people closer together, Meta recognizes that creativity is essential to our collective well-being. Within our walls and around the globe, Open Arts cultivates creative engagements that offer new ways of thinking about ourselves, our communities, and the world at large. Open Arts is organized as 5 global areas of focus: Commissions, Design, Experiences, Partnerships, and Strategy & Operations.

Description:

NEW INC and Ace Hotel New York Present A Somewhere Good Spiral with Naj Austin, Johann Diedrick, Van Newman, and Annika Hansteen-Izora

NEW INC and Ace Hotel New York are happy to host the minds behind Somewhere Good for an introduction to the world-building and thought process behind their highly anticipated iOS app.

For CEO Naj Austin and her team, current online spaces don’t just lack imagination, they’re rarely designed to consider one’s full identity. Somewhere Good is a social platform for intimate community conversations, a new way to come together in shared curiosity, dreaming and play. All interactions happen within worlds – quirky, expansive audio spaces that refresh every 24 hours. The Somewhere Good team thinks about it like a kickback with the homies – some of the best conversations can't last forever and you can't wait to go back.

A “Somewhere Good Spiral” builds from the team’s internal practice of posing every decision as a question first, allowing curiosity to guide discussions like, “When do Black people feel safe?” and “What is consent in the age of the follower?”

This evening’s “Somewhere Good Spiral” centers the process of building digital products, from the ground up, through the team’s various identity lenses and experiences. The event will also feature a sneak peek of the app and a Q&A with the team.

Somewhere Good is set to launch in the Apple store later this month. Learn more about Somewhere Good.

ASL interpretation will be provided on site.

New Museum x Ace Hotel

The New Museum teams up with Ace Hotel New York and Ace Hotel Brooklyn for an eight-part series that animates a shared faith in discovery, a mutual devotion to artistic pursuits. The year-long lineup will sanctify the hotels with co-curated pop-ups, artist conversations, screenings and more.

Description:

On April 12 at noon ET, join us for an Instagram Live AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the NEW INC team. Meet members of NEW INC’s team, learn about membership at NEW INC, professional development programming, and how to submit your best application. Open Call launch is open until April 20!

Description:

Please join us for our annual Open House, an online information session for creative practitioners and collectives interested in applying for NEW INC's next cohort! We are opening our virtual doors to prospective applicants who would like to get to know the NEW INC team a bit, spend some time with some of our current members, and learn more about what it is like to participate in our program. If you want to learn more about what our program is all about, please join.

This session is conversational and intended to be interactive - please bring your questions. Y8 Members Nocturnal Medicine (Creative Science), R.I.C.O R.O.B.O (Future Memory), and Rosalie Yu (Art & Code) will present and host breakout sessions about their NEW INC experience. We will also have an AMA style room hosted by the NEW INC team to ask questions about the application.

This session will include CART Captioning, and will also be recorded and posted to our Youtube for later viewing.

Description:

public / private steers the choreography of movement through space. With nothing but a set of headphones and each other, guests will navigate Ace Hotel Brooklyn in small groups with audio as their guide. A clandestine hotel room encounter. A delicate discovery. And a reimagination of the relationships and physical environment that have been formed await within.

Emerging from months in our homes, distanced from each other, we now have to renegotiate and reimagine how we gather as bodies in physical space. Further, the dichotomy of public vs private has grown starker, shaping how we hold and move our bodies. We’ve gone from conforming to certain postures in private space to re-entering public space with these new physical memories. A hotel offers a nuanced place to investigate these shifts as it is a convergence of the public and private.

Please sign up for a 30-minute performance slot below.

About the Partnership:

The New Museum teams up with Ace Hotel Brooklyn and Ace Hotel New York for an eight-part series that animates a shared faith in discovery, a mutual devotion to artistic pursuits. The year-long lineup will sanctify the hotels with co-curated pop-ups, artist conversations, screenings and more.

Description:

This presentation series is a program of NEW INC’s Science Sandbox-funded Creative Science Track, which explores scientific topics through art, speculative design, multispecies environments, technology, and more.

