VENUE
VENUE
Kinetek | Gallery on the MASS MoCA campus B1, Floor 3
Kinetek | Gallery on the MASS MoCA campus B1, Floor 3
Kinetek | Gallery on the MASS MoCA campus B1, Floor 3
CURATOR
CURATOR
Debra McGrory
Debra McGrory
Debra McGrory
OPENING HOURS
10:00 AM T0 5:00 PM
10:00 AM T0 5:00 PM
10:00 AM T0 5:00 PM
Kinetek, an immersive media company focused on enhancing artistic creation with technology, announces the public launch of its immersive art platform Kinetek | Art featuring Kinetek | Gallery, a physical exhibition space on the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) campus (Building 1, Floor 3), Kinetek | Metaverse, an interactive 3D virtual venue and ‘digital twin’ of the Gallery viewable via web browser and Kinetek | Marketplace, a Web3 destination to discover, purchase and collect immersive art, powered by Mojito.
For the inaugural launch Kinetek | Gallery presents, Source Data, a group exhibition of internationally renowned multidisciplinary artists from its roster including Poulomi Basu, Stanely Casselman, Emi Kusano, Lena Herzog, Bobby Lopez, Glenn Marshall, Hugh McGrory and mOSn. Curated by founder Debra McGrory. The exhibition opens publicly Friday May 23 at Kinetek | Gallery with an opening event from 10:00am-5:00pm coinciding with the online launch of the Kinetek | Metaverse and Kinetek | Marketplace. The exhibition will be on view for three months through August 23, 2025, and by appointment only in the Kinetek | Gallery.
Source Data explores how artists use AI as a collaborator, not a replacement, to expand creative possibilities through generative images, animations, and other media. By examining the artists' source data and AI transformations, the exhibition questions traditional notions of authorship and originality, encouraging a nuanced understanding of AI's impact on artistic and human expression. The featured NFT collections with custom metadata offer a deeper look into the source materials and the evolving relationship between human and artificial creativity.
“The technologies available to artists for the creation and exhibition of digital works have grown exponentially in recent years with major advances in Generative AI, web browsers and NFT marketplaces. Kinetek, a company focused on how technology can enhance rather than replace artists, is launching Kinetek | Art to demonstrate the potential of these technologies,” states Hugh McGrory, artist, founder and director and writer of Underscore, a feature-length cinematic immersive art experience in post-production.
“Each Kinetek | Art platform— Metaverse, Marketplace, Gallery —exists to elevate the world of immersive art, showcasing groundbreaking work by its growing roster of creators. “This public launch is just the beginning of Kinetek’s immersive art journey in hybrid spaces,” said Debra McGrory, Kinetek Founder, Curator, and Producer of Underscore. “Kinetek | Art redefines how immersive art is experienced, collected, and shared through innovative exhibitions, hybrid virtual experiences, and authenticated on-chain digital art. Collaborating with our artists, we are building a dynamic distribution framework designed to scale with AI and celebrate artistic expressions using ephemeral technologies.”
Source Data: Artist Group Show presented by Kinetek | Gallery
Curatorial Statement by Debra McGrory
The advent of artificial intelligence into the realm of artistic creation has ignited a fervent debate, framed mainly by an alarmist media narrative. Headlines proclaim the imminent displacement of human artists by machines, foretelling a future where algorithms supplant the very essence of human creativity. This dystopian vision paints a bleak picture of artistic obsolescence, overlooking the potential for a more symbiotic relationship between human ingenuity and computational power. Conversely, a more optimistic and arguably more nuanced perspective envisions a future where artists can strategically harness the transformative capabilities of AI. In this paradigm, AI becomes not a replacement, but a powerful collaborator, expanding the artist's creative palette, significantly boosting productivity, and unlocking avenues for experimentation with entirely novel artistic forms and expressions.
A fundamental understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which artificial intelligence recreates and, perhaps more accurately, imagines images, is needed to understand the underlying source data. In the group exhibition Source Data, we explore works by Kinetek artists featuring generative images and animations, audiovisual generative works, film, photography, music, and silkscreen paintings. In juxtaposing these works in physical and virtual exhibition spaces, we experience and explore the artist's creative process using digital technologies as a new way of expression and distill the artist’s source data or source image(s). We distill what is inherently human; we distill what is ‘artificial’ (made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural).
