NEWSLETTER
Emphasizing process, artists work with cutting-edge emerging technology at MoMI LAB with the public as witness
Astoria, New York (September 17, 2026) — Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) announces upcoming artists in residence Toni Dove and Sougwen Chung x SCILICET. MoMI LAB’s Artist Residency program supports artists who incorporate emerging technologies into their practice, facilitating accessibility to cutting-edge software, hardware, and expertise for both artists and the public. Running from October 2026 to April 2027, the Residency program invites the public as witness to the creative process itself through on-site studios and artist-led public programming including workshops, panels, and public Q&A sessions that inform project development.
MoMI LAB, where the Residency is hosted, is a free, co-creation space where the public can engage directly with emerging technologies—not only to use them, but to understand, question, and shape how they are transforming everyday life. The LAB includes a public education area featuring interactive stations and a “tinker” space; a classroom space for demonstrations, workshops, and presentations; and two dedicated studios for artists-in-residence. Launched in conjunction with MoMI LAB in June 2026, the Artist Residency program was inaugurated with Rachel Rossin. Her work on spatial computing examines the slippage between virtual and tangible space to build hybrid sites for escape and reflection. In the coming months she will participate in public Q&As about her work and the event Making Art in the Era of Neurotechnology on October 15, featuring a conversation moderated by MoMI’s Curator of Science & Technology Sonia Epstein. Rossin’s Residency concludes in December.
Beginning in October 2026, Toni Dove’s MoMI LAB Residency builds off her work Sunjammer 6: Tale Blown by a Solar Breeze, which exists both as an installation and as a performance. Cameras, projection, spatial audio, and highly directional speakers return Hypatia, the philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer murdered in Alexandria in 415 CE, as a furious ghost ten years in our future. She encounters a NASA engineer developing an off-world solar power station, creating a narrative that connects ancient mathematics to contemporary questions around energy, technological infrastructure, ownership, and the political economies developing around space. During her MoMI Residency, Dove will begin developing The Twisted Gift, the next story within this larger instrument. Centered on Cassandra and the emergence of quantum computing, the project grows directly from Dove’s concurrent residency at the Yale Quantum Institute, where she has been speaking with physicists about what draws them to the field, what kinds of questions drive their research, and what happens to those trajectories when capital enters the picture.
SCILICET is Chung’s artist-led research and experimental studio, and the Residency will support both Chung’s individual practice and the collaborative structure through which their artistic research is being developed. Incubated privately for roughly three years, the research centers on chimeric circuitry and alternative materials for low-level computation, amongst other research tracks. Chung is investigating what happens when biological processes, living organisms, and electronic systems are considered together at the level of circuitry rather than only at the level of interface. The project is consequently as concerned with the values embedded in technological production as it is with the resulting devices: how ideas of care, interdependence, and relationship to living systems might alter the materials and processes through which computation is constructed.
Research, prototyping, collaboration, material testing, and documentation constitute a substantial part of the work itself, yet these processes are often largely invisible once an artwork reaches exhibition form. MoMI will function as a working environment for the early AR, interface, robotics, and performance research of Dove’s The Twisted Gift, allowing the artist to develop the technical system and narrative together while opening portions of that process to audiences before the work reaches a finished state. Working through the Sougwen Chung x SCILICET structure also allows collaborators to participate in the Residency as the research develops. The LAB offers Chung and SCILICET a place to make that developing research legible to the public while it is still unresolved, allowing audiences to encounter experimentation and decision-making as part of an artistic practice rather than only encountering its eventual outcome.
Acknowledgements
The Artist Residency program is supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund's Charles E. Culpeper Arts & Culture program and Agog: The Immersive Media Institute.
About Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI)
MoMI celebrates the history, art, technology, and future of the moving image in all of its forms. Located in Astoria, New York, the Museum presents exhibitions; screenings; discussion programs featuring actors, directors, and creative leaders; and education programs. It houses the nation’s most comprehensive collection of moving image artifacts and screens over 500 films annually. Its exhibitions—including the core exhibition Behind the Screen and The Jim Henson Exhibition—are noted for their integration of material objects, interactive experiences, and audiovisual presentations. For more information about the MoMI, visit movingimage.org.
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Museum of the Moving Image is housed in a building owned by the City of New York and has received significant support from the following public agencies: New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; New York City Council; New York City Economic Development Corporation; New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services; the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York; and the Regional Economic Development Council.