Watching the Future Hatch in the New Museum Incubator

Nicole Yi Messier and Victoria Manganiello would like you to talk to their textile. Just pick up the phone and tell it a story. Nothing elaborate — a simple story will do. The textile in question is a few feet away, 18 fabric panels suspended from the ceiling. While you’re talking, ChatGPT will decode the emotions, which are then displayed as colors on fiber optics running through the fabric. The system is constantly evolving, but depending on the circumstances, red could mean joy, blue might mean frustration, purple could signal sadness.

“Ancient Futures,” as it’s called, is one of 33 installations on view through June 20 at 161 Water Street, a Financial District office tower that’s been recently reborn as a collaborative work space and culture hang. All were created by soon-to-graduate members of New Inc, a “cultural incubator” that’s run by the New Museum and will move into the starkly angular addition designed by Rem Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, next year.

Participants in the yearlong program pay as much as $150 per month to be part of an art/tech community — New Inc is very big on community — that includes mentors and alumni as well as staff and fellow participants. What they get in return has more to do with career guidance than with making art.

Art is what’s on view at Demo2024, New Inc’s latest annual showcase of its members’ work. This is where Messier and Manganiello, who work together in a studio called Craftwork in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, show what they can do with cloth and electronics — materials that suggest physical and digital, fuzzy and hard-edge, past and future. Just down the corridor, Dan Gorelick has set up a listening station where you can hear live air traffic control chatter from Tokyo, New York, Mexico City or Zurich, Switzerland superimposed on algorithmically generated soundscapes — dark and moody compositions punctuated by a highly technical patois.

Around the corner, the Mexico City-born artist and VR developer Alfredo Salazar-Caro is showing 3-D-printed maquettes made of clay — prototypes for fantastical houses that might be constructed simply by pressing “print.” And the architectural designer Jeremy Schipper critiques the gentrification of the East Village with an elaborate maquette surrounding the 1888 Temperance Fountain in Tompkins Square Park. But at New Inc itself, the focus is less on making art than on making it in a way that provides a living for the artist.

“I think the days of, like, starving artists are gone,” New Inc’s director, 34-year-old Salome Asega, said with a laugh. “The rent is due!”