TRANSFER

New Publications 📚𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐒𝐅𝐄𝐑 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐬 What happens when the apps and platforms that host our culture disappear? These two foundational research publications from the TRANSFER Data Trust that tackle that very question. ​​𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐒𝐅𝐄𝐑 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐬𝐭 is a cooperative led by artists who are taking preservation into their own hands—building the tools and knowledge to ensure that the last decade of digital art survives the next century. By leveraging decentralized storage and encryption, TRANSFER’s model offers a new approach to media art valuation, conservation, and governance. Gray Area is incubating this initiative, which is making great strides in the preservation of virtual worlds and generative art. 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 #𝟏: 𝐔𝐩𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦 𝐨𝐟 𝐎𝐛𝐬𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞 This essay by Eddy Colloton documents the strategy and outcomes of TRANSFER’s conservation Care Team. It introduces the concept of conservation “upstream” from the museum—working directly with artists in their studios before works enter institutional collections—and presents 5 detailed case studies showing why this approach is urgently needed. The essay traces how platforms disappear, companies restructure, and works that are only a few years old face insurmountable technical barriers. 𝐑𝐞𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 #𝟐: 𝐋𝐢𝐧𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐀𝐫𝐭 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐑𝐞𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐝𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐓𝐢𝐦𝐞-𝐁𝐚𝐬𝐞𝐝 𝐌𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐚 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐌𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐚 A 38-page technical report, produced by ontology and data modelling specialist Rae Egan, that examines the alignment between the Linked.art Data Model and the descriptive metadata requirements for documenting time-based media artworks within TRANSFER’s decentralized archive. It is a rigorous analysis of how existing cultural heritage metadata standards fall short for time-based media, and proposes a vocabulary to address those gaps. These two reports cumulate the second year of fieldwork conducted by the TRANSFER Data Trust, supported by Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW), Filecoin Foundation, GSR Foundation, and Gray Area. Read them online now at (link in bio).

Congratulations to @leocastaneda__ on a stunning showing of ‘Levels & Bosses’ at the @whitneymuseum biennial! We love seeing video games in the museum spotlight 🌟 ‘Levels & Bosses: Camoflux Mangrove Biome’ is also on view in TRANSFER Dowload: AliveNET @nguyenwahedart through March 19th. Come by the gallery for an immersive preview and go experinece the game on Whitney Artport and play in the biennial! 🎮 Protip: 1.5 hours of gameplay on view at the museum, gamers of all ages can fully explore Castañeda’s masterpiece. nguyenwahed.com whitney.org/exhibitions/camoflux-recall-grotto

𝐸𝓍𝓉𝑒𝓃𝒹𝑒𝒹 until March 19th: TRANSFER Download: AliveNET at @nguyenwahedart an immersive exhibition exploring the fragile space of perception between human and machine. Featuring @carlagannis @lorna.mills @hotemogf @yoshisodeoka @huntrezz @antigonibunny @gifnugget @_menkman @fabiolalariosm @leocastaneda__ Tuesday - Saturday 2-6PM Through March 19th Pictured Artworks 📸 Yoshi Sodeoka – Isolux 7200 (2026) Lorna Mills – Petting Zoo: THUNDERBONE (2026) Fabiola Larios – Wild Wired World (2024) Rosa Menkman – Refractions (2026) Carla Gannis – Model of Me (2026) Eva Papamargariti – Liminal Beings (2019) Huntrezz Janos & Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou – DENTAXUVIA Resisters (2026) Leo Castañeda – Levels & Bosses: Camoflux Mangrove Biome (2024) Chia Amisola – Arkipelago (Arc 1) (2026)

Thank you to everyone who joined us last week for the opening night of ‘TRANSFER Download: AliveNET’ at @nguyenwahedart . Gallery hours are Tuesday - Saturday from 2-6PM through March 1st Special thanks to our photographer 📸@deskarovill

