I spoke with the (now former) head of creative partnerships at ONX Vallejo Gantner at the Onassis ONX Summer Showcase 2023. We talked about the origin story of ONYX Studios as well the the Onassis Foundation’s support for XR art and innovation. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.438] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So going back to some of my expanded coverage of what was happening in and around New York City while I was at Tribeca Immersive, both in 2023 and 2025. So each year during Tribeca, Onyx Studios will have like a summer showcase, showcasing different projects of some of their different members. And so I attended this both in 2023 and 2025. And I actually had a chance to sit down with, at the time, the director of creative partnerships of Onyx Studios, Vallejo Gantner, who is now moved on into another location. He's actually with PS21 Center for Contemporary Performance, where he's the artistic and executive director. But at the time, he was still with Onassis Foundations back in 2023. So Onassis Foundation out of Greece, in collaboration with New Ink, had created this Onyx Studio, which is like this studios for all these different artists and emerging technologies to have a hub to play with some of the latest technologies, but also just have a community space to incubate all these different types of projects. They've featured a number of different projects over the years. that have been born out of Onyx Studios. And so I had a chance to see some of the different projects, but also cover the larger issues. And this year, actually, at Tribeca Immersive, Onyx Studios, Jazzy Amudi, as well as Agog were partners with Tribeca in order to curate Tribeca Immersive. And so this will help just give a little bit more context as to what Onassis Foundation is and what's happening there with Onyx Studios. And I'll be diving into some other conversations that I've had in and around the Onyx Summer Showcase. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Valeo happened on Saturday, June 10th, 2023 in New York City, New York. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:06.608] Vallejo Gantner: So hi, my name's Vallejo Gantner. I am the Director of Creative Partnerships at the ONX Studio in Manhattan, in New York. We're sitting here right now, actually. I help find kind of interesting partnerships, opportunities for artists, and think about the kind of strategy and how to pull together this kind of crazy mixed up beast that we have with us in the form of this production studio and exhibition space.
[00:02:38.291] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space.
[00:02:42.935] Vallejo Gantner: Well, it's accidental. So really I came from, I mean, I moved to New York 18 years ago to run a theater in the Lower East Side called Performance Space 122, which is a kind of legendary crucible of contemporary performing arts. So my background is all in live performance, but Interestingly, over the course of that time, so much technology was brought to bear and came to play an ever-increasing role in how people thought about live performance, different ways of mediating it, different ways of thinking about presence, and, of course, different ways of thinking about what it meant to be engaged with audience or for even what an audience was. And, you know, over the last decade particularly, As people kind of struggled and fought and tried to explore for ways of trying to find new forms of intimacy with audience and connection and meaning, technology and immersive media have kind of continuously been a part of that.
[00:03:50.424] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so last year around this time at Tribeca, I had a chance to come out to Onyx Studios for the first time to see some of the artists' exhibitions. And here we are a year later, again, just showing an exhibition of some of these emerging artists playing with all sorts of different aspects of generative AI and motion capture, live performance. But there's also, going back to IFA Doc Lab of 2022, there was a partnership between onyx studios and if a doc lab with the motion capture studio and so i had a chance to see a lot of those pieces actually do a lot of interviews with folks and so in some ways this goes back to the onassis foundation setting this larger context maybe could give a little bit more context as the onassis foundation and how it is interconnected to all these things like onyx studios and everything's going on here
[00:04:33.999] Vallejo Gantner: So Onyx came about as a collaboration between Onassis and New Ink, the New Museum's incubator. Onassis is a really large foundation based in Greece that has programs across healthcare, across education and culture. perhaps it's best known outside Greece for its cultural programs where it's really become one of the key nodes for contemporary culture in Greece and anybody who's been to Athens over the last few years will have seen the fact that it has become one of the most dynamic vibrant exciting edgy fun and creative cities in Europe and you know, I think Onassis and its peer foundations in Greece have played a huge role in that. And part of, I think, never perhaps explicitly said, but part of what I think Onassis' mission or objective is, is to really try and reframe what Greek and Greece means away from idyllic beaches and islands and holiday and antiquities and into something that is very much more a contemporary space. And so In Athens and in other parts of the country as well, Onassis has a really significant digital program, so commissioning Greek artists, residency programs, and a huge outdoor media art festival called Plasmata that opens in June of 2023 and runs until July in a city called Ioannina in the northwest, a beautiful historic city in northwest Greece. and we in new york in the onyx studio kind of i guess we're there sort of we're the lab for how that digital presenting residency development program in greece will evolve and they're building a studio there they're creating different kind of presenting contexts we're trying to find ways for the digital program to interact with and collaborate with the performing arts program and the film programs and the visual art programs and so the artists who are members of onyx and who are part of this are in a dialogue with what's going on in greece and i'm in a constant dialogue with the digital team there about how we can feed each other and so you know it's a unique beast in that sense as well because we are definitively our source code, as it were, is transatlantic, as well as being something that's very much a product of the kind of New York ecosystem.
