Studio DEMO x Rhizome: Prototyping Worlds

Artists have long treated play as a serious, expansive practice. Working outside commercial gaming, they’ve developed a distinct field: visually rich, critically alive, and economically viable on its own terms. Studio DEMO x Rhizome sessions offer a glimpse of past and future forms of the “artist-made game”.

What if a game could model a climate future, stress-test an economic ideology, or simulate the collapse of late-stage capitalism in real time? If you’ve ever played The SIMS, this may feel familiar. Yet, predating SIMs, game designers were already attempting to model serious realities of our geopolitical and socioeconomic world through precise, and unexpectedly playful, and often stylized environments. This conversation brings together artists and designers, Tess Elliot, Alex Declino, and Mitch Anzuoni, who are each building games that use real-world data to prototype systems of decision-making, resource distribution, and care.

Studio DEMO is a live broadcast hub at the New Museum, open to drop into throughout the day and available via livestream. Featuring NEW INC's wider creative community, broadcasts take the form of talks, demonstrations, couch conversations, panel discussions, DJ sets, and more. This year, NEW INC partners with peer organizations to build thematic programming for Studio DEMO. Partners include Geidai Project, Onassis Foundation, Rhizome, Serpentine, YoungArts.