❤️‍🔥ON VIEW through March 1st 𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙉𝙎𝙁𝙀𝙍 𝘿𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙡𝙤𝙖𝙙: 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙉𝙀𝙏 at @nguyenwahedart featuring a new Animated GIF installation ‘Petting Zoo: THUNDERBONE’ (2026) from Lorna Mills @lorna.mills With elements culled from a variety of online sources, her moving image collages are in a state of constant oscillation; her frenetic looped animated GIFs are a reflection of the humor and politics of our global public commons, the internet. In her ongoing ‘Petting Zoo’ series, Mills captures ‘petting’ in all its manifestations: sometimes light, sometimes heavy, sometimes soothing, sometimes frenzied. ‘Petting Zoo: THUNDERBONE’ reflects on the squeeze of our current moment with flowing hot lava, sloppy ICE agents, T-rex strippers, frenetic kissing, fighter jets, and suspicious creatures of all sorts. Lorna Mills is a Canadian new media artist known for her digital animations, videos, and GIFs, regarded as a pioneer of net.art since the 1990s. Her practice has included obsessive Ilfochrome printing, obsessive painting, obsessive super 8 film & video, and obsessive on-line animated GIFs incorporated into restrained off-line installation work. Past exhibitions include Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum, NY, Yellowwhirlaway at the Museum of the Moving Image, NY and The Great Code at TRANSFER, NY, and Sea Change at the Pérez Art Museum Miami. For the month of March, 2016, her work Mountain Light/Time was displayed in Times Square, NYC, every night as part of the Midnight Moment program. This work is available for acquisition through the gallery, send inquiries to [email protected]. January 16 - March 1 Nguyen Wahed Gallery 504 E 12th St, 10009 New York Tuesday - Saturday 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM 🔗 link in bio.

𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙉𝙎𝙁𝙀𝙍 𝘿𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙡𝙤𝙖𝙙: 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙉𝙀𝙏 opens on January 16th from 5-8PM at @nguyenwahedart featuring ‘Refractions’ (2026) from Rosa Menkman @_menkman debuting simultaneously in Croatia @drugomore in ‘Image Remains’ Menkman’s solo exhibition. Drawing on Paul Klee’s iconic 1920 painting ‘Angelus Novus’ and Walter Benjamin’s philosophical interpretation of the work as the “Angel of History,” Rosa Menkman explores what happens to images in today’s digital environment as they are continuously copied, processed, fragmented, and circulated across platforms and algorithms. In ‘Refractions’ the Angel is on a mission to learn from a Cyclops vision (a vision of future demise). But once she enters its timeline, optical vision fails and orientation collapses. What she captures are vectors, render objects, and machine-to-machine standards that appear as ruin. A glitch that is not an error in her dataset, but her lack of protocol. Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and theorist who focuses on visual artifacts created by accidents in both analogue and digital media. In 2011 Menkman released The Glitch Moment/um with the Institute of Network Cultures. Her work appears in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum, MOTI and numerous private collections. In 2019, Rosa won the Collide Arts at CERN Barcelona award. Her recent exhibitions include Still Processing at NXT Museum (Amsterdam, NL), Digital Witness at LACMA ( Los Angeles, CA), and Electric Op at Buffalo AKG Museum (Buffalo, NY). This work is showing for the first time in NYC, and is available for acquisition through the gallery, send inquiries to [email protected]. Opening Reception January 16 5-8PM at Nguyen Wahed Gallery RSVP 🔗 link in bio.

𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙉𝙎𝙁𝙀𝙍 𝘿𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙡𝙤𝙖𝙙: 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙉𝙀𝙏 opens on January 16th from 5-8PM at @nguyenwahedart featuring ‘Isolux 7200’ by Yoshi Sodeoka @yoshisodeoka ‘Isolux 7200’ is a new work in an ongoing series that uses mathematical structures drawn from natural systems to choreograph density, motion, and light through daily, seasonal and celestial cycles.  The series offers a meditation on time, migration, and energy – each structured by constants that remain just out of reach. Yoshi Sodeoka is an artist working across video, print, and digital media, with a practice that includes immersive video installation. His work explores the boundaries between perception, abstraction, and systems logic—drawing from experimental music culture and the structural language of math and digital technology. His aesthetic often incorporates diagrammatic overlays—lines, vectors, symbolic forms—that evoke how machines attempt to read the world, while embracing ambiguity and contradiction. The result is a visual language that feels both engineered and intuitive. His projects span fine art, editorial, and music contexts. He has collaborated with musicians such as Metallica, Psychic TV, Tame Impala, Oneohtrix Point Never, Beck, The Presets, and Max Cooper. Sodeoka’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Centre Pompidou, Tate Britain, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Deitch Projects, La Gaîté Lyrique, the Museum of the Moving Image, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and Laforet Museum Harajuku. His work is in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of the Moving Image, and SFMOMA. This work is available for acquisition through the gallery, send inquiries to [email protected]. Opening Reception January 16 5-8PM at Nguyen Wahed Gallery RSVP 🔗 link in bio.

𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙉𝙎𝙁𝙀𝙍 𝘿𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙡𝙤𝙖𝙙: 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙉𝙀𝙏 opens on January 16th from 5-8PM at @nguyenwahedart featuring ‘Model of Me’ (2026) by Carla Gannis @carlagannis with sound design by R. Luke Dubois @rlukedubois ‘Model of Me’ is a surreal, speculative encounter between the artist’s human self and her AI alter ego, C.A.R.L.A. G.A.N. (Cross-platform Avatar for Recursive Life Action Generative Adversarial Network). Set within a virtual world populated by Gannis’ physical sculptures, assemblages and wearables, an experiential journey unfolds through perception, embodiment, and technological misrecognition. Throughout the piece, C.A.R.L.A. is introduced to a series of sensory “upgrades” by her human counterpart via speculative headsets. Each device offers access to a human sense—touch, smell, sight, sound, gravity—but these encounters quickly reveal the limits of anthropocentric perception. ‘Model of Me’ reflects on how digital systems perceive and homogenize human experience, the hubris embedded in privileging our own senses, and the quiet liberation of refusing technological beautification or correction. It asks what it means to be seen by a system that can learn everything—except what it feels like to live, age, and let go. Carla Gannis creates artwork with a commitment to experimentation. Throughout her career, she has worked with an array of mediums and tools, including drawing, painting, video, interactivity, extended reality, and machine learning models. Gannis’ work has been exhibited globally in exhibitions, screenings, and internet projects since the 90s. Her recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Ro2 Gallery (Dallas, TX), Telematic Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Ryan Lee Gallery (NY, NY), and Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art (Charleston, SC) and commissions from the Pérez Art Museum Miami (Miami, FL), and The Whitney Museum of American Art (NY, NY). This work is debuting as a 3-channel installation, with a longer cinematic single-channel video forthcoming in 2026, and is available for acquisition through the gallery–send inquiries to [email protected]. Opening Reception January 16 5-8PM at Nguyen Wahed Gallery

𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙉𝙎𝙁𝙀𝙍 𝘿𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙡𝙤𝙖𝙙: 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙉𝙀𝙏 opens on January 16th from 5-8PM at @nguyenwahedart featuring ‘DENTAXUVIA Resister’ (2026) by Huntrezz Janos @huntrezz & Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou @antigonibunny ‘DENTAXUVIA’ is an expanded reality (XR) project, by Los Angeles based artists Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou and Huntrezz Janos, that blends performance, games, augmented reality, interactive sculptures, and poetry, complicating the boundaries between the tangible and the intangible. By blending the physical and digital, human and non-human, past and future, ‘DENTAXUVIA’ offers a speculative space for reimagining how we live, love, and survive in a post-apocalyptic times. Through play and performance, it encourages us to rethink the boundaries of ourselves, opening up new possibilities for queer futurity and interspecies collective survival. Huntrezz Janos is an Afro-Hungarian transcorporeal artist known for mediating her inquiry into the layered nature of identity through simulation, augmentation and worldbuilding. Huntrezz has exhibited and performed at institutions including LACMA (Los Angeles, CA), The Modern (Fort Worth, TX), The Athens Biennale AB7:Eclipse (Athens, GR), Tate Britain (London, UK), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), and K Museum of Contemporary Art (Seoul, KR). Antigoni Tsagkaropoulou is a multidisciplinary artist working across moving image, installation, performance, and sculpture. Their work has been supported and exhibited by institutions internationally such as Arnolfini – Bristol’s Center for Contemporary Arts (Bristol, UK), Honor Fraser Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), LACMA (Los Angeles, CA), Onassis ONX (New York, NY), and Gray Area (San Francisco), among others. ‘DENTAXUVIA Resister’ is a new video work from the series that blends live performance and gameplay. Available for acquisition through the gallery, send inquiries to [email protected]. Opening Reception January 16 5-8PM at Nguyen Wahed Gallery RSVP 🔗 link in bio.

𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙉𝙎𝙁𝙀𝙍 𝘿𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙡𝙤𝙖𝙙: 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙉𝙀𝙏 opens on January 16th from 5-8PM at @nguyenwahedart featuring ‘Levels & Bosses: Camoflux Mangrove Biome’ (2024) by Leo Castañeda @leocastaneda__ Created using the video game software Unreal Engine, Leo Castañeda’s ‘Levels & Bosses: Camoflux Mangrove Biome’ advances 3D animation techniques through feedback loops of digital and analog tools combining paintings, photographs, and drawings with virtual reality sculpting and other experimental 3D modeling methods. Anticipating a cataclysmic event, a posthuman species known as the Camoflux builds a teleporter using a range of mutualistic abilities to commune with living landscapes. These skin-shifting beings grow machine mangroves to harness kinetic energy from the water. Exploring how the language and structures of video games intersect with the world at large, this work reimagines models of conflict and energy consumption through computer-animated biomes influenced by Latin American abstraction, South Florida landscapes, and anime mythologies. Leo Castañeda is a multimedia artist and video game designer exploring Latin American Surrealism in the Digital Age. Castañeda has exhibited at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, Museu do Amanhã Rio de Janeiro, among others. He is currently a resident at the Bakehouse @bakehouseartcomplex and has been selected as an exhibiting artist in the 2026 Whitney Biennial. This work is available for acquisition through the gallery, send inquiries to [email protected]. Opening Reception January 16 5-8PM at Nguyen Wahed Gallery RSVP 🔗 link in bio.

𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙉𝙎𝙁𝙀𝙍 𝘿𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙡𝙤𝙖𝙙: 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙉𝙀𝙏 opens on January 16th from 5-8PM at @nguyenwahedart featuring ‘Arkipelago (Arc 1)’ (2026) by Chia Amisola @hotemogf ‘Arkipelago’ is a series depicting the “second creation” mythologies of the Philippines, where a world comes to life from primordial material—here, the computer interface. ‘Ark 1’ of the trio draws from the domestic amidst disaster, depicting everyday agricultural life, influenced by Filipino social realist painters. They move slowly and ambiently through landscapes drawn out on the desktop. Each scene is composed of a dozen smaller vignettes made from handcoded software, generative processes, and manual performance. Recorded and re-composited directly from the artist’s desktop, the act of ‘creation’ shifts from software to the hand, where the authorship and life of a world is continuously contested. Chia Amisola is an artist of ambiences and agencies. Their practice centers the intimacies, infrastructures, and apparitions of the internet, particularly of the third world experience. They are based between Manila and New York. Their work has been presented internationally at Art Fair (Philippines); the V&A and Tate Britain, (UK); Tai Kwun (Hong Kong); WSA & Gray Area (New York, USA); panke.gallery, (Germany); InterAccess, (Canada); and the Experimental Games Showcase at GDC. Features include The New Yorker, BOMB Magazine, Frieze, It’s Nice That, Nylon, et. al, and recognition as Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia and as a Lumen Prize Winner. They were a NEWINC Art & Code Y10, a Gray Area Resident, and an Internet Archive DWeb Camp Fellow. This new artwork in the series is debuting in ‘TRANSFER Download: AliveNET’ and is available for acquisition through the gallery – send inquiries to [email protected]. Opening Reception January 16 5-8PM at Nguyen Wahed Gallery RSVP 🔗 link in bio.

𝙏𝙍𝘼𝙉𝙎𝙁𝙀𝙍 𝘿𝙤𝙬𝙣𝙡𝙤𝙖𝙙: 𝘼𝙡𝙞𝙫𝙚𝙉𝙀𝙏 opens on January 16th from 5-8PM at @nguyenwahedart featuring ‘Liminal Beings’ (2019) from Eva Papamargariti @gifnugget Automata, since ancient times, have been standing on the verge of two states, developing machinic and human characteristics simultaneously. Papamargariti explores the concept of the automaton and the ways that it embeds different anthropomorphic forms and functions. Automata are trained to execute and learn respective actions and procedures, thus creating an uncanny, awkward state, trapped in limbo between conditions of existence. ‘Liminal Beings’ delves into issues and themes related to simultaneity, the merging and dissolving of our surroundings with the virtual, and the constant diffusion of fabricated synthetic images that define and fragment our identities and everyday experiences. Eva Papamargariti has a practice which spans moving image, printed matter, and sculptural installation. Her work explores the cognitive and affective relations between coexisting realities, where the grotesque, fictional, and real converge. Using video, CG animation, AR, 3D scanning, and textiles, she investigates metamorphosis, liminality, and symbiotic relationships between human and non-human agents, as well as identity construction shaped by online presence. She has exhibited at the New Museum, Whitney Museum, Tate Britain, MAAT, EMST, Museum of the Moving Image, MoMA PS1, GAMeC, Pioneer Works, Athens Biennale, Mediterranean Biennale, and Transmediale. Her work is held in public and private collections including DESTE Foundation and Onassis Foundation, among others. This work is available for acquisition through the gallery, send inquiries to [email protected]. Opening Reception January 16 5-8PM at Nguyen Wahed Gallery RSVP 🔗 link in bio.