Source Data explores how artists use AI as a collaborator, not a replacement, to expand creative possibilities through generative images, animations, and other media. By examining the artists' source data and AI transformations, the exhibition questions traditional notions of authorship and originality, encouraging a nuanced understanding of AI's impact on artistic and human expression. The featured NFT collections with custom metadata offer a deeper look into the source materials and the evolving relationship between human and artificial creativity.
By engaging directly with AI through the lens of artistic process, the public will be encouraged to question traditional notions of authorship, originality, and artistic skill, ultimately contributing to a more informed and nuanced understanding of the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on the future of artistic expression, and more broadly, human expression. The artist's collections, minted NFTs on the blockchain, complete with custom metadata form a database to gain a deeper understanding of the chosen source materials, their historical significance, and their artistic context. Source image(s) are individual NFTs, selected ‘frames’ of generative artworks, some selected by both artist and curator, embedding custom ‘traits’to define a series of separate images and characteristics that make up a whole. By reflecting on these source materials, from raw digital photographs to generative artworks and subsequent AI transformations, digital variations of original silkscreen paintings to pure audio compositions as experiments of future generative sonic AI installations and immersive listening rooms, audiences can ponder these new modes of human expressiveness that AI tools enable, pushing the boundaries of traditional artistic practice and media formats that push the limits of perception.
About the Artists Works
In Source Data, each artists’ source invites the viewer into a story world. Poulomi Basu presents photographic works and a short film from her series ‘Centralia’, a hallucinatory reflection where a visible conflict between a guerilla army, an indigenous people and the Indian state simmers and is associated with wider issues of environmental degradation. Stanley Casselman’s collection ‘Aspect Inversion’ expands his paintings beyond the silkscreen to digital dimensions; an exploration of self in flux, each variation of the original source painting is a visual meditation on the idea that identity, like the universe, is never fixed but constantly unfolding. Emi Kusano presents two works, exploring nostalgia and identity through her signature retro-futuristic aesthetic. In Emi Kusano’s Synthetic Youth: Takenoko Zoku, the artist reimagines the ephemeral movement of Takenoko Zoku (a flamboyant youth subculture known for their colorful outfits and spontaneous dance performances to disco music in pedestrian zones) through the lens of AI, portraying them as a synthetic youth culture that hovers between memory and myth. Utilizing AI hallucinations and visual transitions, the work captures the fleeting brilliance of youthful energy—blurring the lines between the real and the artificial, the past and the future. Nostalgic yet futuristic, the artwork resurrects the ghost of a forgotten subculture, inviting viewers to reconsider what is lost, what is remembered, and what can be reimagined in the digital age. Also on view is Kusan’s Morphing Memory of Neural Fad Number #1 from her post-photography video series, she reimagines Tokyo street fashion history through seamless transitions, detailed camera work, dynamic movement, and music that immerse viewers in a unique atmosphere and memoryscape. For his digital collection Small Acts of Compliance Robert “Bobby” Lopez, acclaimed songwriter and the first person to ever achieve a double EGOT (he has won at least two Emmys, Grammys, Oscars and Tonys) taps into his joy of solo lyrics to release four never-heard-before musical vignettes, in writing he ‘expresses himself while yielding to a larger presence,’ Glenn Marshall’s tecnococo collection marks the birth of an expressive AI persona and ‘generative AI collage’ - a new genre of artmaking designed by the artist that encapsulates the evolution of AI art and culmination of decades of coding and process. Lena Herzog’s Inferno collection, features four exclusive digital artworks, extracted frames selected by the artist from her immersive artwork 'Any War Any Enemy' (2022-2024), a five minute immersive video excerpt from the project as well as her full virtual reality experience. The piece is a powerful visual portrayal of the possible end of the world caused by nuclear war, a harrowing experience in virtual reality, her still images offer yet another uneasy yet poetic reflection of this potential future. Hugh McGrory’s Images Aren’t Real collection introduces the compelling vision of the filmmaker and immersive media artist forging a unique path in the contemporary art and experimental AI cinema landscape. McGrory celebrates the unreality of film, photography and AI as media made by humans rather than occurring naturally, as a copy of the natural world. He draws no distinction between images made using a camera or generated with artificial intelligence, they are both artificial illusions. “Still images are signifers, AI images are imagined from data, moving images don’t really move - it’s all a sophisticated magic trick to fool our perception,” he states. This collection features thought-provoking works that invite viewers to reconsider the very fabric of visual representation. mOSn’s debut collection "L’Arcano Vivente - The Living Tarot" is drawn from the shadowed roots of Renaissance tarot and the esoteric currents that shaped its rise, the collection reimagines the Major Arcana as living symbols. Each card —an eternal image in motion—invites the viewer into a moving ritual of myth, memory, and meaning. Inspired by the illustrations of the popular Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot and Sola Busca tarot, the collection will expand to feature all 22 cards of the Major Arcana.
