This article first published in CLOT Magazine as Part 1 and Part 2 of "Against the Experiment, exploring ten years of Backslash at Cornell Tech".

In 2023, I visited the exhibition “Between Performance and Documentation: Contemporary Photography and Video from China” curated by Nancy Lin and Ellen Avril at Cornell’s Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, N.Y. Near the end of the exhibition, amongst photographs and videos documenting performance art in China from the 1980s and 90s, stood six monumental wooden structures, each holding a large portrait-oriented screen. The structures reminded me of wooden crates rearranged into obelisk-shaped pillars. The monitors on each of the pillars showed bright-colored videos that depicted what seemed like an environment straight out of a video game—snowy landscapes, underground mine shafts, and fantastical villages surrounded by silhouettes of mountains and overflown by colorful dragons. The installation was Miao Ying’s Pilgrimage into Walden XII Project, Chapter I: The Honor of Shepherds (2019–20), which the label indicated was created through a program (then) called \Art. This was the first time I heard of Backslash at Cornell Tech. I was intrigued. As someone who studies and writes about the complex and intertwined relationship between art, science, and technology, my curiosity was piqued. I thought, “we have an art-and-technology program at Cornell?” “Why didn’t I know about this!”

Backslash (or simply \) is Cornell Tech’s art funding program supporting artists and creatives whose practices are described as “nonlinear, unconventional, unexpected, adventurous, intense, surprising, questionable, and primed for engagement with new technologies.” The program offers different financial structures (fellowships, grants, microgrants) to fund projects at various scales, from smaller student projects to major collaborative works between visiting artists and Cornell faculty and graduate students. To date, Backslash Artists and fellows include Matthew Weinstein, Kate Gilmore, Mika Tajima, Miao Ying, Devin Kenny, Christie Neptune, Jen Liu, Mimi Ọnụọha, Chando Ao, Noah Feehan, Xin Liu, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Niko Koppel, and Tianyi Sun. Since its inception in 2016, the program has undergone continuous transformation—shifting names, restructuring its funding mechanisms, expanding its focus—evolving, as technology does, through iteration and reiteration rather than stasis. No art initiative remains static, of course, but there is something fitting about a program embedded in a tech campus that treats transformation as a feature rather than a bug. Still, one throughline has persisted: the program’s commitment to pairing artists with technologists and its insistence on the production of a realized artistic output; in other words, not a demo or a prototype, but something complete that can be presented to the public. Backslash is not about the experiment of partnering artists and engineers, but the receipts, the results that such a partnership can generate.

The program is the brainchild of founding fellow at Cornell Tech Greg Pass, then the campus’s Chief Entrepreneurial Officer and a former Chief Technology Officer at Twitter. The conception of Backslash, as Pass explained to me, must be understood within the context of Cornell Tech’s establishment in New York City and the school’s founding vision. From the beginning, rather than limiting itself to traditional engineering education, Cornell Tech aimed to encompass the full spectrum of technology’s role in society, the economy, and culture at large, positioning itself not merely as a satellite extension of Cornell University in New York City, but as a distinct entity designed to leverage different resources and programs to fulfill this vision. The campus emphasizes outputs and public outreach: since its founding in 2012, for example, Cornell Tech has implemented yearly open studio events where students present their work to the general public in order to cultivate a sense of academic accountability and to ensure a continuing connection between scholarly research, technological innovation, and society.

Art and design, likewise, have been essential components of this vision and Backslash is one element of this, one branch of the tree. In 2017, Cornell Tech opened its permanent campus on the south end of Roosevelt Island in the former site of the Blackwell’s Island Penitentiary. The construction of the Emma and Georgina Bloomberg Center, one of the campus’s main buildings, stipulated the allocation of one percent of its budget towards art installations. The building features five permanent installations created by Michael Riedel, Matthew Ritchie, Matthew Day Jackson, Ilya Bolotowsky, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor. Moreover, interinstitutional exchanges have been created to integrate design into Cornell Tech’s curriculum, including collaborations with students at Parsons School of Design. These collaborations were facilitated through connections with Parsons professor Justin Bakse and later expanded with the establishment of Cornell Tech’s M.S. in Design Technology.

