York, NY… Now entering its third year, the New Museum’s incubator NEW INC today announces its incoming class of new and returning members. The incubator program brings together a cross-disciplinary community of artists, designers, filmmakers, curators, computer scientists, data scientists, and entrepreneurs working at the intersection of art, design, and technology to experiment with new models and modes of cultural production. While this new class continues to produce creative work and products inspired by, responding to, or leveraging the tools of emerging technologies like 3-D printing, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence, among others, they are distinguished by doing so with a greater focus on social impact.
Projects this year tackle a range of pressing issues related to pressing social issues such as income inequality, privacy, diversity, the refugee crisis, climate change, and disability, among others. Many of the new ventures take the form of social enterprises, non-profits, and public benefit corporations, and several have a strong focus on serving communities through education.
NEW INC has also introduced a new residency program designed to bring additional expertise to the community and engender a culture of peer-to-peer mentorship. Residents are seasoned artists, entrepreneurs, and researchers who are embedded within the NEW INC cohort. While they develop ventures of their own, they will also serve as in-house mentors and community catalysts, hosting office hours, organizing programs, and contributing content to NEW INC’s digital channels.
NEW INC, the first museum-led incubator, was conceived by the New Museum in 2013 and launched in September 2014. NEW INC’s aim is to support innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship by offering a 12-month professional development program, mentorship, shared resources, and an 8,000 square foot shared workspace on the Bowery, next door to the New Museum.
Over the past two years, NEW INC has incubated 70 creative practitioners, studios, and start-ups who have launched new initiatives in such fields as wearable technology, blockchain systems, countersurveillance, virtual reality, augmented reality, 3-D printing, experiential design, new musical interfaces, and much more. Their companies have raised more than eight million dollars in funding from venture capital, crowdfunding, and grants, and have created more than 160 new jobs in the local creative economy.
Learn more about the 2016–17 NEW INC Members
2016–17 NEW INC RESIDENTS
Anand Agarawala, Entrepreneur-in-Residence
Anand Agarawala is an interface designer, software developer, inventor, and nerdcore hip-hopper. He is the founder of BumpTop, a 3-D desktop user interface inspired by real desks that uses multi-touch gestures to drive towards a more expressive, human vision for computing.
Anders Sandell, Entrepreneur-in-Residence
A world traveler, designer, storyteller, and entrepreneur, Anders Sendall is the founder and CEO of TANK & BEAR and the creator of Aiko. He is passionate about using play as a vehicle for learning and creativity, and he has over a decade’s worth of experience designing products for mobile devices and the web.
Danielle Strle, Entrepreneur-in-Residence
A child of the internet, Danielle Strle is a senior technology and creative professional, as well as a producer, investor, and adviser to a diverse array of creative projects and businesses. She likes building new things and working on many projects simultaneously.
DIS, Artists-in-Residence
DIS is a New York-based collective composed of Lauren Boyle, Solomon Chase, Marco Roso, and David Toro. Its cultural interventions are manifest across a range of media and platforms, and it explores the tension between popular culture and institutional critique, while facilitating projects for the most public and democratic of all forums—the Internet.
Ida C. Benedetto, Researcher-in-Residence
Ida C. Benedetto is an experience designer and strategist who works on real world adventures, game design, and digital media. She is often at the helm of a fair bit of creative chaos, and she is currently researching the design of transformative social experiences through encounters with primal risks.
Public Science, Researchers-in-Residence
Founded by Francis Tseng and Fei Liu, Public Science is a loose interdisciplinary conglomeration that uses storytelling, games, and satire to reconfigure new technologies for social and political purposes. Their current work is centered around building tools to encourage counterfactual systems of thinking and the cognitive mapping of the complex world.
Siren, Entrepreneurs-in-Residence
Founded by Susie Lee and Katrina Hess, Siren is the only personality-centric dating app designed to spark real connections through conversation—created by women and founded on core principles of comfort, privacy, and mutual respect.
Stephanie Dinkins, Artist-in-Residence
Stephanie Dinkins is an interdisciplinary artist and associate professor whose art employs lens-based practices, the manipulation of space, and technology to grapple with notions of consciousness, agency, perception, and social equity. She teaches digital art and interactive media at Stony Brook University.
Taeyoon Choi, Artist-in-Residence
Taeyoon Choi’s art practice involves performance, electronics, drawings, and storytelling, often leading to intervention in public spaces. He collaborates with fellow artists, activists, and professionals from other fields to realize socially engaged projects and alternative pedagogy. Choi cofounded the School for Poetic Computation in 2013, where he continues to organize and teach.