About the Curator
Debra McGrory is a dynamic immersive art producer and curator fascinated by the intersection of data, art, cinema, and emerging technologies - blending immersive experiences in hybrid physical and virtual (online) spaces. She has curated special projects internationally including the iPad as Art (2012) VOLTA Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland; BOOM! Boomboxes, iPads and Audiovisual Interfaces (2012) (VOLTA NY); PROJECTiON (2011) (VOLTA NY) (introducing Beeple); ULTRA VOLTA: The Spectrum of Ultra Violet (2014) (introducing Alexander Reben), FRAME (Art Basel Miami Beach), Clouds in Cloudless Skies (Producer, 2014) a code-generated music video, and she has presented eleven award-winning interactive documentary and immersive installation projects with the National Film Board of Canada at Sundance (Bear 71) and the Tribeca Film Festival (Do Not Track, Draw Me Close, Biidaaban: First Light). In 2026 she directed ‘In/Formation’ the first 360 virtual reality documentary film during Tribeca Storyscapes. She is currently in post-production on Underscore, a groundbreaking cinematic AI film by Hugh McGrory that combines virtual production, AI and live performance. Debra is an Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design (since 2012) and adjunct professor at Williams College where she recently taught AI and Art: Generative Art Making. Debra received her BA in Art History and Studio Art from Loyola College in Maryland.
Kinetek, an immersive media company focused on enhancing artistic creation with technology, announces the public launch of its immersive art platform Kinetek | Art featuring Kinetek | Gallery, a physical exhibition space on the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) campus (Building 1, Floor 3), Kinetek | Metaverse, an interactive 3D virtual venue and ‘digital twin’ of the Gallery viewable via web browser and Kinetek | Marketplace, a Web3 destination to discover, purchase and collect immersive art, powered by Mojito.
For the inaugural launch Kinetek | Gallery presents, Source Data, a group exhibition of internationally renowned multidisciplinary artists from its roster including Poulomi Basu, Stanely Casselman, Emi Kusano, Lena Herzog, Bobby Lopez, Glenn Marshall, Hugh McGrory and mOSn. Curated by founder Debra McGrory. The exhibition opens publicly Friday May 23 at Kinetek | Gallery with an opening event from 10:00am-5:00pm coinciding with the online launch of the Kinetek | Metaverse and Kinetek | Marketplace. The exhibition will be on view for three months through August 23, 2025, and by appointment only in the Kinetek | Gallery.
Source Data explores how artists use AI as a collaborator, not a replacement, to expand creative possibilities through generative images, animations, and other media. By examining the artists' source data and AI transformations, the exhibition questions traditional notions of authorship and originality, encouraging a nuanced understanding of AI's impact on artistic and human expression. The featured NFT collections with custom metadata offer a deeper look into the source materials and the evolving relationship between human and artificial creativity.
“The technologies available to artists for the creation and exhibition of digital works have grown exponentially in recent years with major advances in Generative AI, web browsers and NFT marketplaces. Kinetek, a company focused on how technology can enhance rather than replace artists, is launching Kinetek | Art to demonstrate the potential of these technologies,” states Hugh McGrory, artist, founder and director and writer of Underscore, a feature-length cinematic immersive art experience in post-production.
