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A Drawing Robot on the Bowery: NEW INC Opens, 2014

In 2014 the New Museum opened the first museum-led incubator for art, design and technology next door at 231 Bowery, where Sougwen Chung began drawing alongside a robot.

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In 2013 the New Museum came up with an idea no museum had tried: an incubator. NEW INC launched in September 2014 at 231 Bowery, the 19th century building next to the museum's SANAA-designed home that once held the homes and studios of James Rosenquist and Tom Wesselmann. Cofounded by director Lisa Phillips and deputy director Karen Wong, with Julia Kaganskiy as its first director, it took 8,000 square feet of shared desks, workshop and presentation space, with Rhizome and Columbia's Studio-X as anchor tenants. The museum was not new to the field: in 2000 it had opened Media Z Lounge, the first dedicated museum space for digital art projects, and in 2003 Rhizome became an affiliate.

The press release of May 20, 2014 named the first 24 full-time members of an inaugural class of 40. They ranged from countersurveillance products (Adam Harvey) and software (Kunal Gupta, Tristan Perich) to information design (Accurat, Paul Soulellis) and installation and performance (Sougwen Chung, Charlie Whitney, Lisa Park). The advisory council included Aaron Koblin, John Maeda, Neri Oxman and Kate Crawford. "We're building an ecosystem," Kaganskiy said. "The community is really what's going to define this initiative."

Chung went on to make the room part of art history. She began collaborating with a drawing robot while at NEW INC in 2015, in works such as Drawing Operations Unit: Generation 1 (Mimicry), where her hand and the machine's arm share a single sheet. The New Museum described the project as exploring "the difference between handmade and machine-made marks as an approach to understanding the interaction between humans and computers." Chung still introduces herself as drawing alongside robotic systems since 2015.

In February 2017 the New Museum and Nokia Bell Labs revived the spirit of E.A.T., the 1960s collaboration of Bell Labs engineers and artists, with a residency for 3 NEW INC members: Chung, Lisa Park and the dance collective HAMMERSTEP. The results opened as Only Human at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City on April 29, 2018. Chung's Omnia per Omnia reimagined "landscape painting as a collaboration between an artist, a robotic swarm, and the dynamic flow of a city." Park's Blooming, a life-size cherry blossom tree, came into full bloom when 2 to 4 visitors held hands, and 2 galleries of E.A.T. archives, including films of 9 Evenings, hung alongside. NEW INC is now in its 13th year.

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