Presented in partnership with Serpentine’s Synthetic Ecologies Lab, this evening program invites the members of NEW INC’s Creative Science Track to present the ways their practice interacts with notions of ecology, nature, and embodiment. While Western culture distinguishes the natural world as external to humans, the speakers included in this program will tell stories that expand our perception of ecology: That the natural world consists of an entangled series of interactions and relationships that humans are a part of, not separate from. The practice of embodying, in this case, reveals the hidden ways we participate in our ecologies while also making visible the ways our environments change us, our bodies, and the perception of our surroundings.

The evening is anchored by a keynote by designer and researcher Yasaman Sheri, followed by presentations by our Creative Science track members Ani Liu, Gal Nissim & Leslie Ruckman, Jiabao Li, Jonah King & Sue Huang, Nocturnal Medicine, and Trash Club. Having worked closely with the artists on this track, Mentor-in-Residence Fiona Raby will act as a respondent for the evening.

This event is held in person by invitation only, but will be streamed live to NEW INC’s YouTube channel.

ASL interpretation will be provided in stream.
Click through to learn more about the presenters.

ABOUT NEW INC
NEW INC was cofounded by Lisa Phillips and Karen Wong in 2013 and is the first museum-led cultural incubator dedicated to supporting innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship across art, design, and technology. NEW INC’s Director is Salome Asega. For more information, visit newinc.org.

ABOUT NEW MUSEUM
The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.

Event Partner:

SERPENTINE
Championing new ideas in contemporary art since 1970, the Serpentine has presented pioneering exhibitions for half a century from a wide range of emerging practitioners to the most internationally recognised artists of our time. Across two sites only 5 minutes apart, in London’s Kensington Gardens, the Serpentine presents a year-round, free programme of exhibitions, architecture, education, live events and technological innovation, in the park and beyond.

ABOUT SERPENTINE SYNTHETIC ECOLOGIES LAB 
Synthetic Ecologies Lab celebrates instruments, tools & platforms that support artistic practice in life sciences and zones of inquiry in contemporary biotechnology by prototyping creative outlooks and methodologies that inspire and support a new generation of artists. The lab works around non-static themes like fermentation, poetics of sensing and perception, aesthetics of new nature, simulated life, ecological art and microbial aesthetics. The projects bring together communities of interdisciplinary thinkers and practitioners to further pluralities and investigate paths less explored.

ABOUT SCIENCE SANDBOX
Science Sandbox is an initiative dedicated to inspiring a deeper interest in science, especially among those who don't think of themselves as science enthusiasts. We support and collaborate with programs that unlock scientific thinking.

Description:

In collaboration with Garage Stories, we are thrilled to announce the third edition of #BadxStoriesNYC! It's like TedX, but for bad stories.

Join for a night at ONX Studio to celebrate learning from the challenges of an ever-evolving XR space, where a group of fantastic media art leaders such as Winslow Porter, Eva Davidova, Darragh Dandurand, Lyron Bentovim and Jamie Pallot will share some of their bumps on the road to success.

Why do we do this? As creators, or simply humans, we are always looking for the perfect ending to our story; what we don’t realize is all those “wrong” endings that make a story truly interesting.

We want to share mistakes, learning, and create a very special occasion for networking between media artists, entrepreneurs, and creators.

Event Partner:

Garage Stories is an innovation lab committed to building a better future with emerging media. We work with private companies and public institutions, bringing together content creators, technologists and entrepreneurs; to generate visions, products, stories and community to foster a positive impact.

Description:

In our final NEW (dr)INC event of this year, NEW INC hosts design entrepreneur Fred Dust for an hour of conversation, concepting, and thoughtfully leaning into the next chapter of our lives.

Part workshop, part discovery - Fred will lead us through the Hunch Hour, a conversational methodology to confirm or complicate our untested hopes and expectations for the future. If you’re looking for a brave, invigorating way to explore what's next in our deeply changed world, this session is for you. Please register below!

Guest Speaker:
Fred Dust is the founder of Making Conversation, LLC and is a designer, author, educator, consultant, trustee, and advisor to social and business leaders. He is one of the world’s most original thinkers, applying the craft and optimism of human-centered design to the intractable challenges we face today. Formerly, Fred was Global Managing Partner at the acclaimed international design firm IDEO. Fred works with leaders and change agents to unlock the creative potential of business, government, education, and philanthropic organizations. Learn more here.