“Each Kinetek | Art platform— Metaverse, Marketplace, Gallery —exists to elevate the world of immersive art, showcasing groundbreaking work by its growing roster of creators. “This public launch is just the beginning of Kinetek’s immersive art journey in hybrid spaces,” said Debra McGrory, Kinetek Founder, Curator, and Producer of Underscore. “Kinetek | Art redefines how immersive art is experienced, collected, and shared through innovative exhibitions, hybrid virtual experiences, and authenticated on-chain digital art. Collaborating with our artists, we are building a dynamic distribution framework designed to scale with AI and celebrate artistic expressions using ephemeral technologies.”
Source Data: Artist Group Show presented by Kinetek | Gallery
Curatorial Statement by Debra McGrory
The advent of artificial intelligence into the realm of artistic creation has ignited a fervent debate, framed mainly by an alarmist media narrative. Headlines proclaim the imminent displacement of human artists by machines, foretelling a future where algorithms supplant the very essence of human creativity. This dystopian vision paints a bleak picture of artistic obsolescence, overlooking the potential for a more symbiotic relationship between human ingenuity and computational power. Conversely, a more optimistic and arguably more nuanced perspective envisions a future where artists can strategically harness the transformative capabilities of AI. In this paradigm, AI becomes not a replacement, but a powerful collaborator, expanding the artist's creative palette, significantly boosting productivity, and unlocking avenues for experimentation with entirely novel artistic forms and expressions.
A fundamental understanding of the underlying mechanisms by which artificial intelligence recreates and, perhaps more accurately, imagines images, is needed to understand the underlying source data. In the group exhibition Source Data, we explore works by Kinetek artists featuring generative images and animations, audiovisual generative works, film, photography, music, and silkscreen paintings. In juxtaposing these works in physical and virtual exhibition spaces, we experience and explore the artist's creative process using digital technologies as a new way of expression and distill the artist’s source data or source image(s). We distill what is inherently human; we distill what is ‘artificial’ (made or produced by human beings rather than occurring naturally, especially as a copy of something natural).
Source Data explores how artists use AI as a collaborator, not a replacement, to expand creative possibilities through generative images, animations, and other media. By examining the artists' source data and AI transformations, the exhibition questions traditional notions of authorship and originality, encouraging a nuanced understanding of AI's impact on artistic and human expression. The featured NFT collections with custom metadata offer a deeper look into the source materials and the evolving relationship between human and artificial creativity.
By engaging directly with AI through the lens of artistic process, the public will be encouraged to question traditional notions of authorship, originality, and artistic skill, ultimately contributing to a more informed and nuanced understanding of the transformative impact of artificial intelligence on the future of artistic expression, and more broadly, human expression. The artist's collections, minted NFTs on the blockchain, complete with custom metadata form a database to gain a deeper understanding of the chosen source materials, their historical significance, and their artistic context. Source image(s) are individual NFTs, selected ‘frames’ of generative artworks, some selected by both artist and curator, embedding custom ‘traits’to define a series of separate images and characteristics that make up a whole. By reflecting on these source materials, from raw digital photographs to generative artworks and subsequent AI transformations, digital variations of original silkscreen paintings to pure audio compositions as experiments of future generative sonic AI installations and immersive listening rooms, audiences can ponder these new modes of human expressiveness that AI tools enable, pushing the boundaries of traditional artistic practice and media formats that push the limits of perception.