2016-17 FULL TIME MEMBERS
Andrew Chepaitis
Andrew Chepaitis leads ELIA Life Technology, which develops assistive products for people with visual impairments. The company is developing a suite of products that will enable its consumers to achieve greater levels of education, employment, literacy, and independence.
ARTIPHON
Artiphon is a creative technologies company designing adaptive instruments for everyday music-making. Their first product, the INSTRUMENT 1, launched on Kickstarter, where it became the #1 highest-crowdfunded musical instrument. The INSTRUMENT 1 was named one of TIME’s 25 best inventions of the year, and is available at artiphon.com and MoMA Design Stores.
A Ü T O/M Ö T O R
A Ü T O/M Ö T O R is an album of music and exhibition of tactile artwork that combines sound, technology, digital art, and immersive participatory installation.
Carbon Pictures
Carbon Pictures is a New York–based virtual reality company specializing in virtual reality and large-scale immersive experiential installations, co-founded by Milica Zec, a director, editor, and screenwriter, and Winslow Turner Porter III, a director, producer, and creative technologist. They create cutting-edge experiences, including Giant, a virtual reality experience inspired by real events.
Christian Rocha
Christian Rocha explores the ever-increasing intersection of art, design, and technology. He believes visual and technical disciplines by nature go hand-in-hand. Rocha is keenly interested in video games as an emerging art form and in integrating video game-like concepts, interactions, and mechanics into non-video game products and situations—both digital and physical.
DATA X
DATA X is a creative studio that works at the intersection of data, society, and education. They believe in information transparency, online consumer protection, and the democratization of the internet. Their work blurs the lines between art, social critique, and consumer products.
Ekene Ijeoma
Ekene Ijeoma is a designer, artist, and programmer whose work explores the artistic and humanistic properties of data and algorithms through media, objects, and installations.
Eliza McNitt
Eliza McNitt found filmmaking through science, and her unique voice as a director fuses science with narrative storytelling. McNitt’s first film, Requiem for the Honeybee (2009), was inspired by a desire to communicate the devastating impact of vanishing honeybees.
Erica L. Bernhard
Erica L. Bernhard is a bicoastal experiential architect and multimedia artist who connects people using space and technology in high-production environments. Constantly on the forefront of new trends, Bernhard cultivates a vision for the positive potential within emerging technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence.
Faris Al-Shathir
Faris Al-Shathir is an interior designer, architect, and co-founder of BOFFO, a nonprofit organization that presents innovative and experimental art, architecture, and design.
HAWRAF INTL.
HAWRAF INTL. is a concept-focused studio founded by Andrew Herzog, Carly Ayres, Pedro Sanches, and Nicky Tesla. They are designers, writers, strategists, artists, and creative coders. The studio’s work deals with creative accessibility and interaction, and involves experimenting across a range of mediums and disciplines to create work that challenges expectations.
Jonathan Bobrow
Jonathan Bobrow is an artist, designer, and developer. Strongly informed by the idea that our minds are shaped by the toys and tools we grow up with, and our design spaces are limited by the coordinate systems with which we are most comfortable, his work offers new tools and perspectives to address these limitations.
Maria Stanisheva
Maria Stanisheva is a Bulgarian director and producer of documentary and animated films. Her recent work includes the award-winning document Father (2012). In 2016, she founded ANIMADOCS, a production company that creates media content specializing in education and human rights.
Marquee
Marquee is a premium quality subscription service for arts and culture audiences. It combines the teams of London-based Maidthorn Partners and New York-based TenduTV, and will extend beyond content into commerce to become a complete companion for arts-engaged consumers—packaging rich content together with bookings, mobile payments, and loyalty and social programs.
Micromuseums
Micromuseums is creating a new model for institutions that aligns with a culturally decentralized future. They create vending machine-sized museums that travel to unexpected places, such as the DMV or a hospital waiting room. Each museum explores the small things that play a big part in our world.
Penelope Jagessar Chaffer
Penelope Jagessar Chaffer is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, artist, and environmentalist. She is the first black female director to have been nominated for a British Academy Film Award. She is the director, producer, and technologist behind Toxic Baby (2016) and the Detoxed Project, the world’s first customized interactive documentary app and digital health platform.
Vincent Houzé
Vincent Houzé uses modern computer graphics techniques to create interactive art, performances, and large-scale multimedia installations. His practice centers on dynamic simulations and systems in which simple rules give rise to complexity, richness, and realistic motion.
Wallplay
Wallplay is a matchmaking platform for experiential brand collaborations. It pairs artists, technologists, and creative professionals with brands and agencies for special projects.
WE DESIGNS
WE is a generative creative agency that delivers branded designs, installations, and interactive experiences through a new technology- and research-led approach. As a design practice, WE believes that the future of collaborative work should include engaging design beyond architectural space and into various fields and practices, such as digital media, advertising, software, and design fabrication.
Whitney Falk
Whitney Falk founded the design startup ZZ Driggs with a curious eye and a vision for reimagining how we furnish our homes, offices, and the places we dwell for a new economy. ZZ Driggs is an online marketplace featuring sustainably-produced contemporary furniture available via a subscription platform when you want and for as long as you need.
2016–17 PART TIME MEMBERS
Afripedia
Founded by Teddy Goitom and Senay Berhe, Afripedia is a platform and a visual guide to art, film, photography, fashion, design, music, and contemporary culture from African creatives worldwide.
Alice Sheppard
Alice Sheppard’s work emphasizes the movement that arises from her particular physicality and her curiosity about line, form, and dance as a craft. She is passionate about virtuosity, strength, simplicity, and beauty, and is drawn to moments in which her personal aesthetics collide with societal and cultural norms.
Amani Olu
Amani Olu is an artist, writer, curator, and entrepreneur. He is the founder of Humble Arts Foundation, a 501c3 organization that supports and promotes new photography, as well as Olu & Company, a marketing agency for the arts and beyond. Olu is currently developing a platform for content creators.
Andrea Wolf
Andrea Wolf is a Chilean-born interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York. Her work consists of ongoing research into the relationship between personal memory and cultural practices of remembering. She produces multimedia installations that explore how technology, media, and memory affect and transform each other, creating models of remembrance that are culturally shaped.
The Argus Project
Rich in content, storytelling, and myth, the Argus Project addresses citizen videography, countersurveillance, and police accountability, creating a space that brings together many points of view for a much-needed conversation on racial and economic inequality within our fractured democracy.
BFAMFAPhD
BFAMFAPhD is a collective that works at the intersection of art, technology, and political economy. They create reports, pedagogical tools, and movement syllabi, and at NEW INC select members of the collective will be developing Of Supply Chains, a card game, text, and interactive teaching tool that traces the life cycle of a business project.
Bhold
Bhold, founded by designer Susan Taing, creates engaging, functional design that is rapid prototyped with 3-D printing and beta tested by the first-of-its-kind Bhold Labs community. The company’s unique approach ensures each product is as thoughtfully designed as can be.
Carla Cisno
Carla Cisno is an Italian sound and live media artist who works at the intersection of art, music, design, and technology. Focusing on immersive and interactive projects, she develops animate environmental forms that intentionally confuse touch, hearing, and vision in favor of generating more indeterminate means of perception.
Dahkil Hausif
Dahkil Hausif began his craft as a voiceover talent, filmmaker, writer, and editor while he was a student at Syracuse University. He is the voice of ESPN Film’s 30 for 30 documentary series and has created three award-winning short films with partner Daoud Abeid. Their next feature will be a narrative film shot in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.
Graham Sack
Graham Sack is an award-winning screenwriter, director, and academic whose work focuses on the intersection of science, technology, and storytelling. While at NEW INC he is writing and directing a virtual reality cinematic experience commissioned by NYT VR and Penguin Random House to accompany the release of George Saunders’s debut novel, Lincoln in the Bardo.
Hammerstep
The Hammerstep Initiative aims to elevate dance to a new level, to act as a platform for personal and collective empowerment, and to spark social progress in the process. Hammerstep is an organized arsenal of stage performance, public ambush dance, guerrilla street marketing, community organizing and action, outreach initiatives, and alternative media coverage.
HE+HU
HE+HU is an interdisciplinary art and consulting collective founded by He Wei and Hu Naishu. The duo creates whimsical and participatory art events as a means of facilitating a dialogue between East and West. They work to bridge the two cultures through food, art, and design practices that are deeply rooted in Chinese culture.
Hello Velocity
Hello Velocity is a creative studio whose practice includes marketing, branding, commerce, and art. Coming from both artistic and technical backgrounds, its team understands the creative community, as well as brands’ need to engage with it.
Jason Shin
Jason Shin is the founder of Wonderspaces, a touring arts exhibition. Along with teammates Patrick Charles and Tony Lim, he is creating traveling pop-up museums that make art, tech, and design from cultural hub cities, festivals, and industry conferences accessible and affordable to local audiences for eight weeks at a time. The team is currently based in Phoenix, where they are working on the company’s first exhibition.
Jessica Ann Peavy
Jessica Ann Peavy is a video and performance artist whose work focuses on the art of storytelling and perceptions of truth. Since completing her BFA degree in Film at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University, and her MFA degree at the School of Visual Arts, Peavy has shown her work across the country and internationally.