[00:07:15.854] Kent Bye: And so here at Onyx Studios, you have a number of people who are both helping run this studio space and these residency programs and mentors, but also artists that are coming in. Because Onassis is based in Greece, is there a Greek connection to each of these artists, or is it pretty agnostic as to... So I'm just trying to connect the dots between what the connection there is back to Greece when it comes to everything that I see here.
[00:07:38.422] Vallejo Gantner: I mean, valid, completely valid question. I mean... I think there are four Greek members and a couple of Greek diasporic members who are making work. Theo Triantafelidis, Manolis Manousakis, Lucia Alevanou, who people may have seen in Venice last year, but also Yorgos downstairs, who made an incredible interactive television work or interactive video art piece. And the idea is not that it be kind of dogmatically or parochially Greek, I think the fertility and the excitement of the ideas that are bubbling up in Athens and that those are expressed here as well and I think as that infrastructure comes online in Athens the challenge we face and the thing we're in a way most excited about is that kind of conversation that's going to start happening in a much more intensive way where We anticipate that the artists who are members of Onyx will be going to Athens pretty frequently for residencies, masterclasses, workshops, co-productions and vice versa. The Greek artists are going to be coming here and I think hopefully really learning from and taking something away from and then feeding the New York ecosystem. And so this kind of, you know, Onyx is interesting. We're not, we try not to be egotistical about how we function. We exist in a set of relationships, both with Athens, with the artists who are our members, but also with five different partners that we work with now. New Ink, who was our kind of founding partner, but also Rhizome, the digital art, legendary kind of digital art outfit. NYU's engineering department, Tandon School, Media Art Exploration, that's run by Kay Mashalay, that is a presenter and co-commissioner of work at the intersection of life performance, technology and science. And finally, Games for Change, who I'm sure many of your listeners will know about as a distributor and producer of games and XR experiences that are really at the cusp of social change.
[00:09:47.861] Kent Bye: I see this as a place of incubating both the immersive arts, but also integrating the latest and greatest emerging technologies. I think artificial intelligence and generative AI is something that within the last year has had a lot of different tools that are available. I'm seeing a lot of projects and experimentations with at least three or four different projects that are experimenting with different levels of generative art. also is happening at the same time as Tribeca Immersive and the Tribeca Festival, so having the entire immersive industry coming into town, and so I feel like this is a little bit like what's happening on the bleeding edge, maybe stuff that is still emerging, not fully baked in some sense, or still being developed, these prototypes, and some of them I'll see later in the film festival circuit, and others maybe not, but it seems like this experimental place for artists to come together, and I guess to go back to the intention for Onassis to be able to start the Onyx Studio in the first place is the idea to be in the heartbed of all the different places of these intersections of innovation and to invite artists into a place to provide some technology and some resources to help them just kind of play around and explore their creative imagination.
[00:10:55.140] Vallejo Gantner: As I said, we're driven by the membership. What we buy, the tech, the toys that we buy, we poll all the members and say, what do you need? When we're talking to them about their work, we don't just think about what I'd call the traditional XR distribution outlets in terms of film festivals. We're talking to art biennales, to galleries, to completely visual art context then we're talking from my history to really the performing arts landscape so different kinds of presenting and producing theaters performing arts festivals around the world but particularly in the us so We don't see this as a technology or as a form that should exist as kind of an ancillary to this film circuit. I think we're interested in the other ways and the other pathways in. As the tech integrates into more and more of our daily lives, it shouldn't... You know I think we've all in the field been so profoundly frustrated for so long with the kind of limitations of the distribution model that we have for the work that is being made. Particularly in VR obviously just because of the limitations of headsets and the limited number of people who have them, but also I think it's often the case that the work that exists between different spaces can fall through the cracks. So part of what we're trying to do is to make sure that people understand whether they're from theatre or dance, circus or XR or visual art, video, filmmaking, documentary, photography, composition, sound. You know that these works that straddle these two worlds have validity, merit and indeed innovation across all of these genres and shouldn't be pigeonholed or boxed into a corner. They can have impact and consequence outside the immediate traditional surrounds in which we've located the work.
