Artifacts over authorship.
The work, its resonance, and the world it opens matter more than any singular creator. The Artifact Index is the living record of that work — a public dataset of creative practice, kept in the open as it is being made.
01 What this is
The Artifact Index is the public surface of Artifice NYC’s archive. It captures the conditions of creative production — who made a piece of work, where, alongside what, with what materials, in what mode — rather than only the finished output.
Most cultural archives index outputs: paintings, books, films, exhibitions. The Index instead treats process as the cultural object. Each entry carries full provenance and is structured so that artifacts, their makers, and the spaces that held them remain readable in relation.
It is in beta. The schema is open. The corpus grows with each chapter.
02 Mission
Artifice NYC is a 501(c)(3) cultural organization that uses science fiction as a method of public research — through exhibitions, residencies, and a living archive of creative practice.
The through-line is the phrase method of public research. Science fiction here is not a genre or an aesthetic. It is a working method — speculation as a way of prototyping social, aesthetic, and ecological possibilities, then returning evidence to the present.
The Index is the third of the three named program types. The exhibitions are Chapters and nodes. The residencies seed the practitioners. The Index keeps the record.
03 Vision
A future where experimental artists and creative technologists have the infrastructure to bring research, prototypes, and new technologies into public life.
Through science-fiction worldbuilding, Artifice builds cultural mobility for these practices, helping speculative work gain visibility, documentation, and institutional relevance.
04 Method
Each artifact is presented in one of two modes:
The dual mode is non-negotiable per record. An artifact lives in one or the other; it does not toggle. The friction between the two modes is the curatorial work.
05 How the Index works
The Index is the public surface of the archive. Every entry is an artifact — a discrete piece of work — carrying its full provenance and a reference to the practitioner(s) who made it.
Records are published only when their provenance is complete. Drafts and works-in-progress are held privately until they’re ready; what you see is the published archive, nothing speculative.
Companion systems — signal discovery, practitioner profiles, and a venue atlas — are in development and will connect to the Index as they come online.
06 Schema
Every artifact carries a shared schema. This is the working version; new fields are added as the practice demands them, and the changelog is kept in the open.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| id | Stable slug or source identifier. |
| code | Sequential index code (A1, A2 …) for reference and citation. |
| title | Artifact title as titled by its maker. |
| type | Form — installation, performance, talk, object, digital, protocol, environmental. |
| mode | WHITEBOX or BLACKBOX. Mutually exclusive. |
| entity | Artifice NYC, Studio Artifice, or Both. |
| source | Where the record originated — a chapter, a node, a research import. |
| authors | References into PROFILES. One artifact, one or more named makers. |
| description | Short text from the maker, edited lightly for the Index. |
| event | The program the artifact appeared in, if any. |
| event_dates | The window of presentation. |
| venue | Where it was held. |
| location | The room, wall, or position within the venue. |
| duration | Run time, if time-based. |
| rights | Documentation and reuse permissions on file. |
| status | Published, Draft, or Archived. |
| date_added | When the record entered the Index. |
Profiles, Spaces (Atlas), and Programs run on parallel schemas, joined by id references.
07 Provenance and consent
Profiles are non-negotiable. Every artifact in the Index references the practitioners who made it, by name, by record. Consent is captured before a record is published; practitioners can request removal or restrict views at any point.
No surveillance use. No extractive licensing. AI use, when present, is named in the description and compensated through the program that produced the work.
08 Current state
Twenty artifacts from nodes:ii (Onassis ONX, April 2026) are indexed with their provenance, descriptions, and authoring profiles. Additional records enter the Index as their documentation completes.
The Chapters series (001–005) and additional nodes editions follow. The schema and the data both remain in beta until enough records exist to expose the relations the Index is designed to surface.
09 Support
The Artifact Index is built and kept open by Artifice NYC, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit (EIN 33-2548076). Membership and donations fund curation, infrastructure, and public access.
Membership runs in four tiers — Reader (free newsletter), Member, Supporter, and Patron — carrying benefits like ticket discounts, early access, free merch, monthly meetups, and recognition. One-time gifts are fully tax-deductible.