Onassis ONX is leading the way in New York when it comes to XR presentations. Digging deeper through several interviews with founding members from Onassis ONX that had works presented during the first edition of TECHNE at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), it’s clear that this is blossoming into something remarkable. Beneath the cutting-edge tech it’s very human.
Cover: THE VIVID UNKNOWN, by John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio
These humans, as Matthew Niederhauser puts it, are “chasing the dream of sustainable XR presentations!” But what does that dream look like for Onassis ONX? An interview with the artists/founders from the group exhibition during TECHNE shows what this is looking like.
XR presentation: chasing the dream
For the ONX team, the dream centers around three key goals:
- Getting artists paid
- Getting institutions up to speed on how to consistently showcase XR works/new media installations
- Accelerating projects they feel can be distributed in a new manner.
We are trying to get institutions to understand how to consistently support artists through their own infrastructure and having technology on hand so they don’t feel like they’re rebuilding from scratch every single time they want to do a presentation of an XR work or a new media work of some sort of installation.
Matthew Niederhauser
He adds that New York City, with its vibrant creative community, has “an audience hungry for these types of presentations.

A Pivotal Moment for ONX
As 2025 kicks off, Onassis ONX is hitting its stride. Five years into this endeavor, the hybrid XR production and exhibition space is expanding its reach, placing stakeholders in positions to activate projects that were once considered too complex to realize.
Onassis ONX is a platform. A platform built upon relationships, knowledge sharing, space and resource sharing, and the highly dedicated ONX team with support and guidance of the Onassis Foundation. With over 70 members, the collective offers capacity-building activities, seed funding, and international networks. To join ONX is to be seen – not just for your potential but for your ability to bring your project to life. If your project has got some legs, Onassis ONX doors might be able to open for you and your XR creature has the opportunity to sprout wings and maybe, just maybe, fly. But it’s not a guarantee. “Not everyone makes it,” Niederhauser admits.
Still, for those who do, ONX is creating a world where sustainable XR presentations become a reality – not just for creators but for the audiences who are eager to experience them. And I must say, a Brooklyn winter is the perfect time for an immersive, innovative, polyphonic, participatory, ever-unfolding, one of a kind experience like those presented this January at TECHNE.
TECHNE: The First Edition at BAM
The first edition of TECHNE was presented across two NYC festivals: Next Wave and Under the Radar. The program’s theme of TECHNE, according to Program Director Jazia Hammoudi, “derive[s] from ancient Greek, refer[ing] to making both art and craft. The term first came up at Onassis ONX two years ago when we started dreaming about a program that exemplifies what we do with technology–the tool that shapes our craft.” (“Techne” Program Guide).
The collection of works shown represent what Onassis Foundation Director of Culture Afroditi Panagiotakou has identified as their global curatorial direction for 2024-25,
Meeting in the spaces between. Loving with abandon. Listening, caring, feeling. Relationship[s]… the material from which societies, ecosystems, institutions,and even software are made.
TECHNE Program Guide
Each work stands on its own, as does each artist. And all works shown are “asking, in myriad ways, the same question: how do we build relationships today – with each other, with technology, with other species, and with the world?”

Here’s a brief breakdown of the primary four installations:
“The Vivid Unknown” by John Fitzgerald and Godfrey Reggio
A collective experience that uses AI and computer vision to reimagine Godfrey Reggio’s iconic 1982 film, “Koyaanisqatsi,” a story of the earth as an organism and the impact of humanity on the planet, scored by Philip Glass. This research project invited visitors to enter inside an unfolding cacophony of stimuli created through state-of-the-art generative AI visuals and soundscapes synthesized through a dynamic audio diffusion model.
“The Golden Key” by Marc Da Costa and Matthew Niederhauser
An interactive experience that explores the deeper underpinnings of machine learning by creating an encounter between myth, machine, and the collective actions of an audience. “The Golden Key” immerses visitors in the mythical fantasies of an artificially intelligent machine as it composes a never ending story. Winner of the XR Jury Award at SXSW 2024.
“Voices” by Margarita Athanasiou
A video essay weaved around the history of mediumship practices as a tool for female empowerment. Balancing between the poetic, the informative and the magical, this very personal work traces the artist’s own family history within this field, travels through the lives of channeling practitioners across centuries and presents the parallel evolution of new age spirituality and information technologies that frame the body as the ultimate communication device.
“Secret Garden” by Stephanie Dinkins
An immersive web experience and installation illuminating the power and resilience in black women’s stories. Interactive audio vignettes generate a multi-generational narrative that collapses past, present, and future. As audiences wander this spatialized tract, they meet women with stories to tell: surviving a slave boat, growing up on a 1920s Black-owned farm, surviving 9/11, and embodying an AI-powered by African American women.
Alongside this were two works-in-progress by emerging artists:
“RUNWAY” by Christiana Kosiari
A performance where a woman maniacally jogs in place, a practice both for her health and a kind of self-torture with music monitoring the metronome of her steps. The installation invites the audience to step onto a treadmill and aims to create a dance vocabulary where each pose tells a story, and each stumble offers a lesson.
“a {room} of one’s own” by Viola He
An XR performance about making creative work within a confined space, through voice loops, motion capture, and audio-visual fragments in projected scenes, the unnamed protagonist takes us through their adolescence as they navigate sickness, immigration, and a multilingual artistic career.

