“While we are not an artist-led institution, we are led by artists,” says Jazia Hammoudi, the program director of Onassis ONX, New York, in a video conversation with STIR. A hybrid space for new media and immersive art, the practice acts as a catalyst for the growth of a global community of interdisciplinary artists. The art-tech incubator uplifts interdisciplinary artists by offering a variety of assistance—from development funding and networking to amplifying creative voices and providing advanced production tools. The studio also provides presentation opportunities through their various partners and collaborators which include the New York University’s Tandon School, Games for Change and Pioneer Works from New York, and global institutions such as International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX) and Digital Museum of Digital Art (DiMoDA). In the interview, Hammoudi and Matthew Niederhauser, the technical director of the New York division, unpack Onassis ONX's evolving ethos, its curatorial and developmental muscle and the ways its physical and conceptual spaces are shaping the future of interdisciplinary practice.

Established in 2020 in partnership between the Onassis Foundation and NEW INC, the studio has bases in New York, United States and Athens, Greece, and responds to the needs of artists working at the forefront of emerging contemporary digital culture. “Contemporary art and creativity are rapidly evolving, and many institutions are not set up to support them,” Hammoudi tells STIR. Onassis ONX seeks to actively contribute to the growing field of immersive, interdisciplinary art, working with an internal cohort to build what Hammoudi calls “expanded future dreaming” for the diverse possibilities of what the world could look like in the future. By catering to the needs of the artist community and providing bespoke curatorial and developmental frameworks, the studio challenges the conventional models of cultural institutions that often follow a structure of categorical isolation, making it difficult for transmedia artists to navigate.

As Hammoudi outlines in the video interview, the studio is “trying to seed a revolution where museums, theatres and immersive spaces start talking to each other” for the larger benefit of the disciplines and the artists instead of following rigid structures that do not evolve with contemporary times. Their studio is foremost a hybrid production space, where artists are provided with state-of-the-art equipment and systems involving spatial sound and motion capture, along with open desks, demo spaces and storage rooms. The space is an integral part of their developmental framework, acting as a tool and a contributor in the making of the multidisciplinary arts. At times, the studio transforms into an exhibition space, especially during their annual showcases, encouraging discourse on emerging art and technology.

In 2024, the studio discovered artists who used game engines to append video game logic while exploring creative territories within the vast virtual world of video gaming. “Video games have specific principles that are consumption-oriented and feed into political biases and hegemonies of power. We were looking at artists who upend these dynamics and use video games to build avenues for conversation, accommodating chaos and open-endedness,” Hammoudi tells STIR. This led to the organisation of Group Hug, a group exhibition of site-specific and large-scale installations, held between September 26 – November 17, 2024, at the Water Street Projects’ exhibition space in New York.

The showcased projects were Feral Metaverse by Theo Triantafyllidis, THE LACK: I KNEW YOUR VOICE BEFORE YOU SPOKE by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and The Endless Forest by Tale of Tales (Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn). Greek artist Triantafyllidis envisioned a world that favours disinhibition and cooperation among users, setting up a medieval catapult as a site-specific gaming rig to prompt players as an integral part of the ‘great machine’. While Berlin and London-based artist Brathwaite-Shirley also focused on player agency, she utilised bespoke dance mats for player input to portray them as mediums of play. New York-based game developers Harvey and Samyn presented an online multiplayer game with the sole objective of peaceful exploration in an endless dreamlike forest as a deer. “Video gaming is turning into one of the most popular forms of entertainment on the planet and has a lot of room for exploration in terms of artistic intent,” says Niederhauser. For a studio that originated as a collaborative environment for artists to work, Group Hug was its most complex and ambitiously conceived undertaking to date, both in terms of curatorial scale and critical reach. Co-curated in partnership with curator and cultural strategist Julia Kaganskiy, Serpentine Galleries’ Arts Technologies division, and New York City-based new media art hub Rhizome, the exhibition attracted significant cross-demographic engagement, drawing audiences of diverse ages and backgrounds through its immersive assemblages.

Onassis ONX takes great care in the curation of its annual Winter Exhibition and Summer Showcase, spotlighting the diversity among the projects that often explore themes of ecology, surrealism and transhumanism. The 2025 Summer Showcase, With All Due Respect, questioned the relationship of humanity with AI and technology through four artworks and a performance, presented using advanced technologies. Held between June 7 – 8, 2025 at their studio space in New York, the exhibition included a self-sustaining simulation of a decaying architectural maze, The Maintenance Game by Peter Burr and Neuro-Cinema: From Synapse to Montage by Graham Sack. The latter was an immersive experience through a multichannel video installation that fused excerpts from NeuroPlastic (2025)—a speculative film written and directed by Sack, with EEG-controlled (electroencephalogram) interactivity.

The studio’s recent showcase at the Tribeca Immersive 2025, In Search of Us, created a space to ask questions and discover truths through a series of immersive installations. In light of the festival’s 14-year legacy, the exhibition focuses on the multiplicity of perspectives that shape our collective identity, addressing some of the most pressing questions of the modern age. Through installations such as New Maqam City by art and culture collective MIPSTERZ, In the Current of Being by Cameron Kostopoulos (immersive creator and founder of storytelling collective Kost), and There Goes Nikki by filmmakers Michele Stephenson and Joe Brewster and their son Idris Brewster, the immersive exhibition ventures into the known and unknown sociocultural and technological landscape of the world through AI, VR and mixed media.

Since its inception, Onassis ONX has embraced the porous edges of culture, technology, and space, positioning itself as both incubator and interlocutor for the artists shaping the narratives of the future. Anchored by a versatile studio space, its curatorial and developmental frameworks invite and propagate bold, experimental creations while challenging disciplinary silos that categorise and often isolate hybrid endeavours. Through programmes and exhibitions that traverse all that is political, technological, transdisciplinary and speculative, Onassis ONX serves as a site of dialogue and agency on immersive design and art. In doing so, it asserts that the future of cultural institutions lies in cultivating physical and conceptual spaces that can accommodate emerging new worlds, imagined and realised.