Extended Realities
Building Resilient Realities
Our NEW INC member cohort consists of 5 unique Tracks or focus areas guided by a Mentor-in-Residence: Art & Code, Cooperative Studies, Creative Science, Social Architecture, and XR (Extended Realities). At the core of DEMO, members share their individual projects during Track Talks which are followed by a group conversation moderated by the Track Mentor-in-Residence.
In partnership with the EY Metaverse Lab and Onassis ONX, Extended Realities supports artists and technologists who blur the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds. These speakers are forging new audience relationships through emerging storytelling methods, including AI, motion capture, mixed reality, and more. Following presentations by Leah Smithson, Luca Lee, Mischa Kuma, MYStudio, and Nat Decker, the Trackâs Mentor-in-Residence Danielle McPhatter will moderate a group discussion.
DEMO2024 Keynote Presentations serve as the meeting point between various disciplines, areas of inquiry, creative practices, generations, and career levels. Our invited speakers share their knowledge to bring further context to the ideas and projects incubated at NEW INC, as well as offer an additional perspective garnered from experience, passion, and illuminating creative work in their own fields.
Andrew Thomas Huang delivers his keynote in alignment with the principles of our XR Track. In this presentation, Huang will share his process of constructing exemplary world-building across short and long-form media formats. A figure that is known for creating hybrid fantasy worlds and mythical dreamscapes inspired by his Chinese heritage, queer Asian mythology, and folklore, Huang will speak to his rich and purposeful use of XR tools to produce dynamic imagery on screen.
Studio DEMO is a broadcast hub run in partnership with independent art publisher Montez Press Radio, inviting our NEW INC alumni and creative community for a series of live talks, demonstrations, couch conversations, panel discussions, DJ sets, performances, and more.
In this closing Studio DEMO panel, NEW INCâs Founding Director Julia Kaganskiy brings together some of the incubatorâs earliest XR (extended realities) artists and producers for a roundtable reflecting on the past decade of this ever-evolving storytelling format, while also projecting where they see XR developing in the field next.
Studio DEMO sessions do not require tickets and seating is on a first come, first served basis.
Spanning a symphony of digital creations, the exhibition, "Building Resilient Realities," emerges as a collective inquiry into the possibilities of preservation, resilience, and regeneration through the impact of extended reality (XR). This group exhibition showcases human resilience, rallying against the erosive tide of modernity that endangers our identities, environments, communities, and future histories. It also serves as a collective defiance of established norms to reclaim and reshape our relationship with technology to refocus on connection with ourselves and other organic beings.
By harnessing the transformative potency of XR, the artists represented here repurpose the same technology that is often associated with restlessness and isolation to create a safe space for reflection, community, and accountability. These immersive pieces become emblems of resistance, inscribed with digital runes that offer alternative visions of the future that go beyond just survival â opening portals for renewal and a chance for our tired souls to find moments of stillness and kindle sparks of hope.
The artworks encompass a determined defiance against the monolithic, failing universals that technology sometimes espouses, offering instead a multiverse of new and intersectional futures. Futures that offer the potential to supplant waste with regeneration; where the incessant march of obsolescence is contested by the permanence of care, the insistence of human touch, and a resilient will to endure and persevere.
Technology, so often perceived as an external force that shapes us, is re-envisioned here as a canvas that we paint with our stories and dreams. The evidence lies in the execution of the works: an interactive game facilitates rest and nurture through nature, a multimedia performance resurrects lost artistry from historical ashes, a speculative architectural model offers a blueprint for sustainable futures, the opening of a portal for the preservation of a lost culture, a new toolkit for creative expression, human adaption and resilience against everchanging and overwhelming triumphs, and the biases and inaccessibility of emerging technologies are exposed and become an avenue for powerful change. Each experience provided by the collective melds the lines between user and creator, pushing participants towards an introspective journey that questions and redefines our coexistence with the tools we wield.
In "Building Resilient Realities" artists become architects of a world in which we are no longer estranged from the ecosystems and histories that sustain us, nor alienated by the technology we have birthed. As stewards of this virtual expanse, they choreograph a digital embodiment of liberation, guiding us towards a more integrated, more resilient understanding of self and community amidst the humanless innovation that shapes our era.
About the Track:
Our NEW INC member cohort consists of 5 unique Tracks or focus areas guided by a Mentor-in-Residence: Art & Code, Cooperative Studies, Creative Science, Social Architecture, and XR (Extended Realities). Annually, our members are invited to contribute to a group showcase demonstrating the Trackâs guiding questions. These exhibitions are curated and produced by invited guests.
Our XR (Extended Realities) track explores how artists can use, interact with and leverage XR tools to create dynamic experiences. Artists in this cohort leverage emerging tools that are forming new audience relationships to technology and are interested in the third space between our physical and digital worlds. Here they develop projects that explore aesthetic and technical opportunities for motion capture, virtual reality, augmented reality, the metaverse, immersive sound and more.
Featuring Work From: