Eyebeam, 185 Wythe Avenue, New York, NY (2025)

06/30/2025

📢We are thrilled to let you know that Sheetal Prajapati, has joined Eyebeam as our Interim Executive Director. She begins Tuesday, July 1.
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🌟An educator, artist, and advisor with more than 20 years of experience in the field, Sheetal comes to us as a friend and champion of Eyebeam. Over the past eight months, she has worked closely with the Board and Staff in a consulting capacity and provided leadership with a depth of continuity, clarity, and care.
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Sheetal is uniquely positioned to purposefully guide us through this exciting period of transformation, as she advised peer organizations including NEW INC. and Creative Capital and provided organizational transition through interim leadership. Additionally, we are tremendously excited to benefit from her expertise in artist initiatives, programming, and engagement, as we reorient our community engagement and public programming.
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As we gear up to shape what we collectively envision what leadership looks like at Eyebeam, Sheetal will continue overseeing the ongoing community-design initiative work that we recently began with FLOX, to re-engage with you, our community, more purposefully and as we respond to opportunities and systemic challenges facing the broader art and technology community in this moment, the height of technofascism.
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As we continue together in this new chapter, you have our assurance that, at Eyebeam, we will always support and nourish experimentation, innovation, and creativity. Please feel free to write to us at eyebeamnyc@pm.me, and join us on eyebeam.org for the full message or via the link in bio.

🖼️Caption: Portrait of Sheetal Prajapati, Eyebeam’s new Interim Executive Director.

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05/29/2025

We are tremendously excited to share with you the next step in a new chapter at . As we wrote to you in Feed last month, we are in a moment of reflection and introspection. We want to listen and build upon what we have heard from many of you over the last few years.
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And while we will always invest in artists who create with tech and explore how it influences the way we live now, we are interested in how Eyebeam might shift and adapt to our community’s concerns, issues, and ideas.
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We recently kicked off a community listening and engagement campaign with , a community design and strategy studio rooted in Black feminist theory, Afrofuturism, and social justice. The purpose of this engagement was to assist us in alumni and community listening to ensure that Eyebeam’s next chapter is supportive, caring, nourishing, and explores the question, “How shall we move forward together?”
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As of this post, 15% of our artists and alumni network have been sent a community mapping survey, which participants recently completed; and FLOX studio has begun one-on-one interviews with alumni. This process will culminate in a Town Hall hosted in New York City.
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Art and invention can make a better world, and we will continue to center you, our community, in everything we do. We are committed to communication and transparency, and we welcome your questions, concerns, and ideas. Please feel free to write to us at eyebeamnyc@pm.me.
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Join us on eyebeam.org for the full message or via the link in bio.

Caption: Sloan Leo Cowan of FLOX Studio gathers with Eyebeam and community, photo credit: .legge

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05/22/2025

Eyebeam, along with 540 nonprofit arts organizations, and counting, received a termination letter notifying us that our 2025 NEA grants were cancelled for falling outside the federal administration’s new funding priorities.
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We face a challenging moment; the tremendous loss in funding across the field has dire implications for the livelihood of artists and the cultural workers who rely on federal grants to continue their work. Like all of our peers in this field, we are energized to proceed in upholding our mission to serve artists and their visions of this present moment and of future possibilities.
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For 25 years, Eyebeam has been a home for artists working at the edge of technology. We were one of the first organizations dedicated to supporting innovative artists in experimental settings. We will keep building on that legacy, even through this volatile period. We could not be where we are today without you, our community members, especially artists and technologists who’ve shaped our organization through their imagination and innovation. In this moment of change and uncertainty, we ask all of you to please consider directly supporting artists whose livelihoods are made even more vulnerable in this landscape.
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As Eyebeam begins connecting with broader efforts in the arts community, here’s how you can take part:
👉If you’re an artist working with tech who’s anticipating or experiencing loss of financial and/or programmatic support because of NEA’s granting shifts, we want to hear your story. You can email us at eyebeamnyc@pm.me.
👉If you’re an arts org centering artists and resonate with this message, we welcome your perspective and collaboration. Reach out to us at eyebeamnyc@pm.me
👉If you’re part of an arts org whose federal funding was also cut, we encourage you to add your org to this live-tracked list created by artist Annie Dorsen, (bit.ly/NEAgrant_tracker). This live archive continues to demonstrate the scale of loss of funding in the arts across the country.
👉 If you’re in a position to support Eyebeam’s efforts through a donation, you can send a fully tax-deductible gift via eyebeam.org/support.

