Artifice is a 501(c)(3) supporting emerging artists, researchers, and creative technologists working across material science and new media. Artists develop work in the lab (WHITEBOX) and show it on the stage (BLACKBOX). Together they make the artifacts of science fiction.
Artifacts of creative science and material media. Work that holds still long enough to be studied.
Artifacts of digital narrative and new media. Work that happens in time: image, sound, performance.
Artifice NYC is a curatorial research nonprofit working between creative science and new media fictions. We produce immersive, site-specific showcases and open creative infrastructure (a public archive practitioners build and control), shaping how speculative practice and emerging technology define the way we live.
Most experimental work reaches the public already finished: the process folded away, the false starts cut, the decisions that mattered left out. Artifice shows the rest of it. In Chapters and nodes, work appears while it is still being figured out: in the lab, where the making stays in view (WHITEBOX), and on the stage, where you meet it before anyone explains it (BLACKBOX). We use science fiction as a method, studying the technology already arriving through the futures we imagine for it. A piece might begin as something on a screen and become a room you walk through; the people who made it record that passage in the Artifact Index, deciding what it includes and how it is held.
Artifice comes from the Latin artificium: ars (art) and facere (to make). Every artifact takes craft and research to make. But as AI floods the field, the research behind a work, and the question of who made it, gets stripped away. I trained at an interdisciplinary school and watched experimentation go unrecognized: there was nowhere to show the work, and nowhere to show how it was made. I built Artifice so artists, not the technology, decide how the work of the future gets told.Renaise Kim, Executive Director
Today Artifice runs three public programs: Chapters, nodes, and monthly Meetups. The full form is a two-part showcase: a WHITEBOX lab residency where artists develop the work, then a BLACKBOX stage festival where the public sees it. The Artifact Index records both, so the work survives the night.
Three kinds of funding match the model. Restricted cohort grants pay for a single residency-to-festival cycle. General operating grants keep the organization running them. Documentation grants support the Artifact Index. A funder can back one cohort or the whole organization, and read its return either way.
By 2035, after a decade in which AI reshapes how culture gets made, Artifice is the place where experimental work is developed in public and kept on the record: a body of work researchers, funders, and artists can point to and cite.
Build the finance, reporting, and grants capacity funders require. Prequalify, formalize the board, clean the books.
Secure program underwriting from aligned companies, studios, cultural partners, and technology sponsors.
Activate and acquire paid Members, Supporters, and Patrons through the programs themselves.
Everything runs through one public record. Each artifact is submitted, reviewed, placed in WHITEBOX or BLACKBOX, developed, performed, and documented. One schema, full credit, open and citable once the doors close.
The record that outlasts any single night. Each chapter adds twelve artifacts to a growing public archive: the work, who made it, and how it was developed. It stays open to researchers, funders, and the artists themselves.
index.artificenyc.org →Most experimental art disappears the moment the doors close. The Index keeps it, turning one-night programs into a citable body of work that grows with every chapter and shows what the mission produces.
Renaise Kim · Executive Director
Kassandra Schengili · Vice Chair
Sarah Kim · Treasurer
Ethan Proia · Secretary
Ashley Lee Wong
Sarah Brin
Renaise Kim · Creative Director
Kassandra Schengili · Development Director
Sarah Kim · Communications
Woo Kim · Programs Director
Minsoo Bae · Editor
Andrew Deng · Programs
Yvette Ho · Programs
Effy Feng · Documentation