NEW INC and Rhizome’s Art & Code program treats software as a cultural subject as much as a creative tool.
- Its 13th cohort brings artists and practitioners into a year of mentorship.
- Participants examine platforms, infrastructure, games, labor, and AI-generated code.
- The program values critical questions over technical novelty alone.
NEW INC and Rhizome have announced the 13th year of their Art & Code program, a year-long track for artists and creative practitioners who use technology and the internet as subjects as well as tools. The cohort will meet monthly with mentor Bri Griffin and develop work toward NEW INC’s DEMO festival in June.
That structure sounds familiar: mentorship, meetings, a final exhibition. The more interesting detail is the program’s premise. Art & Code is not presented as a technical accelerator or a course in digital production. It is for people who critically engage with technology, which leaves room for software to become a social system, an archive, a game, a way of organizing attention, or a problem to be resisted.
Art and Code as Social Infrastructure
Code as material, not just method
The new cohort includes artists, software designers, game developers, and collectives. Alice Yuan Zhang works across digital and physical space, building communal structures and running Plot 田, a Los Angeles project that combines public gatherings with a custom members-only platform. Ashton Reeder’s source list is less a portfolio description than a map of contemporary infrastructure: data centers, bot farms, lithium mines, border walls, cell phones, autonomous weapons, and digital twins. Celine Nguyen writes about how intellectual and artistic work is shaped by economic and technological systems.
These practices do not share a single aesthetic. Their common ground is a willingness to treat technology as something made by people and therefore open to inspection. A platform has a politics. An interface has assumptions. A game teaches its rules before a player has decided whether to accept them.
The program’s previous year made that position unusually explicit. The Year 12 cohort responded to the spread of “vibe coding,” the loose term for using AI systems to generate software through natural-language prompts, in an online exhibition called Edge Cases. Rhizome’s accompanying essay described the projects through several meanings of code: language, social rules, creative medium, and secret message.
What Comes After the Prompt
One project by Shakti Mb used a landing page for an essay film about online bot culture. Karlie Zhao made a website that could be played like an instrument, with visitors dragging lines of a poem across the screen. The works did not settle the question of whether AI changes the value of code. They made the question harder to avoid.
The problem of visible effort
The essay’s sharpest idea came from Nolen Royalty’s phrase “legibility of effort.” When generated code and generated images can look polished at a glance, viewers lose an old shortcut for judging how something came into being. Difficulty is no longer visible in the object itself, and technical fluency is no guarantee of intention.
That problem gives the new cohort’s program a useful tension. NEW INC is offering community, resources, and a path to public presentation, but the work is not valuable merely because it is made with advanced tools. The participants’ biographies point toward questions about surveillance, collective life, cultural labor, play, security, and the stories embedded in games. Code is the medium through which those questions can become tangible.
The announcement does not say what the cohort will produce, and it would be premature to predict the results. For now, the important development is institutional rather than technological: a museum-affiliated incubator is giving artists time and a public framework to examine what software does to culture, including the systems that now help produce software itself.
