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.