Within this framework, Pass was interested in creating an initiative to further facilitate student engagement with the intersection of art and technology. The program drew inspiration from various precedents, including Rhizome’s Seven on Seven (7x7) program, in which seven artists are paired with technologists for a day-long collaboration “to make something new.” (In fact, the 2025 Rhizome 7x7 was hosted by Backslash at Cornell Tech.) Pass, however, who previously served as board chair of Rhizome for ten years until 2024, didn’t want to simply recreate 7x7 at Cornell Tech, so a new structure was devised. The new program’s initial designation was ArtFoo—foo being a term derived from computer science terminology to denote a placeholder or arbitrary variable, a stand-in for something yet to be defined. The name later changed to \Art, and then simply Backslash.

The move from ArtFoo to Backslash was due to multiple reasons. The backslash gave a different meaning to the endeavor. In programming, the \ character functions as a so-called escape character, indicating that subsequent elements require a different interpretation. As Pass told me, this character can produce unexpected outputs and behaviors, “not what they’re meant to be.”Kernighan and Ritchie’s seminal book on the C programming language, known simply as K&R and first published in 1978, explains that the \ character “provides a general and extensible mechanism for representing hard-to-get or invisible characters.” In layman's terms, \ signals a change of interpretation to whatever is in front of it (what literary theory calls defamiliarization, an operation that changes the way a word is read and interpreted in order to see it in a new light). This way, “\n” means the “n” is not really an “n” but a “new line.” Another example is “\a” which in C language triggers a small ring sound, the so-called bell character and Pass’s favorite example of the use of \. (Curiously, a “\\” means the second “\” is not this special escape character but an actual “\”—it’s the world upside down, two negatives making a yes.)

When one learns about Backslash at Cornell Tech, probably the first thing to note is its branding and visual identity. When I first discovered the program, an ASCII art \Art banner dominated the upper half of its website. Later, a custom-made font consisting entirely of backslashes was created by New York-based design studio Cotton. But the name and its striking visuals (and, frankly, the discomfort it produces when you attempt to read the text on its website) are, I think, more than clever branding. It articulates a certain philosophy. I read the move from ArtFoo to \Art, and eventually to Backslash, as the consolidation of a more ontological shift in the way the program is conceived, a transition from open-ended potential to declared intervention. Foo suggested tentativeness, an experiment still searching for its form, a placeholder. Backslash, by contrast, suggests an action to us: it interrupts, escapes, and transforms the meaning of what follows. It asks that we question what art might look like and compels us to be open to new art forms, new languages. With \, the program now had a theory of itself, a way of articulating what art might do when embedded within a “true technology” campus, as Pass often describes Cornell Tech—meaning, a place where technology is considered in all its dimensions, not only as an engineering problem but as a social force, economic engine, and cultural condition.

Like its name, the program has transformed and evolved through trials and new iterations. In its earliest incarnation, for example, Backslash functioned as a post-graduate fellowship through which recent Cornell Tech graduates were essentially hired to work and collaborate with artists. This is how artist Matthew Weinstein worked with Brandon Plaster and Alap Parikh (both 2016 M.S. in Information Science and Connective Media graduates), and Kate Gilmore with Renee Esses Wolfsdorf and Nishad Prinja (both 2017 Meng. in Computer Science graduates). The fellows would travel to the artist's studio on a set schedule, working side by side to develop projects over the course of the fellowship, which lasted anywhere from six months to a year. (Plaster, for example, shared with me that one of his favorite memories of the program was riding his bike along the East River to Weinstein’s studio in Green Point.) This was, in effect, a job: a bridge between finishing a degree and entering the workforce, but one spent in the service of artistic production rather than a tech startup.

