Showcase 2016
NEW INC End-of-Year Showcase 2016
The New Museum at 231 Bowery, Ground Floor
July 28–31 & August 4–7
12–5 PM
NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, design, and technology, is a testing ground for new ideas. It brings together forward-thinking artists, fashion designers, musicians, virtual reality filmmakers, product designers, software developers, architects, and more to develop creative projects and businesses that respond to our present moment and point the way toward the future. A collaborative, interdisciplinary program for individual practitioners and new businesses alike, NEW INC incubates the growth and development of projects that blur the lines between culture and commerce.
Public Beta, NEW INC’s second annual end-of-year showcase, takes its name from the world of rapid prototyping in software development and the tech mantra “release early, release often”—a strategy for getting real-world, real-time feedback on nascent products. Often, these products are raw and unfinished, and it is only through public input and interaction that they can progress and move forward.
Over the course of twelve months, NEW INC members work to develop their projects and businesses in the private, shared workspace at 231 Bowery. Public Beta offers an opportunity for members to present their work to the broader public, stress-test works in progress, gain input from audiences, and engage with new viewers and potential customers. This lab-like environment is a space for beta testing new products, virtual reality experiences, installations, and performances, and offers audiences a glimpse at what’s been incubating this year.
WEEKEND 1: JULY 28–31
The Critical Marketplace
From subtly critical gestures to objects enabled by new design and manufacturing processes, the products on display in the Critical Marketplace demonstrate how artists and designers are using the market to test and spread their ideas about the world.
ANTIBOT WEAR exonemo
In response to the ubiquity of surveillance cameras in public space today, exonemo has created a customizable apparel line as a source of offline free speech. The web service utilizes machine-unreadable captcha typeface—typically used to exclude bot programs from online log-ins—to allow users to generate their own wearable designs. The project has been produced in collaboration with Print All Over Me.
ATHA Michelle Cherian
Atha is a fashion and lifestyle brand fusing contemporary art and traditional craft. For Public Beta, Atha presents pieces from Michelle Cherian’s most recent trip to Nepal, where she is working with artisans to create the next edition of Atha jewelry and scarves. Also featured are stories from the road—about the artisans, crafts, and places that have inspired her.
BHOLD Susan Taing
Bhold aims to change how we manufacture and produce goods by prioritizing efficiency and sustainability. It is the first to bring digital beta testing to physical products in a scalable model, through the labs program. The company’s goal is to thoughtfully design objects for the widest audience.
CONTINUUM
Patrick Delorey / Floating Point Studio
Continuum is a line of self-generating, limited-edition jewelry. Digital animations of each piece unfold indefinitely—moments from these animations are identified, extracted, and materialized by additive manufacturing. Each piece is unlike any that has come before, or any that will come after.
THE COUNTERPOINTER Luisa Pereira
The Counterpointer is a synthesizer that generates three-voice harmonies in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. For an alto melody created by the user, it produces bass and soprano voices based on the rules of eighteenth-century counterpoint. It is the first device in The Well–Sequenced Synthesizer, a series exploring new ways of interacting with music through computation and interactive design.
EXTENSION PILLARS Pinkhouse
The fountain was once a staple of town squares: a life-sustaining public amenity adorned, perhaps, by marble statuary befitting its central role. In our lives today, cell phones have an equivalent importance. Pinkhouse’s Extension Pillars re-envision the charging station for these devices to complement their importance, creating a utility—and a proverbial watering hole.
FLIRTING GOBLETS HE+HU
Flirting Goblets is a series of kinetic products designed to facilitate social interaction. A feathered device is connected to each goblet, serving as an avatar for a person to gently touch the world. The feathers are controlled by sensors that interact with one another, helping people break the ice by using an absurd approach.
SHOP:MOBILE Telfar
Telfar Clemens presents a mobile shop that attempts to create a shop-able context for his work outside of the designer boutiques to which his work is most often bound, but where it is perhaps least often understood. SHOP:MOBILE is a highly mobile shop architecture that will house both a curated selection of Clemens' garments and a loop of his video work.
TUNICA
TUNICA creative studio presents selections from their magazine and gallery. TUNICA
magazine is a biannual art, design, and fashion publication, each edition of which is masterminded in collaboration with guest art directors and editors. The TUNICA gallery is located in pop-up spaces located throughout New York, Barcelona, Paris, and Berlin.
WEEKEND 1: JULY 28–31
VIRTUALITIES
The artists, filmmakers, designers, and storytellers whose work is presented in this section exploit virtual reality’s ability to immerse viewers in a different world—instantly transporting them to far-flung places. Some of the locales depicted here include: the electric streets of Dakar, Senegal; a terrifying war zone; the quiet depths of outer space; and strange and surreal environments of the creator’s own devising.
AFRIPEDIA – DANCE BATTLE 360°
Stocktown Films
Stocktown Films and House of Real present the world’s first 360-degree virtual-reality-video dance-battle experience, showcasing the best street dancers from Dakar, Senegal, in an interactive online experience in which audiences can immerse themselves in the movement, the music, and the city itself.