[00:12:56.226] Kent Bye: Well, hopefully I'll have some time to talk to some of the artists that are here. I know some of the artists are going to be submitting things into the festival circuit, and they're a little bit more fully finished as projects, I'd say, that I expect to potentially see at the premiere once they're fully finished and be able to talk to some of the creators at that point. But I'd love for you to just maybe give a brief overview of the program that we're showing here, just so that people get a sense of the different genres and modalities and artists that you're featuring here.
[00:13:20.265] Vallejo Gantner: Absolutely. I mean, like Onyx, today we saw a dance work that is a kind of choreographer engaging with Stable Diffusion, a piece called Kinetic Diffusion, Brandon Powers. We saw Kat Musatea, who's made a work that is a kind of hybrid of movement and speech synthesis that has two performers on stage really creating, trying to create language and phonemes. She's figured out a choreography for 41 different phonemes that can make any sound that we use in language. We saw Bag of Worms, and I know you've spoken to Matt Romaine in the past. This is becoming kind of one of our favourites at Onyx, and he's developing that into a full evening work. And then finally, Chloe Alexandra Thompson, who's a Cree artist, and DBR Marine, a Pacific Islander, a video artist, and... They made this beautiful piece that is kind of meditation on glitches and the gaps in between video and sound and mistakes that is both a kind of live sound video DJing exercise, if you will, but also a live composition and a kind of choreography in the way she's triggering sound with her movement as well. Around those live performances, Katherine Hamilton was showing a new work called Shadow Time that is an amazing kind of journey through the way media has been presented and in its final manifestation will take place inside a camera oscura. So it'll very immersively be a journey through the kind of history of the way we've understood images. Winslow and Ellie presented Forager, their work from South by Southwest this year that is a journey through mycelium. There's a couple of works in development. Peter Burr had a video piece. Matthew McCorkle previewing a work in progress called Moody that's a very beautiful, I think one of the most powerful sort of journeys and uses of the technology to kind of engage with mental health that I've seen. Right up there with Goliath last year. And the Erixa project. And finally Ashley Zielinski who last year worked with us on an exhibition using the images that were coming down from the James Webb telescope which is extraordinary. She's been collaborating very closely with NASA for almost a decade now and so we had a whole immersive exhibition about that that she's built out both on screen and in VR.
[00:15:53.863] Kent Bye: Awesome. And so here at Onyx, we're looking at a lot of these future technologies of what's existing now and really tapping into the creative imagination of all these different artists to push the limits of what's possible. But I'd love to hear from your perspective what you think the ultimate potential of all these immersive technologies might be and what they might be able to enable.
[00:16:14.000] Vallejo Gantner: Big question there, Kent. Look, the thing I keep getting excited about, I can't speak about forever and what it's going to do all over the place. We're all going to disappear in the singularity. But the thing that I will say has excited me most recently is... this journey of the technologists back toward the writers and the performance and the choreographers and the dramaturgs. For years as a performing arts presenter and producer I've seen directors, playwrights, dancers seek out technologists and try and figure out how to bring that technology to bear in their work. And they've kind of been revered the mystic, the Gnostic kind of seers of what can be done. And what's fascinating now is I think we're starting to see a journey back the other way as those wizards of technology find their way back into storytelling that is kind of driven by different forms of thinking than has historically been the case. You know, the way we've used VR as a kind of empathy machine now for, let's say, a decade is being challenged, I think, by different works that are starting to seek in a Brechtian way, you know, different ways of thinking about how audiences will engage with it other than just kind of purely immersion into an empathetic environment. Awesome.
[00:17:43.665] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:17:48.288] Vallejo Gantner: Well, sign up to the Onyx mailing list and watch this space.
[00:17:53.611] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining me today to help break down a little bit about what Onyx Studio is doing, as well as Onassis Foundation. And yeah, we're excited to see where it goes in the future, especially with foundations and organizations like yourself to help support and cultivate this artistic community. So thank you.
[00:18:08.900] Vallejo Gantner: Thank you, Kent. I mean, you know, everybody should Patreon, sign up Patreon and follow you on because the body of work you've assembled and the relentless, unflagging, untiring, championing that you do of this field is quite inspiring. So thank you. Yeah, thank you.
[00:18:29.363] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
