The Democracy Machine Celebration

Eyebeam is excited to celebrate and mark the conclusion of The Democracy Machine, a radical experiment created to unlock artist-led invention in the areas of self-governance, technology, and democracy. In the fall of 2021, Eyebeam handed over its flagship residency to artists with the launch of The Democracy Machine. The inaugural cohort created a dynamic, evolving blueprint and strategy to unlock possibilities of collaboration, creation and intervention. The second phase of the program kicked off in 2022 exploring themes of surveillance and decolonization in technology.

The current and final phase of the program includes ten fellow and fellow groups who began their Democracy Machine journey in early 2024 and have spent the last six months with praxis focused exercises in collective power with an emphasis on their positions as artists and technologists developing work within the current moment of escalating global violence. With five New York-based groups and five others spread across Los Angeles, Oakland, Mumbai, and Berlin, the group’s time together culminates with an afternoon at the National Academy of Design on Saturday, September 28, 2024 with the presentation of a collaborative short film. The film will be an original work developed by the cohort, with potential references to previous work from cohort members produced through the duration of the fellowship.

In celebration of the three iterations of the experimental fellowship, Eyebeam will offer a Democracy Machine 101, a reader including academic and editorial writing that grounded the work of the over thirty fellows that went through Democracy Machine. Complementing this offering will be a reference library featuring books from Eyebeam’s diverse universe of mentors, fellows, and supporters that ground themes of care, beauty, decolonization, and future possibilities through technology.

This venue is fully accessible to wheelchairs.

While masks are not required, they are available to all guests and mask-wearing is encouraged. If you are feeling sick or have tested positive for Covid-19, we ask that you please refrain from attending in-person Eyebeam and National Academy of Design programs to care for fellow community members.

The National Academy of Design is located in the Chelsea neighborhood, between 10th and 11th avenues, right by Chelsea Park.

The closest subway stations include the C and E trains at the 23rd St stop, and the 7 Train at the 34 St-Hudson Yards stop.

Eyebeam is grateful for the extraordinary generosity of our funders, board members, and partners to continue supporting artists and projects that build a better and more just world. Eyebeam’s major supporters include the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Arison Arts Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Ford Foundation, Henry Luce Foundation, Jerome Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, New York State Council on the Arts, Omidyar Network, and The O’Grady Foundation.

The in-person gathering is possible through the genenorsity of the National Academy of Design.

→ is made up of eight Iranian feminist artists and activists “invested in cultivating a transnational dialogue, particularly among the people of the Global South, and in solidarity with the uprising of the Iranian peoples, especially womxn, the LGBTQ+, and all marginalized communities.” The anonymous collective collects, labels, and chronicles the ongoing visual evidence of Iranian womxn’s embodied gestures of defiance shared on social media platforms.

→ , featuring artists , , and , is a collective of disabled artists and access workers researching, creating, and archiving at the intersection of disability and computer graphics whose aim is to “crip the tools of digital production towards a more expansive disability aesthetics within media arts and cultural archiving.” The collective cultivates the crip community, specifically those interested in disabled computer graphics, and empowers its participants to identify inaccessibilities and ableist stereotypes.

→ , featuring artists and , is a Bangkok-born Brooklyn-based collaborative artist practice focusing on research that examines and decoded past histories by creating, using code, algorithm, multimedia, and technology to experiment, explore, and define decolonized possibilities. อีเหละเขละขละ is a Thai word that means dispersedly, chaos, unorganized, all over, and non-direction to break free our practices from labeling. Asserting that “for us, tech = tool of expression” and “that we have to hack tech, the art of hacking is very human”; the collective is interested in subversive storytelling using non-dominance sound and visual archives, historical research decoding, and unlearning biases.

→ is an Armenian writer, artist, and researcher born in Yerevan and residing in Glendale, CA. She is an Associate Professor in Technology and Social Justice at ArtCenter College of Design. Her work pursues imaginaries of emerging technology that are grounded in ancestral, SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African), and embodied ways of knowing.

→ is a writer, artist, and guerrilla theorist whose work explores love and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. Having “dreamt themselves into the world via the internet from an early age,” Githere’s work prototypes relationality-as-art through experiments that span social design, community organizing, performance lecturing, travel, and image-making.

→ at Community Tech New York (CTNY), is an artist and educator who believes a classroom should be visceral, safe, and collaborative. At CTNY, Enriquez focuses most of his energy designing & refining Portable Network Kits (PNK) and its accompanying curriculum modules to demystify the basics of wireless networking, local servers, the internet, and solar battery power.

→ is a storyteller who weaves together fact and fiction to create counter-mythologies that interrogate narratives shaping the present. Rahal’s myth world takes the shape of sculptures, performances, films, paintings, installations, video games, and AI programs that he creates by drawing upon sources ranging from local legends to science fiction, rendering scenarios where indeterminate beings emerge from the cracks in our civilization.

→ is a multidisciplinary technologist and creative based in New York City. He works at the intersection of counter-mapping, data visualization, investigative reporting, and oral history to challenge the boundaries of technology, making it more actionable to movement-based organizers and the public.

→ is a Los Angeles-based artist and organizer examining the political nature of technical infrastructure and the embodied connections between people, which are foundations of collective action. Through installation, poetry, performance, and world-building, Veeler exposes technologically mediated processes of individual and collective becoming. In 2023, Veeler founded the Virtual Access Lab as a non-profit research unit of New Art City, in collaboration with Gray Area. The Virtual Access Lab supports accessible digital culture through software, commissions, and digital preservation.

→ is a California-based artist, writer, organizer and coder. They are the author of the book, a 2023 National Book Foundation Science and Literature Award winner.

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