The Long History of New Media: How Artists + Institutions Don’t Just Keep Up
Oct 7, 2026 6:30 PM
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8:00 pm
From oil paint to photography, later video and film, now virtual reality and AI, every generation has embraced new technologies that reshape how art is made, experienced, and understood. Inspired by our Fall 2026 exhibition, Masterpieces: A Virtual Experience of the Museo del Prado, and featuring artists and arts workers Jazia Hammoudi, Ruby J. Thelot, and Wendi Yan, with moderator Rubén Polendo, this conversation will consider how emerging tools and innovative approaches in arts organizations can deepen, rather than replace, our relationship with art.
Free with RSVP.
This program will include live captioning. For accessibility accommodations, including ASL interpretation, please email Public Programs Manager, Jacqueline@powerhousearts.org.
Bios:
Jazia Hammoudi is a curator and XR producer specializing in contemporary art and immersive technologies. She holds degrees in art history and museum studies from the Courtauld Institute of Art (London), and has held positions at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, the Barbican Centre, the Newark Museum, and Artnet. She got her start in XR as studio manager and researcher for Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and has brought projects to SXSW, the Venice Biennale, and Serpentine Galleries.
On the side, Jazia leads art and architecture tours in her native Morocco as part of a larger effort to bring exposure to North African artists.
Ruby Thelot is a designer, artist and cyberethnographer based in New York. He teaches Design and Media Theory at New York University. He is the founder of the award-winning design studio 13101401 inc and the cultural research firm R2S. His work focuses on the interactions between humans and artificial intelligence, images, memory and the implications of being-on-line.
His artwork has been shown internationally in venues such as the National Communication Museum in Melbourne and Interaccess in Toronto. His writing can be found in Artforum, Spike Art Magazine, Artnews, Dazed, and other magazines. His work has been featured in publications like the New Yorker, Wired and Art in America.
He is the author of “Stonemilker” (Nueoi Press, 2022). “A Cyberarchaeology of Checkpoints” (Irrelevant Press, 2023) and “In Defense of Being-On-Line” (Drawdown Books, 2026).
Wendi Yan (b. 1999, Beijing) constructs speculative epistemologies through research-driven worldbuilding and metafictional simulation, using CGI technology, game engines and sculpture to probe the artifice of knowledge. She collaborates with scientists to explore the frontier between imaging and imagining. Yan’s work has been exhibited internationally, including ArtScience Museum Singapore, HEK Basel, Ujazdowski Castle CCA, Hyundai Motorstudio and MU Hybrid Art House. Yan holds an A.B. in History of Science from Princeton University. She was an inaugural Steve Jobs Archive Fellow, the Grand Prix recipient of the 6th VH Award by Hyundai Motor Group, the inaugural resident at A24 Labs, and an Honorary Mention recipient of CERN Collide Stockholm. wendiyan.com
Rubén Polendo is the Founding Artistic Director of Brooklyn-based Theater Mitu. For nearly three decades, his work has challenged inherited ideas of theater-making, bringing performance into collision with installation, architecture, media, and emerging technology. At the center of his arts practice is an ongoing investigation of innovation: how new forms emerge when disciplines, technologies, cultures, and ways of making are brought into dynamic conversation.
Polendo has created more than forty-five original collaborative works with Theater Mitu, presented and developed nationally and internationally. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work exploring AI, robotics, and performance, and Theater Mitu received a special Obie Award recognizing more than 25 years of sustained innovation under his leadership with Co-Artistic Director Justin Nestor.
Polendo’s artistic home is MITU580, Theater Mitu’s interdisciplinary arts space in Gowanus, Brooklyn. Housed in a former glass-recycling warehouse, MITU580 is a laboratory and gathering place where artists across disciplines make, experiment, research, and exchange ideas.
Polendo is a professor at NYU and currently serves as Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts.
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