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03/13/2025

“My time at Eyebeam has been glorious, captivating, consuming, and profound. After spending nearly a third of my life involved with the organization in one capacity or another, the last ten as executive director, I am moving on,” writes Roddy Schrock in a special message now on eyebeam.org. (Link in bio).
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“I am happy to share that I will be moving into a new venture, in a new but related field: holistic healing. I will soon focus my learnings from two decades of co-creation with artists to be in service of building health, working to resolve issues which arise from the unique stresses of nurturing creativity inside of capitalism.”
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“It has been an honor and a joy to work with the Eyebeam community in helping build the organization, particularly over this last decade. At the core of it all is a commitment to the direct support and platforming of artists’ ideas, typically extraordinarily prescient, which challenge our conception of what could be imagined and created, not only what currently exists. I hold the conviction that their work in helping us all evaluate our relationship to technology, thereby each other, is deeply important and deserving of significant support and awareness.”
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Read Roddy’s full message on eyebeam.org, along with a special message from our Chair and Vice Chair, Board of Directors.
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Slide 1, Photo: Whitney Legge

Slide 2, quote by Roddy Schrock, “At the end of June, I’ll be moving on from Eyebeam after 10 years as executive director. It has been glorious, captivating, consuming, and profound. And I am so proud of the work that we accomplished.”
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02/27/2025

Last month, Eyebeam organized a gathering in collaboration with the Department of Transformation about the present and future possibilities of AI and art-making. Ways of Relating / Artifice & Intelligence was an experimental and experiential one-day opportunity to uncover probing and profound questions for the field. Here are some of the ideas shared by an exciting group of artists, writers and thinkers:

Quote 1: “Two things may be happening at the same time and one is the extension of humanness to forms of artificially produced humans and the withdrawal of participation in the human from categories of humans.” - McKenzie Wark, .

Quote 2: “What question is AI the answer for and what problem is AI the solution to? AI is a lens that shows us what we value and what we don’t because the presumption that labor can be automated in a particular way often requires implicit devaluation of that labor. ” - Jacob Gaboury.

🖼️All photography courtesy of Whitney Legge, .legge.

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02/27/2025

Last month, Eyebeam organized a gathering in collaboration with the Department of Transformation about the present and future possibilities of AI and art-making. Ways of Relating / Artifice & Intelligence was an experimental and experiential one-day opportunity to uncover probing and profound questions for the field. Here are some of the ideas shared by an exciting group of artists, writers and thinkers:

Quote 1: “I’m working on some projects now and people ask, ‘What is it going to be?’ And it’s about six months out and I don’t know. It’s an experiment. Come for the ride. The ride is scary for people and how do we stick with the ride as opposed to going for the outcome, which is the corporate capital version of the thing.” - Eyebeam alum Stephanie Dinkins, .studio, .dinkins.

Quote 2: “We need to kill the idea of the expert. AI is all about the evolution of consciousness, the evolution of the human. All those ideas are epistemological ideas that are grounded in a very specific historical time, tied to a very specific form of governance and extraction.” - Luciana Parisi.

🖼️All photography courtesy of Whitney Legge, .legge.

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02/27/2025

Last month, Eyebeam organized a gathering in collaboration with the Department of Transformation about the present and future possibilities of AI and art-making. Ways of Relating / Artifice & Intelligence was an experimental and experiential one-day opportunity to uncover probing and profound questions for the field. Here are some of the ideas shared by an exciting group of artists, writers and thinkers:

Quote 1: “What makes technology profound and meaningful is that it’s a way for us to access human knowledge. It’s not the ‘transformer’ architecture that enables us to predict the next sentence that makes it cool. It’s that it allows me to ask questions that I care about of ‘knowledge’ that has existed this whole time, but it’s not been accessible to me.” - Eyebeam alum Surya Mattu,

Quote 2: “One thing that I am personally doing is tapping into the idea of ancestral intelligence, but also what liability, what gifts that we have inherited? There’s so much wisdom and knowledge because our ancestors have been through uncertain times before.” - Eyebeam alum Valencia James,

🖼️All photography courtesy of Whitney Legge, .legge.

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10/24/2024

🎙️Today’s continuation of Eyebeam's outgoing oral historian Cassie Packard's interview with Democracy Machine alum, Mashinka Firunts Hakopian
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Continued…Packard: So much hinges on challenging the neutrality ascribed to these forms of knowledge production and distribution. [Could you] speak a bit about the project you’re working on during the fellowship [Bazhak Nayogh (One Who Looks at the Cup)] and the ways in which it knits together ancestral and artificial intelligence?

Hakopian: The project fits within a larger body of work exploring ancestral intelligence. I approach ancestral intelligence as [embodied] ways of knowing, transgenerationally transmitted, and often drawn from SWANA cultural histories—ways of knowing that are underrepresented, undervalued, and typically confined to obsolescence within dominant AI discourses.

In the rhetoric of hyper-novelty that I see around emerging technologies, we are always implicitly being asked to accept what came before as obsolescent. And “what came before” is tacitly understood as non-Western, Indigenous, or otherwise underrepresented ways of knowing. Ancestral intelligence intervenes in that formation, refuses hyper-novelty, and insists on an expanded view of technology. What happens, for example, when we recognize tasseography (coffee ground reading) as a predictive technology?

In the context of ‘One Who Looks at the Cup’, I’m thinking about what it means to model AI that predicts multilingual, collectively authored futures that are rooted in ancestral pasts. This multidisciplinary artwork and community data project centers practices of prediction that come from SWANA coffee ground readings, a divination method used for hundreds of years that predicts the future by detecting visual patterns in coffee grounds.

As the sociologist Carina Karapetian Giorgi writes, this is an intimate form of knowledge exchange that takes place in domestic environments rather than institutional settings. Giorgi also writes that this form of divination was matrilineally transmitted as a means to imagine survival within Armenian diasporic communities after the Armenian Genocide in 1915.

🖇️ read more @ eyebeam.org/with-mashinka-firunts-hakopian

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10/23/2024

🔊 Today, we continue the serialization of Eyebeam oral historian Cassie Packard’s interview with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian.
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Cont’d…Hakopian: The writing project you mentioned [The Institute for Other Intelligences] (X Artists’ Books/ X Topics Series, 2022)] is a quasi-quasi-scholarly artist’s book. The text draws from critical media studies and contemporary reporting around AI to present a speculative manual for training feminist bots. It was produced in collaboration with a number of people, including Fernando Diaz, a computer scientist who illustrated it with speculative diagrams, designed by Becca Lofchie Studio and edited by Ana Iwataki, and Anuradha Vikram.

I later adapted the book into a lecture performance [Dispatches from the Institute for Other Intelligences (2023)], with a musical score by electronic composer Lara Sarkissian, that was presented at the Centre Pompidou and the New Museum. The project offers a data feminist critique of AI as a “view from nowhere,” premised on the question, “How do we deploy what we know if not from within a body?”

My lecture performance practice, which originated in collaboration with Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson as part of the collective Research Service, grew out of reflecting on—and wanting to intervene in—the presumed neutrality of the lecture as a technology. This practice focuses on embodied and practice-based forms of research, particularly those that emerge in community contexts. The project I’m doing as part of my Eyebeam Fellowship is working within that model, as well.

🖇️ read more @ eyebeam.org/with-mashinka-firunts-hakopian.

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10/22/2024

This week, we are serializing outgoing Eyebeam oral historian Cassie Packard's interview with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, a member of the 2024 Democracy Machine cohort. Read an excerpt below.
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Packard: Between your curatorial projects, your scholarly and experimental writing, and your performance practice, you are working in a lot of modes. What’s the impulse behind this heterogeneity, and how does it feed your larger project?

Hakopian: These projects share a desire to foreground knowledge systems and technologies of knowing that open up otherwise occluded imaginaries. I did my dissertation at University of Pennsylvania on the lecture performance as an artist-activist tool that was used in the 1970s by artists organizing against the War in Vietnam and advocating for more equitable conditions within museums.

Hakopian: The strategies they used were similar to those deployed now by activists who are doing the crucial work of calling for a Free Palestine — like the activist pedagogies of the demonstrators who stunningly shuttered MoMA on February 10th by staging a sit-in and distributing informational pamphlets. They were shutting down art spaces and transforming them into spaces of knowledge-making in the service of collective resistance.

Hakopian: In one exemplary instance, the artists Faith Ringgold and Tom Lloyd led an unauthorized lecture tour of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969, highlighting the histories of colonialism that undergirded the modernist galleries and that led to the formation of Western art history as a corollary of colonial violence and extraction.
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🖇️ Catch more of the interview @ eyebeam.org/with-mashinka-firunts-hakopian

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10/10/2024

💾 “ I want to find a personal approach to thinking about our technologized society and express how technology has changed the ways we are living. I’m particularly interested in the ways that personal and collective memory reside in technological infrastructure, and how new technologies affect our day-to-day lives, including the emotional connections we make,” Eyebeam alum artist and 5th VH award finalist HE Zike shares with art writer and reviews editor at ‘Frieze,’ Cassie Packard.
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“I titled ‘Random Access’ after a mode of reading and writing data where you can access any datum in an equal amount of time. The video is based on my research into the cloud and its infrastructures, as well as my personal experience. It’s set in Guiyang, a southwest city of China, a rising data capital, and my hometown. In the fictional narrative, which was partly inspired by the story of my parents and the nature of the city, the datacenter breaks down.”
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HE Zike’s video works, ‘Random Access’ (2023) and ‘Saros’ (2020 - 2022), are on view in the 2024 Art Spectrum ‘Dream Screen’ exhibition at the Leeum Museum of Art, until December 29th. Curated by Hyo Gyoung Jeon (Curator, Leeum Museum of Art), Jiwon Yu (Guest Curator), and Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanjia.
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To read the interview in its entirety, 🖇️eyebeam.org/with-he-zike🖇
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🖼️ Caption slide 1: Portrait of Eyebeam alum artist 2022-2023, HE Zike. Courtesy of the artist; 🖼️ Caption slide 3 and slide 4: HE Zike, ‘RANDOM ACCESS 乱码城市,’ 2023. Still from Video. 14 Minutes, 20 Seconds. Supported by the 5th VH AWARD, and presented by the Hyundai ArtLab, Hyundai Motor Group. © 2023 HE Zike. Courtesy of the artist.

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10/09/2024

📺 “I wanted to revisit it to explore my own memory of martial law. I reshot the series [Space Warriors, broadcasted by a government TV channel in Taiwan for a short time in the final years of martial law in the 1980s] and introduced abstraction, chaos, overlaid imagery, and erotic scenes in an effort to break the show’s nationalist and patriarchal logics,” Eyebeam alum artist and filmmaker Su Hui-Yu shares with our oral historian Cassie Packard.
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🔮 In December 2022, Su Hui-Yu participated in an Eyebeam-hosted online artist panel, “Hacking the Crystal Ball” with Taiwanese artists Eyebeam alum 2020-2021 Xin Xin and guest panelist and curator Lee Tzu-Tung, discussing art and technology in the matters of Taiwanese Sovereignty. Su drew on his personal experience from the “White Terror”, a time in Taiwan, during the martial law period, similar to the Red Scare in the U.S., when the state launched a campaign that repressed freedom of expression, violated basic human rights, and forced policies of assimilation waged on the Indigenous peoples of the land. Su describes his practice as boundary-crossing explorations that adapt martial-law era national media into Queer-feminist cinematic reinterpretations. In examining a chauvinist past, he posits that “the duty of the artist is not to offer an answer or solution [but] to create different perspectives on—or dimensions to—experiences, rather than direct people.”
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To read the interview in its entirety, 🖇️ eyebeam.org/with-su-hui-yu 🖇
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🖼️ Caption slide 1: Portrait of Eyebeam alum artist 2022-2023, Su Hui-Yu. Courtesy of the artist; 🖼️ Caption slide 3 and slide 4: Su Hui-Yu, ‘The Space Warriors and the Digigrave,’ 2023. Video installation, website, and Minecraft server. 7 Minutes, 10 Seconds. Supported by the 5th VH AWARD, and presented by the Hyundai ArtLab, .artlab, Hyundai Motor Group. ©2023 Su Hui-Yu. Courtesy of the artist.

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