Description
8049.9 miles away, a factory runs in the dark. Fully automated, it produces goods 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. With no workers and no interruptions, endless production continues without pause. In this ghost factory, no light is necessary because there are no humans inside. Only systems. Only flow.
The language of our time insists on the new—new speeds, new capacities, new systems. Yet beneath this promise of progress lies a condition of continuous acceleration. Labor no longer resides within the workplace. It is ambient, distributed across infrastructures and environments. Productivity has become a defining characteristic of our very identity, sustained by systems that demand constant engagement while obscuring their own operations.
TOTAL FLOW brings together fifteen artists from NEW INC, the New Museum’s incubator for art, design, and technology, working across five tracks: Art & Code, Extended Realities, Cooperative Studies, Creative Science, and Social Architecture. Addressing these conditions of hyper-acceleration, from urban development and digital labor to ecological collapse, financial abstraction, and algorithmic systems, artists intervene in the infrastructures that shape contemporary life.
Across the showcase, these inexhaustible systems are challenged and satirized. Automated cursor movement exposes productivity as performance. Rest is rendered a luxury. A video game invites players to inhabit the perspective of oil itself. Mealworms metabolize plastic waste. Seaweed becomes a readable bio-interface. Piracy circulates as an alternative economy. AI-generated conversations unfold as infinite, self-sustaining processes. Speculative economies echo cycles of hype and collapse, detaching value from production.
If “new” signals speed and futurity, its apex is the present itself. We are already within TOTAL FLOW.
Curated by Mindy Seu. Produced by Cody Moy. Exhibition Design by Sofia Feguroa