With Trevor Paglen, Maya Man, and Ben Frost
Onassis ONX, the Onassis Foundation’s global platform for art and advanced technologies, announces ONX Relay, a new commissioning and distribution initiative launching with artists Trevor Paglen, Maya Man, and Ben Frost. Building on five years of artist development, production, exhibition, and institutional collaboration across New York and Athens, ONX Relay extends the commissioning process beyond financial support to include technical expertise, curatorial guidance, studio access, production resources, and pathways for presentation and circulation.
ONX Relay begins from the premise that the creation of a work and its future life should not be treated as separate stages. From the outset, artists are supported in developing projects that can be built, documented, adapted, and presented across different contexts without compromising their experimental nature. At the same time, Onassis ONX works with museums, foundations, galleries, collectors, and other partners to strengthen the knowledge, infrastructure, and confidence required to present technologically complex art. The initiative culminates in a convening in New York in spring 2027, bringing the developing works into conversation with curators, producers, institutions, and other potential partners.
The inaugural cohort was selected by Afroditi Panagiotakou, Artistic Director of the Onassis Foundation, following a broad nomination and application process. Their distinct practices reflect a shared commitment to using technology not as an end in itself, but as a material through which to ask larger questions about perception, identity, power, culture, and human connection.
Trevor Paglen’s Neural Images is a multi-year collaboration with computational neuroscience laboratories at Cornell and McGill Universities. Using fMRI data gathered from Paglen’s own visual system, the project develops subject-specific neural models that generate images predicted to activate particular regions of the brain. ONX Relay supports the translation of this research into an immersive interactive installation and a series of large-format paintings, bringing experimental neuroscience, machine learning, and image-making into direct dialogue.
Maya Man’s Dreams Come True is a generative multi-channel video installation and performance centered on a fictional five-member girl group engineered for global appeal. Drawing on K-pop’s training and promotion systems, AI text-to-video and text-to-music models, and the aesthetics of algorithmic media, the work examines identity, authenticity, labor, representation, celebrity, and the circulation of cultural influence in an increasingly synthetic media environment.
Ben Frost’s Prometheus is a large-scale multichannel video and spatial sound installation that takes Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound as its structural and mythological frame. Combining filmed performance, original composition, architectural-scale moving image, and a 16-plus-channel audio environment, the work considers political resistance, suppressed knowledge, sacrifice, regeneration, and endurance. Development will take place across Onassis Ready in Athens and Onassis ONX in New York.
ONX Relay reflects Onassis ONX’s broader commitment to long-term engagement with artists and to building a more resilient ecosystem around technologically complex practices. Its ambition extends beyond the realization of individual commissions by helping significant works meet their audiences, circulate through varied contexts, sustain the evolving practices of artists, and expand what institutions feel equipped to present. Technology may shape the materials and systems of these projects, but the stories, questions, and experiences they produce remain fundamentally human.
Spring 2027, by request/appointment only.