John Soat
John Soat is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and musician with a passion for elevating the human experience. Inspired by his personal journey with sound and transcendental meditation, Soat leverages technology to allow individuals to be more present with themselves and enhance their immediate experience.
Jojo Abot
Jojo Abot is a Ghanaian multimedia artist exploring sound, visual art, fashion, and literature using technology as a tool for enhancing experience and performance. A nomad and a citizen of the world, Abot is touring America, Europe, and Africa while preparing to officially release her first EP, entitled FYFYA WOTO.
Karolina Ziulkoski
Karolina Ziulkoski is an interactive designer from Porto Alegre, Brazil. She uses technological applications to create immersive experiences that allow for a deeper participatory exchange between stories and audiences.
Katrina Neumann
Katrina Neumann is the founder and executive director of Rate My Artist Residency. Founded in 2013, this growing resource provides a platform for artists worldwide to socially and critically engage in conversation about artist residencies. Neumann is also a visual artist, curator, and the director of Kent Fine Art.
Kira Simon-Kennedy
Kira Simon-Kennedy is the co-founder and executive director of China Residencies, a nonprofit directory of opportunities and resources for artists and the people who host them in mainland China and Hong Kong. She also produces independent documentary films, and occasionally translates French and Mandarin.
Matter-Mind Studio
Matter-Mind translates intelligence emerging from the fields of psychology, anthropology, sociology, and ecology into emotionally supportive products and services. They aim to bridge the gap between the physical, practical, and functional and the psychological, sentimental, and emotional.
Nick Fox-Gieg
Nick Fox-Gieg is an animator and creative technologist based in New York and Toronto. His films have screened worldwide, and his work The Orange (2009) won the jury prize for Best Animated Short at South by Southwest in 2010. He has most recently been working on virtual reality projects at Framestore and Google Creative Lab.
Niio
Niio is the home for new media art. It provides a comprehensive set of professional tools for managing, preserving, securely distributing, and displaying multi-format artistic content, all of which are available for free through a proprietary cloud-based platform.
Noa Raviv
Noa Raviv is an Israeli fashion designer and artist who creates high-end garments that address her unique vision and artistic approach to fashion. She is fascinated by the tensions between beauty and ugliness, harmony and chaos, and tradition and innovation, and constantly seeks the perfect balance between these concepts.
Powrplnt
Powrplnt is a network of artists and creatives who come together to provide free classes for teens on the digital art tools needed to thrive in today’s world. Powrplnt aims to inspire young entrepreneurs and artists, primarily of underserved populations, to utilize available technology to pursue their dreams.
Ramulas Burgess
Ramulas Burgess is an American photographer and cinematographer who uses his craft to represent the dignity, love, contrast, and symmetry of his subjects. Born and raised in Philadelphia and currently residing in Brooklyn, Burgess is a traveler by nature and has followed his photography to Africa, Asia, Europe, the Caribbean, and Central America.
Sacha Wynne
Sacha Wynne is a writer, artistic adventurer, and entrepreneur. Inspired by the potential for artists and culture bearers to transform technology, business innovation, and contemporary workplace culture in human-centered ways, she launched the company WӔRK in 2015.
Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria
Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria is the co-founder and director of operations of Residency Unlimited, an artist-centered organization dedicated to producing customized residency structures to support the creation, presentation, and dissemination of contemporary art.
Sensorium Works
Sensorium Works is a creative studio operating at the intersection of art, new media, and technology. When it’s not producing photographic, cinematic, and virtual reality content for a range of clients and exhibitions, it focuses on independent documentary projects in cooperation with the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism, the Cyborg Foundation, and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.
S U N B U N K E R
S U N B U N K E R is a progressive research-based architecture and design studio offering a broad spectrum of capabilities, utilizing innovative techniques and building systems that are tactile, visceral, pragmatic, and engaging.
Tahir Hemphill
Tahir Hemphill is an award-winning advertising creative and multimedia artist working in interdisciplinary collaboration, thought, and research. His practice investigates the role systems play in the generation of form—he produces art with tools that remove his hand from the process. Currently, Hemphill manages the Hip-Hop Word Count and oversees the Rap Research Lab’s media arts education program.
Victor Vina
Victor is a designer and educator interested in the applications and implications of computational systems in diverse sociocultural contexts. Vina teaches at Pratt Institute and holds an MA from the Royal College of Art. At NEW INC, he is developing Teleobjects, a brand introducing a new generation of everyday connected products for the home.
VolvoxLabs
VolvoxLabs uses dynamic motion graphics, lighting, fabrication, and new media technologies to help artists and brands connect with audiences through creative innovation. From creating high-end cinematic content for music festivals to new media responsive environments, the team combines video, sound, architecture, and visual effects within dynamic custom-built physical spaces.
