Canyon Is Building a Gallery That Feels Like a Living Room [Podcast]
I ask Cass Fino-Radin, Vice President of Art and Technology at Canyon, a question the modernist white cube never had to answer: what does a gallery look like if it is built to be hospitable to work that asks for an hour of your attention, or seventy?
Canyon is a non-collecting venue for durational art opening in New York in 2027, and Fino-Radin calls the approach hospitality forward. Galleries that look and feel more like a living room than the white cube we inherited from history. Doors open at 2 pm and stay open until 11 pm so people with jobs and children can actually come. Design that chains your experience one piece at a time. Their opening exhibition, World Building, brings together close to seventy artists and a room of playable work in a space built for LED.
The barrier turns out not to be technical. Fino-Radin argues that half of what looks like expertise is really comfort with uncertainty, because the first five minutes of a game exist to teach you its rules, and a newcomer who does not know that assumes they will never get it. So the practical work is legible controls, consistent signage, and making sure an idle console does not read to a passerby as a dead screen.
Cass ran the private lab Small Data Industries for nine years and now directs the Canyon Media Art Conservation Center, the first nonprofit lab of its kind in the country. Emulation is not a silver bullet; source code has to come with the work, and very few institutions have a media conservator at all. We end on a conservation technician in their lab pointing an agentic coding tool at a dead Final Cut 7 plugin and watching it strip out the hardware check that was stopping the emulator. Along the way: playing tennis on the Magnavox Odyssey in Ralph Baer's basement, Atari reduced to three lawyers in a trench coat, and why Cass thinks Hideo Kojima has a real claim on Orson Welles.
Links
- Forever Into Infinity: my interview with Cass Fino-Radin
- Canyon
- Canyon Media Art Conservation Center
- Small Data Industries
- Cass Fino-Radin
- Cooper Hewitt on Planetary, its first iOS app
- Patrick Moran on Game On, Virtual Realms, and the Barbican's 25 Years of Game-Based Programming
- Inoculating the Institution: Erica Gangsei on Play SFMOMA's 15-Year Experiment
- How the V&A Built a Games Program From the Inside Out
Hosted by Jamin Warren. Music by Nick Sylvester.
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