Join us for the third program in our new artist-led conversation series.
About this event
ONX Artist Series is an artist-led conversation series. The series intends to expand the definition of extended reality and focus on the thinking, feeling, and methods involved in creating new works. ONX Artist Series provides access to the perspectives of artists in an intimate setting as an opportunity for collective learning and community building.
This series is guest curated by Reese Donohue and features artists Ian Cheng and Antoine Catala in conversation.
Doors open 6:30pm
Conversation 7-8pm
Reception 8-9pm
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Ian Cheng is an artist living and working in New York. Since 2012, Cheng has produced a series of simulations exploring an agent’s capacity to deal with an ever-changing environment. These works culminated in the Emissaries trilogy, which introduced a narrative agent whose motivation to enact a story was set into conflict with the open-ended chaos of the simulation. Most recently, he has developed BOB (Bag of Beliefs), an AI creature whose personality, body, and life story evolve across exhibitions, what Cheng calls “art with a nervous system.”
He has exhibited widely including solo presentations at MoMA PS1, New York; Serpentine Galleries, London; The Shed, New York; LUMA Foundation, Arles; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; and group presentations at Venice Biennale, Venice; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art; New York; Hirshhorn Museum; Washington DC; Tate Modern, London; Louisiana Museum, Copenhagen; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Sculpture Center, New York.
Antoine Catala’s work endows technology with physicality and considers how artificial renderings of forms behind a screen might change our feelings toward them. His video works and internet projects, such as “Distant Feel,” use humor to reveal the ways in which images on the web can be neutralized by way of insincere sentiments or nostalgia. Catala is interested in this underlying structure of his medium—in the collective assumptions we make of images in digital forms, and the ways they can or cannot provoke emotion in scenarios we might encounter. Accidents in technology, either in its use or production, are departure points for Catala’s practice. The artist seeks to discover the ways in which images might demand emotion or thwart them as they “travel virtual and physical distances via the internet.”
Catala has exhibited at the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria, Sculpture Center, New York, Espai d’art Contemporani de Castelló, Spain, Fridericianum, Kassel, MoMA PS 1, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Russia, New Museum, New York, among many other international galleries. He participated in the 12th Lyon Biennale and 2015 Triennial: Surround Audience at the New Museum in New York.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Reese Donohue is the founder of Tempo, a Brooklyn-based interactive design studio. Tempo works across music, art, and technology to create immersive experiences rooted in sound with the belief that sound and form are inextricable.
Reese studied at Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and is an inaugural member of ONX, a new arts fellowship created in partnership between The New Museum and Onassis Foundation, and an alumni of The New Museum’s art and technology incubator NEW INC.
LOCATION
ONX Studio is located in the Atrium of the Olympic Tower building in midtown Manhattan, at 645 Fifth Avenue, with entrances on 51st and 52nd Streets, between Madison and Fifth Avenues.