When I spoke to Plaster, Parikh, Wolfsdorf, and others, they all expressed gratitude for this arrangement. The fellowship gave them a paycheck and a purpose while they figured out their next steps, a rare luxury in the anxious limbo that often follows graduation. Today, the model has shifted. Artists work primarily with current students, and in some cases, faculty serve as advisors or collaborators. More graduate students from the Ithaca campus are also involved. Current Backslash fellow Lawrence Abu Hamdan, for instance, is working with Laura Cortés-Rico (PhD, Information Science, 2028). Additionally, as the initiative has grown, Backslash Artists overlap. Currently, Tianyi Sun and Niko Koppel have been developing their projects simultaneously rather than in sequence. These are year-long collaborations, after which presentation timelines and contexts remain flexible, allowing works to be exhibited in ways that best align with each artist’s practice.

The ethos around working with technology has also shifted, if slightly. A 2017 pamphlet circulated among fellowship recipients emphasized “the artful application or innovation of cutting-edge digital technology” and described the program as aiming “to create new art, new art forms, and new art technologies.” Similarly, an older Cornell Tech Impact page from July 2019 described \Art as a program that “supports bleeding edge technological interventions into artistic practice.” Today, the language around technology has softened. Backslash is interested in supporting artists and artworks that are “unconventional” and “unexpected,” as the new description reads, all adjectives that emphasize disposition rather than technical novelty; in other words, less foo and more \. The shift, in my opinion, suggests that Backslash has moved away from a preoccupation with newness and toward something harder to pin down: a certain sensibility, perhaps more conceptual than technical, in which the appropriate technology serves the artwork as opposed to the artwork matching the newest technology.

Jen Liu’s project, for instance, which culminated in her video work The Land at the Bottom of the Sea (2023), began as an exploration of Large Language Models (LLMs) and image generation programs to explore how to visualize the people and voices that have disappeared or have been “liquidated,” as she puts it. Liu, who worked with Soul Choi (2022 MS in Information Science graduate), soon realized the limitations of these technologies and “how ideological machine learning was.” Through conversations with Choi and others, Liu’s project morphed into, as she explained to me, an exploration of “the limits of machine learning to point to a larger inability to see.” Liu is no stranger to the use of new technologies as material and conceptual tools in her practice, and she is well embedded in the art-and-technology community (she was the recipient of LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab grant). But her Backslash project is less a probe into using machine learning for art-making and more a reflection of what we, as society, expect these technologies to do or reveal.

This emphasis on concept rather than tools is also observable in the student projects Backslash funds through microgrants. For example, 2024 microgrant awardee Kara Myren created a Pink Noise Quilt, which translates a digital signal-processing concept into a handcrafted textile. Kara used software to visualize a pink noise filter, a type of random signal distribution commonly used in electronics and audio applications, then posterized and pixelated the image to reduce its 255 shades of gray to a manageable palette. The resulting grid was matched to pink fabrics sourced from a New York City fabric store and hand-sewn into a 30 x 30” quilt, now on permanent display at Cornell Tech’s MakerLAB. The project exemplifies how a technical idea can be executed into an artwork using more traditional media like textiles.

To be clear, I believe the shift I’m talking about is more rhetorical and narrative than programmatic. From the start, Backslash has supported artists whose practices are fundamentally idea-driven—artists for whom technology is a material to think with rather than a new toy. Weinstein, for instance, was interested in creating what he called an “anti-interactive” work. Gilmore, on the other hand, was less interested in technology than in the performativity of physical gestures and their cultural and political associations. Ying's Pilgrimage into Walden XII, for all its visual dazzle, is ultimately, as I see it, a meditation on gamification, labor, and the seductions of virtual utopia. In all these cases, the technology does matter, clearly, but it was never really the point. What seems to have changed is the way the program talks about itself—a recalibration of emphasis from the tools to the questions those tools might help pose.