We invite people who identify as BIPOC women to join NEW INC & Pi-Isis Ankhra for an hour of learning, sharing, and strategizing. Pi-Isis will offer insights and frameworks gleaned from her deep lived and professional expertise as a multi-hyphenate in fundraising, philanthropy, consulting, starting and scaling a company, followed by a discussion. If you identify as a BIPOC woman, are eager to build continuity across your many skills, creative interests, business plans, intersectional identity, and career directions, this conversation is for you. Please register here.


This event and discussion is for women-identified BIPOC creators and innovators only. A recording of Pi-Isis’ presentation portion will be available for all to view after the event.

Guest Speaker:
Pi-Isis S. Ankhra, founder and president of P.S. 314, Inc., brings over 20 years of experience developing strategic initiatives targeted at leveraging private and public investments. She has secured over $150 million for a diverse range of community-based and major institutions, specifically within the fields of arts, education, social justice, and advocacy. Ankhra has partnered with a multitude of institutions including the Ford Foundation, Democratic National Committee, and the NAACP, among others, on planning, fundraising, and event production to highlight and promote core social justice issues. An award-winning documentary producer, her expert skill set includes media development, working on both short- and long-form content projects. In 2007, Ankhra launched for select clients. Recognizing the importance and power of collaboration, Ankhra established P.S. 314 a consulting practice to drive social change while addressing the financial and organizational challenges to operate as a strategic partner with key clients.

For anyone who finds themselves stuck on an application question at the 11th hour - we’re here to help! Join us on IG Live on April 19 (a.k.a. the day before apps are due!) to get any last lingering questions answered.

How might we imagine more morally courageous versions of our most controversial public figures? Can we imagine apologies from our opponents, that would no longer render them our opponents? Join us for a discussion on online accountability that solicits feeling, imagination, and critical observation with artist Stephanie Lepp & documentarian Kat Cizek of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. Drawing from Lepp’s Deep Reckonings, a series of explicitly-marked DeepFakes that imagine notorious figures seeking forgiveness, this conversation will explore the mechanics of redemption and fruits of compassion in the landscape of call-out culture. Plus, you'll have the opportunity to script your own 'deep reckoning' for the public figure of your choice.

This event will include closed captioning. ASL interpretation and CART captioning are available by requests made at least four business days prior to the program.

Stephanie Lepp is an artist and producer whose work strives to hold up a mirror — inviting us to grow from what we see. She's the producer of Reckonings, a narrative podcast that explores how we change our hearts and minds. Her latest work is Deep Reckonings, a series of explicitly-marked deepfake videos that imagine morally courageous versions of our public figures. Infinite Lunchbox is her studio for socially-engaged art.

Katerina Cizek is a Peabody and two-time Emmy-winning documentarian. Based in Toronto Canada, she is the artistic director and co-founder of the Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab. At the studio, she wrote (with Uricchio et al.) the world’s first field study on co-creating media called Collective Wisdom (forthcoming with MIT Press). For over a decade, Cizek worked as a documentary director at the National Film Board of Canada, transforming the organization into a world-leading digital hub, with the projects HIGHRISE and Filmmaker-in-Residence. Both community-based and globally recognized, these two ground-breaking long-form digital projects garnered international awards and critical acclaim. Cizek is a member of the Directors’ Guild of Canada, has served as an advisor at the Sundance Institutes’ New Frontier Lab and Stories of Change Program as well as CPH:DOX and ESoDoc. She is a founding member of the Guild of Future Architects, a member of the editorial collective at IMMERSE.

NEW INC and Pioneer Works invite you to a conversation that explores spatial divides throughout time, emerging practices to re-claim dwellings and public areas, and the role of collective imagination in liberation. We’ll hear from Pioneer Works Tech Resident Ariana Faye Allensworth and NEW INC members Ashley Jane Lewis and Eric Moed of oopsa (Office of Open Practice), whose work deals with the urgency of spatial access, historical representation, and how to envision new worlds through the use of data viz, speculative design and monumental sculpture.

This event will include closed captioning. ASL interpretation and CART captioning are available by requests made at least four business days prior to the program.

