ONX Studio by Onassis USA and New Museum presents its inaugural showcase at Tribeca Film Festival 2021

ONX Studio, a space for artists working with Extended Reality, is having its inaugural showcase from today, June 9 to June 20, as a creative collaborator of the Tribeca Festival. Brought together by the New Museum's NEW INC and Onassis Foundation USA, the ONX Studio Showcase features new and original work, along with a behind-the-scenes component of the artists' creative process.

New York, NY…ONX Studio, a collaboration of Onassis USA and the New Museum’s NEW INC, is honored to announce ONX Studio Showcase as a creative collaborator of the Tribeca Festival, taking place from June 9 to 20, 2021. Loren Hammonds, VP, Immersive Programming, Senior Programmer, Film & Immersive at Tribeca Festival explains, “We have long embraced the immersive community in New York, and we recognize the incredible power of the ONX Studio Showcase as an important new accelerator in New York. We are excited to kick off what we expect to be a powerful and creative partnership with the organization during this season’s festival.”

Launched in October 2020 amidst the Covid-19 pandemic with the goal of supporting the practices of extended reality artists, ONX Studio distinguishes itself as a hybrid space where work is both created and presented. It functions as an accelerator, a subsidized production studio/workspace, and an exhibition gallery located in the Onassis Gallery of Olympic Tower in Midtown Manhattan. ONX Studio works in close dialogue with the New Museum's cultural incubator NEW INC (New York City) and Onassis Lab (Athens), the Onassis Foundation’s cross-disciplinary incubator that seeks to support innovation and disruption across disciplines. ONX further builds upon the past work of NEW INC, which has attracted top talents who have been exploring storytelling through digital tools including AR, VR, projection mapping, spatial audio, and motion capture.ONX Studio currently supports a cohort of two dozen artists, with a number of them presenting works in progress for the inaugural Studio Showcase. In keeping with the spirit of a “studio space,” the artists are providing a behind-the-scenes component of their creative process to demystify the technology that goes into extended reality work. Each day of the Showcase (June 9-20) will be different from the previous, as projects and installations will rotate and morph. A session may include live motion-capture filming, hybrid live/Virtual Reality (VR) performance, social VR experience, a talk show in VR, or spatial audio experience. Complementing the installations and experiences are several VR stations that will present finished work by ONX artists, previously only seen during limited runs at festivals such as Sundance, Tribeca, and SXSW.

“The ONX Studio is on the cutting edge of everything that is happening in the world of digital media. I am amazed by the incredible scope of these projects. Given how quickly our world is changing, anyone interested in the future of artistic expression should not miss this showcase. The Onassis Foundation is proud to be a part of this great collaboration.”

- Karen Brooks Hopkins, Senior Advisor of the Onassis Foundation

Highlights of ONX Studio Showcase

Kordae Henry and Jeremy Hartley’s IF NOT NOW is a live motion capture featuring a Flex dancer who is rendered into an Afro-Futurist robotic form and cut into a video to be presented for the remainder of the Showcase.
Created by ONX members Matthew Niederhauser and John Fitzgerald and their collaborators Wesley Allsbrook and Elie Zananiri, Metamorphic is a social VR experience where the body becomes a vehicle for expression within majestically drawn worlds.
Using tools such as photogrammetry and volumetric film capture, Reese Donohue presents two new multi-channel video and spatial sound installations created in collaboration with musicians L'Rain and Eartheater.
Sarah Rothberg’s Channel Whatever presents is an interactive live-streamed performance of metaphysical conversations between the artist and curated guests donning VR headsets to embody avatars in a shared virtual world.
Theo Triantafyllidis’ Anti-Gone, part theatre, part Twitch.tv, is a dramatic live-streamed play whose central characters are avatars powered by VR headsets and mocap suits worn by stage actors.
A library of VR works created by ONX artists can be experienced within the lab during open hours.

Tickets will go on sale on May 19th for 50-minute sessions. For more information please visit the ONX Studio website.