Events
Field Conditions: Incubating Media Arts in NYC
New York’s art / design / technology field is held together by a coalition between practices and cultural institutions that shape what gets made, who gets supported, and what survives. This panel brings together NEW INC at the New Museum, Rhizome, and Onassis ONX, New York City institutions that have an ongoing commitment to Art, Design and Technology. The conversation will look at how each organization identifies and supports practitioners, where funding and institutional models are heading, and what is actually emerging in practice right now. For anyone working across computational design, interaction, immersive media, and creative technology, it offers a direct view of the infrastructure behind the work and of what it takes to build a practice in this city.
Speaker Bio
Salome Asega
Salome Asega is the Deputy Director of Strategy and Innovation and Director of NEW INC, the New Museum’s cultural incubator for creative practitioners working across art, design, and technology. Asega is also an artist, researcher, and educator working between participatory design and emerging technologies. Prior to joining NEW INC in 2021, Asega was the inaugural New Media Art Research Fellow for Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation, where she supported artists and organizations in the new media arts ecosystem. She is also a cofounder of POWRPLNT, a digital art collaboratory based in Brooklyn that offers free and sliding-scale workshops run by established media artists. Since 2015, Asega has been teaching studio and design methodology courses in the M.F.A. Design and Technology program at Parsons School of Design.
Michael Connor
Michael Connor is Executive Director of Rhizome, where he oversaw the Net Art Anthology initiative, an effort to retell the history of net art through 100 works, presented as an online exhibition, gallery exhibition, and book. His first online curatorial project took place in 2003 at FACT, Liverpool, where he organized an edition of the traveling exhibition Kingdom of Piracy with Shu Lea Cheang, Yukiko Shikata, and Armin Medosch. Connor is currently editing a book by Gene Youngblood about the work of Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz.
Matthew Niederhauser
Matthew Niederhauser is an artist who pushes the limits of emerging technologies across a wide range of mediums. His most recent work especially focuses on the creative and interactive potentials of AI, exploring concepts that blur the digital and physical through dynamic immersive storytelling. His award-winning projects have exhibited internationally at BAM, Centre PHI, and MEET and premiered at Venice Immersive, Sundance New Frontier, Tribeca Storyscapes, Ars Electronica, and IDFA DocLab. As the Managing Director of Onassis ONX in New York, Niederhauser also guides a global platform for art and advanced technologies that supports a creative community producing genre-defying work and a network of cultural institutions ready to respond to new forms of artistic expression.