Ariana Faye Allensworth is a visual artist and researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work builds upon interests in photography, spatial justice, and the politics of the archive. She has over 10 years of experience as a cultural producer and arts administrator, specializing in arts education and social impact strategy. She currently works as a Senior Design Lead at IDEO and has previously held positions at The International Center of Photography, The Center for Cultural Power, Youth Speaks, and Cultural Engagement Lab. Ariana is also a founding member of the New York City chapter of the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project and a Winter 2021 Technology Resident at Pioneer Works.

Ashley Jane Lewis is a new media artist with a focus on speculative design and tech education. Her artistic practice explores black diaspora of the past, present and future through computational and analog mediums including science fiction, networked devices, machine learning, data weaving, food design, bio art and performance. Her award winning work has exhibited in Canada and America, most notably on the White House website during the Obama presidency. As an educator, Ashley has taught more than 3500 young people how to code, landing her on the 2016 Top 100 Black Women to Watch in Canada. She’s helped lower the barrier to entry into creative computing in her work with Dan Shiffman and ml5.org, a “friendly machine learning for the web” platform. Ashley holds a New Media BFA from Ryerson University in Toronto and a Master’s degree from ITP at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. 

Eric Moed (b. 1987, New York, NY) Eric’s work exists at the intersection of art, design and architecture – examining the relationship between history, memory and society. He is an exhibited designer, artist and architect and has completed large-scale public installations in the US and the EU. Moed’s projects have been featured in the New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Archinect, Architizer, The Huffington Post, Haaretz, NPR and BBC Radio. He holds a Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University Graduate School of Design with a concentration in Art, Design, and the Public Domain (’19) and a Bachelors of Architecture from Pratt Institute (’12). In 2019 Eric was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Poetic Justice Group. In 2020 he co-founded New York-based design studio oopsa aka Office of Open Practice Studio/Agency with Penelope Phylactopolous.

Join us for a conversation about the NEW INC member experience with Laura Splan and NEW INC Director Stephanie Pereira.

NEW INC and Rhizome invite you to join a conversation with artists Nahee Kim and Christopher Clary about how their work blurs practice and life, love and fantasy, intimacy and technology. Kim’s Daddy Residency is a call for daddies to raise her future baby; Clary’s livestreamed The Chrisy Show is a talk show with sex workers about cam culture hosted on Chaturbate. By centering queer and feminist desire, Kim and Clary ask if the world is ready for a new frame on romance, pleasure, and family life.

This event will include closed captioning. ASL interpretation and CART captioning are available by requests made at least four business days prior to the program.

Nahee Kim (she/they) is an artist, teacher, and web programmer who is performing “nahee.app” on social media. nahee.app is a speculative program that writes itself interpreting Nahee’s sexual identity, preference, and experiences as computational objects. nahee.app devises sex code and documentation and partner matching algorithms by converting mechanisms of existing programming languages and network protocols into provocative interactions. nahee.app expands its code about sex to social context by questioning the existence of gender-specific roles around the family building through the project <Daddy Residency>. Nahee is based in New York and Seoul.

Christopher Clary is an artist and curator exploring sex in tech culture. His practice playfully draws on personal archives and queer histories using performance, video, installation, objects, books, and even software - sometimes all in one series - to think and act on futurity. His art has been part of numerous exhibitions, festivals, and conferences around the world, from the Palais de Tokyo in Paris to China Art Book Fair in Beijing. His Rhizome commission, a porn-novella-zip-file was Hyperallergic’s best individual work of Internet art in 2016 and acquired by MoMA and the Whitney, and exhibited at ETH Zurich in 2019. Curatorially, he co-produced a year of programming for the ICP Museum and Library in 2018 that included the work of Allison Parrish, American Artist, Morehshin Allahyari, Nora Khan, Paul Soulellis, and Porpentine Charity Heartscape. Other curatorial projects include an online exhibition about safe space for The Wrong digital art biennale.

We are opening our virtual doors to prospective applicants who'd like to get to know the NEW INC staff a bit, spend some time with some of our current members, and hear more about what it is like to participate in our program. 

If you want to learn more about what NEW INC is all about, please join! This session is conversational and intended to be interactive - bring your questions. This event will include closed captioning. ASL interpretation and CART captioning are available by requests made at least four business days prior to the program.