FLUX Art Space
A note from the founder
In 2001, the internet was new to most of the world, and the digital divide was among the defining questions of the age. A few had the machines, the connections and the knowledge to use them. Many did not. It was in that moment that I founded FLUX Art Space, and in 2002 it became a 501(c)(3), with a single conviction: that art, technology and community, brought together, could change who participates in the future.
We understood early that access alone was never enough. What was missing, we argued, was a creative divide: the gap between owning a tool and being empowered to make something with it, to claim one’s digital rights, and to be heard. FLUX answered by commissioning artists to work alongside young people and underserved communities on participatory projects in art and technology. We built some of the first afterschool and public school digital art programs in the Bronx. Long before the word entered common use, we were practicing the commons: shared knowledge, open platforms and civic dialogue.
I am restarting FLUX today because the questions that animated its founding have returned with greater urgency. Artificial intelligence, copyright, digital freedom and access are reshaping who may create and who may be heard. Everything I have done since, my writing on the commons, my curatorial work and my collaborations with artists across the world, grew from the ground FLUX first broke. To reopen it now is not a return to the past. It is the continuation of a lifelong body of work, at the moment it matters most.
FLUX returns with a new board of directors, a renewed mission and an unchanged purpose: digital art and community education, led by artists and open to all. We are completing the administrative steps to restore the organization’s standing, so that it may resume full operations and welcome public support.
If you have been part of this story, or wish to be part of its next chapter, I invite you to join us. To be notified when donations open, please write me.
With gratitude and resolve,
Natalia Ivanova
Founder and Director, FLUX Art Space
MISSION
FLUX Art Space is an experimental, artist-centered research and development lab working to close the post-digital divide by building the Commons.
We bring artists and interdisciplinary thinkers together to experiment, incubate ideas, develop new tools, and prototype alternative models for cultural production, collective ownership, and shared infrastructure. Through artistic research, publishing, education, collaboration, and public experimentation, we advance the Commons as a framework for creative agency, collective participation, and new forms of cultural and economic life.
ABOUT
Founded in 2002, FLUX emerged from a commitment to closing the digital divide in marginalized communities through experimental, artist-led, participatory, and socially engaged projects. Working with community centers, the Harlem Arts Zone, Bronx public schools, and after-school programs, FLUX commissioned artists to create site-specific projects that brought creative technologies, hardware, and software into communities where access was otherwise limited. Through the experience of making art, people gained access not only to new tools but to new forms of creative expression, participation, and possibility.
More than two decades later, FLUX re-emerges in response to a new divide. The digital landscape has fundamentally changed, but inequalities in access, ownership, and participation persist. Today, artists remain largely excluded from the technological, institutional, legal, and economic infrastructures that determine how creative work is produced, valued, circulated, and sustained. This is the post-digital divide.
FLUX addresses this divide through experimental research, artistic production, interdisciplinary collaboration, and the development of alternative infrastructures. We bring together artists, architects, filmmakers, designers, researchers, technologists, and legal thinkers to incubate ideas, develop tools, and prototype new models of cultural production, collective ownership, and shared resources.
Through artist-led research, collaborative projects, international exchange, public commissions, our Teaching Institute, the Open Knowledge Commons platform, exhibitions, and public programs, we transform experimentation into practical models and shared resources. We explore new ways of organizing, distributing knowledge, creating value, and sustaining creative labor beyond conventional institutional and market structures.
At the center of this work is the Commons. Not simply as a philosophy, but as a living, experimental framework for collective ownership, shared knowledge, mutual support, and new forms of cultural and economic participation. Building on a practice initiated in New York in 2002 and further developed in Oakland before continuing in New York City, FLUX advances the Commons as both an operational model and a proposition for the future: infrastructure created with artists, governed through collaboration, and held in common.
Our work is grounded in the belief that the future of the creative economy should not be designed around artists, but built with them, on terms they define and with the agency to shape their own futures.
EXPERIMENTS
The Commons: Our Framework
The Commons is the intellectual and operational foundation of FLUX. Not a program or a fixed methodology, it is an evolving framework encompassing collective ownership, shared knowledge, open-source technologies, legal innovation, alternative economic models, artistic labor, resource sharing, and collaborative governance.
It provides the common ground for everything FLUX investigates, develops, and puts into practice.
Working Frameworks
Four interconnected areas of experimentation guide our work:
The Action Lab
Social innovation, site-specific art, public experimentation, community engagement, and international partnerships.
Institute for Cultural Economy
Art, law, economic infrastructure, collective ownership, labor equity, and shared resources.
Post-Digital Incubator
Creative technology, emerging systems, digital access, and artist-led development.
Think-and-Do Tank
Research, publishing, public dialogue, interdisciplinary working groups, and institutional innovation.
“n experimental, artist-centered research and development lab.
Goals
Practice the Commons. Share methods, templates, licenses, and findings openly, transforming individual discoveries into collective resources for the artistic field.
Advance legal and economic literacy. Teach the law and economics of authorship, including copyright, licensing, intellectual property, and artists' ownership of their work.
Build open infrastructure. Treat access to technology and creative infrastructure as a public good, developing open platforms and shared resources that put this principle into practice.
Prototype new models. Commission artist-led projects in digital and interdisciplinary art that test alternative approaches to collective ownership, attribution, compensation, and creative labor.
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