GIANT Carbon Pictures
Trapped in an active war zone, two parents struggle to distract their young daughter by inventing a fantastical tale. Inspired by real events, Giant is an immersive virtual reality experience that transports the viewer into the family’s makeshift basement shelter. The parents’ fairy tale intensifies as bomb blasts draw closer and closer.
HUBBLE CANTATA Eliza Mcnitt
Art, science, and virtual reality come together in an experience for the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival, presented by VisionIntoArt/National Sawdust. Eliza McNitt will preview this new project, Hubble Cantata, for NEW INC. In it, for the first time, viewers will have the opportunity to float within the imagery from the Hubble Telescope that has deepened our understanding of the universe.
HYPER.ZONE James Orlando
This demonstration showcases six gaming levels in a multiplatform virtual space. It features art, fashion, furniture, and performances by artists Matty Bovan, Brady Gunnell, Maxime Guyon, Sigrid Lauren, Alexandra Marzella, Pinar & Viola, Brendan Smith, Morey Talmor, and others.
N=7 Rachel Rossin
Rachel Rossin presents a virtual reality simulation that translates the structure of side-scrolling game play into an immersive experience. In a Dante-esque underwood, the viewer enters a domain of hacked architectural and game imagery, collaged with algorithms generated from paintings, corporate signage, logos, and scenic destinations. These irradiant environments provide a window to sights unseen.
NOTHING TO SEE Charles Sainty
Nothing to See is a virtual reality installation and sculptural series centered around user-uploaded videos of wrecked vehicles on video-sharing sites. This is an investigation of our relationship to those tragic images and our desire to define that which defies our understanding. What do we gain from this act of looking? What do we see?
SELECTIONS FROM SENSORIUM WORKS Sensorium Works
Sensorium Works presents its recent work, including Laurie Anderson – Times Square, filmed for the Midnight Moment program in Times Square; Cannes x Samsung Gear360, a journey through the south of France; Follow The Unicorn: A 360 Bonnaroo Adventure, filmed at the festival; and The Heart Of Brooklyn - Turner Cody, a performance of “Deep In The Heart Of Brooklyn.”
WEEKEND 2: AUGUST 4–7
VARIATIONS / INSTALLATIONS
This section features a wide range of performances and installations that strive to reconnect us with our senses, our bodies, and the natural world—yet, all the while, they rely on technologically mediated methods such as futuristic wearable devices, bio-feedback and motion sensors, and augmented reality or sound-enhanced meditation techniques.
AGALINIS DREAMS Miriam Simun
Combining video and performance, Agalinis Dreams invites audiences to participate in a multisensory ritual experience to commemorate the impending extinction of the Agalinis Acuta, a tiny grasslands flower and the only endangered plant species in New York. Viewers are invited to don wearable sculptures that deliver scents during this intimate performance. Motion Design by Studio Studio.
DEFINING REALITIES Volvox Labs
Defining Realities is a study and an installation that explore both kinetic movement and organic growth. Through the use of digitally fabricated sculptures, VVOX has created a façade representing different ecosystems. The physical structures gain life through movement with the aid of data, animating the structure while conveying the idea of an evolving environment.
FUTURE PAST NEWS
Karolina Ziulkoski and Andrea Wolf
Super 8 film found in a flea market depicting governments in chaos and an impending war seems like it could easily be today’s news, but it’s from 1937. What will happen in fifty years, when someone finds documentation of our news? This augmented reality app switches between 1937 and present, showing how history repeats itself, how we forget.
HEARTMONIC Lisa Park
Heartmonic is an experimental performance piece that uses heart rate sensors to create sonification of participants’ heartbeats. Each participant will generate the sound of a different instrument and, following instructions from a conductor, will be guided into creating a symphony based on their synched heartbeats. This collaborative experience will build an emotional bond.
SOUNDBATH MJ Caselden
Created by MJ Caselden, Soundbath is an exploration of energy flow and vibration, and their impact on mood and consciousness. Using a series of custom sound-generating sculptures, Caselden envelops the audience in a wash of sound, in which they can lie back and experience vibrations moving across a listening space.
TOTEMS Parc Office
Totems are a series of haptic products for human computer interaction. They challenge traditional methods of input and output by atomizing them into space. Instead of the typical screen-dominated devices of today, Totems are a family of small, simple, and beautiful objects that each perform a specific function.
UNTITLED Carlo van de Roer
In collaboration with Satellite Labs and VVOX, Carlo Van de Roer uses new technology developed during his time at NEW INC to expand on his interest in the relationship between in-camera imaging and our perception of time and place.
WEATHER HAS BEEN NICE Andrea Wolf
Weather has been nice is a series of generative video installations in which found vintage postcards are broken down into their elements. Creating an immersive audiovisual experience, the large-scale projections of ever-changing landscapes will be complemented by a recording of the sound pieces, embedded in beanbags created with Print All Over Me.