Humanity Behind the Tech
Speaking with three of the featured artists – Matthew Niederhauser, John Fitzgerald, and Margarita Athanasiou – revealed a common thread: these creators embrace the challenges of new media storytelling because it’s the best way to tell their stories.
Athanasiou, for instance, calls herself a “visualizer of context.” Through her work, she unites archival footage, found materials, and personal history to explore the symbiotic relationship between New Age spirituality and technology. Margarita was one of the first in the ONX AiR Residency in 2019, an artist at the threshold of an emerging organization. In a world where we are saturated by content and information, Margarita has found a pathway that has made it possible for her to bring her research to life in a way like no other time in history would have allowed. She dug into her family history, sparking a curiosity fire about the history of channeling practices.
Niederhauser and Fitzgerald, longtime collaborators, spoke about the roots of TECHNE in NEW INC and ONX. Both emerged out of NEW INC, The New Museum’s interdisciplinary, new media, art, design, science, and technology incubator program and then were studio fellows at ONX and helped design the studio itself. Looking at TECHNE from the outside, you might not realize that the seeds for this exhibition were planted years ago and very much intertwined with NEW INC and the founding of ONX. This is where humanity plays a role, because without the webs of connection carefully sewn over the years of hard work and luck of the draw (being in NYC at the turn of the technology century, studying and working right in the center of it all, tenacity of character +++), none of these creations would be possible.
Reaching for Wonder
And what a shame that would be if these weren’t possible, because these works are truly reaching for wonder. I’m hoping to experience The Golden Key in person, but learning about the lineage of the last four projects Matthew Niederhauser produced with Marc de Costa was exciting; Ekphrasis Parallels, Tulpamancer and now The Golden Key. Each stands independently, yet builds upon one another in innovative ways. Tulpamancer marked a breakthrough in backend technology for the duo, allowing uniquely crafted stories to emerge for individual participants in an intimate, one-on-one format, very intimate and individual. The Golden Key on the other hand, explores togetherness, aiming to unite audiences in collective creation.

This ambitious project asks: how can a large-scale social installation engage with the ATU index (academic database of folktale motifs) to reveal the story archetypes that echo across cultures and bind us together? Asking what stood out the most with this project that speaks through an LLM, Matthew became reflective about how audiences drew upon what was top of mind, which at the time was when the LA fires roared on the other side of the country. At the forefront of our fears is where we draw inspiration, as much as the motifs of love and playful nostalgia that were also part of the recurring narratives people played with. There were guardrails of course – the ATU index has murder, violence, despair – themes The Golden key pointedly avoids. Yet, the project reveals how real-world events seep into our storytelling, processing the unknown in real time. What does that mean for how we create and connect? Perhaps we don’t fully know yet – but it’s happening.
The unknown also takes center stage in John Fitzgerald’s and Godfrey Reggio’s The Vivid Unknown, a piece that asks what happens when we can no longer distinguish ourselves from the systems we create? Watching the 1982 film, “Koyaanisqatsi,” in a packed theater followed by a Q&A with Gabriel Florenz, Founding Artistic Director of Pioneer Works, John Fitzgerald in person and Godfrey Reggio on screen, was a transformative experience. Reggio is a countercultural icon – a beacon example of those that question, that have questioned and continue to question the status quo. John was a film student when he first saw the movie, subsequently ripped the DVD and projected it onto his walls and triggering thoughts that would become the foundation of his artistic career in XR. Godfrey spitfires wisdom like smearing butter on toast. I could barely keep up.
Here’s a few of his unforgettable insights that stuck with me:
“The planet itself is a breathing entity possessed of soul.
The world is literally falling apart and the only answers we have is war”
“All of my films are about technology hidden in plain sight. [I’ve been] single mindedly focusing on this subject because it is the most misunderstood subject in the world. We don’t use tech, we are tech. You can’t live with tech or without it.”
“This film is autodidactic, the audience completes the subject.”
Godfrey Reggio, January 7, 2025.
In that moment, it became crystal clear to me the inspiration and impetus from which “The Vivid Unknown” was born. It’s profoundly moving when you are in a space with artists who’s questions and concerns align with your own.

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The Onassis Foundation might be at the cutting edge of New York’s tech-art scene, but they are celebrating their half century birthday this year and doing so with a bang! This is just one of several large scale presentations that have been brought to life in the last few months and more is on the horizon. When interviewing Matthew Niederhauser he was in the process of helping Pioneer Works get set up with the LED wall that Onassis ONX had used from the Group Hug exhibition at WSA this past fall. Collaboration is a key factor in making the ever elusive LBE distribution through one of a kind installations and exhibitions a reality. The wheels of innovation keep turning, inching ever closer to the dream of sustainable XR presentations.
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