About the Artists Works
In Source Data, each artists’ source invites the viewer into a story world. Poulomi Basu presents photographic works and a short film from her series ‘Centralia’, a hallucinatory reflection where a visible conflict between a guerilla army, an indigenous people and the Indian state simmers and is associated with wider issues of environmental degradation. Stanley Casselman’s collection ‘Aspect Inversion’ expands his paintings beyond the silkscreen to digital dimensions; an exploration of self in flux, each variation of the original source painting is a visual meditation on the idea that identity, like the universe, is never fixed but constantly unfolding. Emi Kusano presents two works, exploring nostalgia and identity through her signature retro-futuristic aesthetic. In Emi Kusano’s Synthetic Youth: Takenoko Zoku, the artist reimagines the ephemeral movement of Takenoko Zoku (a flamboyant youth subculture known for their colorful outfits and spontaneous dance performances to disco music in pedestrian zones) through the lens of AI, portraying them as a synthetic youth culture that hovers between memory and myth. Utilizing AI hallucinations and visual transitions, the work captures the fleeting brilliance of youthful energy—blurring the lines between the real and the artificial, the past and the future. Nostalgic yet futuristic, the artwork resurrects the ghost of a forgotten subculture, inviting viewers to reconsider what is lost, what is remembered, and what can be reimagined in the digital age. Also on view is Kusan’s Morphing Memory of Neural Fad Number #1 from her post-photography video series, she reimagines Tokyo street fashion history through seamless transitions, detailed camera work, dynamic movement, and music that immerse viewers in a unique atmosphere and memoryscape. For his digital collection Small Acts of Compliance Robert “Bobby” Lopez, acclaimed songwriter and the first person to ever achieve a double EGOT (he has won at least two Emmys, Grammys, Oscars and Tonys) taps into his joy of solo lyrics to release four never-heard-before musical vignettes, in writing he ‘expresses himself while yielding to a larger presence,’ Glenn Marshall’s tecnococo collection marks the birth of an expressive AI persona and ‘generative AI collage’ - a new genre of artmaking designed by the artist that encapsulates the evolution of AI art and culmination of decades of coding and process. Lena Herzog’s Inferno collection, features four exclusive digital artworks, extracted frames selected by the artist from her immersive artwork 'Any War Any Enemy' (2022-2024), a five minute immersive video excerpt from the project as well as her full virtual reality experience. The piece is a powerful visual portrayal of the possible end of the world caused by nuclear war, a harrowing experience in virtual reality, her still images offer yet another uneasy yet poetic reflection of this potential future. Hugh McGrory’s Images Aren’t Real collection introduces the compelling vision of the filmmaker and immersive media artist forging a unique path in the contemporary art and experimental AI cinema landscape. McGrory celebrates the unreality of film, photography and AI as media made by humans rather than occurring naturally, as a copy of the natural world. He draws no distinction between images made using a camera or generated with artificial intelligence, they are both artificial illusions. “Still images are signifers, AI images are imagined from data, moving images don’t really move - it’s all a sophisticated magic trick to fool our perception,” he states. This collection features thought-provoking works that invite viewers to reconsider the very fabric of visual representation. mOSn’s debut collection "L’Arcano Vivente - The Living Tarot" is drawn from the shadowed roots of Renaissance tarot and the esoteric currents that shaped its rise, the collection reimagines the Major Arcana as living symbols. Each card —an eternal image in motion—invites the viewer into a moving ritual of myth, memory, and meaning. Inspired by the illustrations of the popular Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot and Sola Busca tarot, the collection will expand to feature all 22 cards of the Major Arcana.
About the Curator
Debra McGrory is a dynamic immersive art producer and curator fascinated by the intersection of data, art, cinema, and emerging technologies - blending immersive experiences in hybrid physical and virtual (online) spaces. She has curated special projects internationally including the iPad as Art (2012) VOLTA Art Fair in Basel, Switzerland; BOOM! Boomboxes, iPads and Audiovisual Interfaces (2012) (VOLTA NY); PROJECTiON (2011) (VOLTA NY) (introducing Beeple); ULTRA VOLTA: The Spectrum of Ultra Violet (2014) (introducing Alexander Reben), FRAME (Art Basel Miami Beach), Clouds in Cloudless Skies (Producer, 2014) a code-generated music video, and she has presented eleven award-winning interactive documentary and immersive installation projects with the National Film Board of Canada at Sundance (Bear 71) and the Tribeca Film Festival (Do Not Track, Draw Me Close, Biidaaban: First Light). In 2026 she directed ‘In/Formation’ the first 360 virtual reality documentary film during Tribeca Storyscapes. She is currently in post-production on Underscore, a groundbreaking cinematic AI film by Hugh McGrory that combines virtual production, AI and live performance. Debra is an Assistant Professor at Parsons School of Design (since 2012) and adjunct professor at Williams College where she recently taught AI and Art: Generative Art Making. Debra received her BA in Art History and Studio Art from Loyola College in Maryland.