My time at Eyebeam has been glorious, captivating, consuming, and profound. After spending nearly a third of my life involved with the organization in one capacity or another, and the last ten as executive director, I am moving on. It has been an honor and a joy to work with the Eyebeam community in helping build the organization, particularly over this last decade.

My leadership tenure began during Trump v1. I’ll never forget, the week after he was elected, all of us on the team sitting down and writing out a statement of values. In some ways, it was a direct response to what we saw as a newly emerging threat. It was also a belated codification of the organization’s commitment to a set of guardrails in how we make decisions. It helped us countless times in the intervening years and pushed us all to build a better organization. In retrospect, I believe we did so. I am also keenly aware that there will always be more to do.

I am so proud of all that we accomplished, from rallying with the community in order to save archived materials after Hurricane Sandy, to financially stabilizing the organization and setting it up for a strong future. All of our work in service to launching smart, challenging, and impactful programs, alongside some great parties. And at the core of it all is a commitment to the direct support and platforming of artists’ ideas, typically extraordinarily prescient, which challenge our conception of what could be imagined and created, not only what currently exists. I hold the conviction that their work in helping us all evaluate our relationship to technology, thereby each other, is deeply important and deserving of significant support and awareness. I recently spoke with Charlotte Kent at The Brooklyn Rail, as part of the publication’s “The New Social Environment” series, about our history of supporting this important work.

It’s a challenge to put all the years into a few words: the memories, excitement, and energy of it all. Before my departure on June 30th, I’m working on a short series of recollections of the opportunities I had to experience, firsthand, the work of some of the amazing people who have come through Eyebeam’s doors over the years. The first of these is here, a reflection on work that spoke, over a decade ago, to the ambiguous feedback loop of predictive technology in which we are all now seemingly enmeshed.

The quality that many Eyebeam artists share, and the element which for me continues to be most illuminating, is their works’ tendency to reveal unseen systems. Whether it be (2007 Resident) Trevor Paglen rendering visible hidden networks of mass surveillance, or (2016-2017 Resident Mentor) Tamiko Thiel exposing suppressed histories through virtual reality. Eyebeam artists’ sense of unbridled exploration and confidence in opening their research to the public, often without immediate concern for its commodification, is an inspiration. Happily, many projects subsequently attracted significant recognition and awards. 

As I prepare for my departure, I am happy to share that I will be moving into a new venture, in a new but related field: holistic healing. I will soon focus my learnings from two decades of co-creation with artists to be in service of building health, working to resolve issues which arise from the unique stresses of nurturing creativity inside of capitalism. 

As Eyebeam moves into its 25th year, the organization will be spending a lot of time re-engaging its community, throughout the city, the country, and the world. We aim to put our resources into energizing our relations with all of the artists and stakeholders we have worked with over the years, committed to the belief that there is nothing more important than human connection, particularly in our digitally modulated world. We look forward to sharing more of that work over the coming months, and I am certain that the organization will continue to illuminate new paths to future notions of technology in service to humanity, through artistic imagination. I am honored to have played a part in the Eyebeam story, and I look forward to all that is to come. And to having a little more time to walk the dogs.

Roddy Schrock
Executive Director