Once again, what has remained constant is the emphasis on the partnership and the creation of an outcome that can speak for itself outside the figurative walls of the program. To achieve this, the interaction between artists and technologists is crucial. There is no fixed project proposal at the outset. Artists are not expected to arrive with a fully formed concept awaiting execution. Instead, the work emerges through conversation—studio visits, meetings, the slow accretion of ideas exchanged between people who think differently about problems. When I asked Liu if Backslash introduced any new tools or technologies into her practice, she replied, “they didn’t give me any tools, they gave me the human.” The shape of the project and the texture of the work emerge from a real conversation between partners. Cornell fellows are creative contributors to the work, not only in the way they solve technical problems but also in how the project shapes up conceptually and physically. The technologists and engineers aren’t merely technical hands executing someone else’s vision. They bring their own expertise, their own curiosities, their own sense of what a technology might do.

For Matthew Weinstein’s The Living End (2017), for example, the artist wanted an animation that would respond to the audience without viewers necessarily being aware they were influencing it. The work needed to feel ambient, reactive, almost alive—but not like a video game waiting for input. To this end, Plaster and Parikh experimented with different systems before eventually settling on the game engine Unreal and a set of Kinect sensors to collect data from the room, such as the number of viewers present, the location of a randomly selected viewer, a viewer’s breathing rate, etc. The sensors needed to be positioned very close to one another as they were calibrated in relation to each other. They also need to remain attached to the Kinect camera. It was a finicky technical problem with no off-the-shelf solution. Plaster ended up fabricating a 3D-printed contraption to hold everything in place, a small but essential piece of custom hardware born out of necessity. The anecdote is minor, but it illustrates the texture of these collaborations: a solution emerging through conversations and improvisation rather than specification. For the Cornell fellows, moreover, this was also a window into different ways of producing creative outcomes. “It was nice,” Plaster told me, “to work in tech for something other than a product to be consumed.” This, ultimately, is what Backslash is about: not technology itself, but the conversation between people who think differently, and the unexpected things that emerge when they build something together.

The creation of a collaborative environment for artists and technologists is not an entirely new concept, of course, and it is worth placing Backslash within this longer history—as an art historian, I would be remiss if I didn’t. (Greg Pass himself is aware of this longer history.) The second half of the twentieth century witnessed a boom in the creation of interdisciplinary initiatives at the intersection of art, science, and technology.Some emerged through grassroots partnerships, others formalized into institutional programs that would shape the landscape for decades to come. Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), founded by Robert Rauschenberg and the engineer Billy Klüver in the 1960s, brought together artists and Bell Labs scientists to collaborate on performances, sculptures, and installations. MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS), established also in the 1960sunder the direction of György Kepes, offered artists residencies within a research university. LACMA’s Art and Technology program, which ran from 1967 to 1971, paired artists with corporations in Southern California's aerospace and electronics industries—a model that, for better or worse, anticipated the tech-company residencies that would become fashionable half a century later. These initiatives established a template: put artists in proximity to engineers and scientists, give them time and resources, and see what happens.

Backslash inherits this tradition, but its positioning within a technology-focused graduate campus sets it apart from many of these early initiatives. The program is better understood, I believe, within more recent university-based efforts. MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), the successor to CAVS, operates on a broader scale and with a wider institutional mandate. CAST collaborates with departments, labs, and centers across MIT. Its scope encompasses visual artists, musicians, composers, and performers, and its Distinguished Visiting Artist program—through the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist residency—typically appoints artists for an entire academic year. The scale of MIT’s program, however, goes far beyond visual art, and it usually engages with late-career artists from different disciplines. Similarly, Princeton’s Fund for Collaborations between Artists and Scientists or Engineers encourages collaborations between faculty in the arts and those in the natural sciences or engineering. Another initiative, closer to home, is CUNY’s Art and Science Connect, housed at the Graduate Center in Manhattan. This initiative brings artists and scientists together, aiming to spur cross-disciplinary research and teaching. Although all these programs share a certain Zeitgeist, many of them emphasize the academic nature of their endeavors.

What distinguishes Backslash from many of these, I think, is its insistence on producing finished artworks rather than research papers, curricular experiments, or symposia. There is something almost contrarian about Backslash’s emphasis on a finished product. In the academy, process is often prized over product; the research paper, the conference presentation, the grant report, all document what was learned along the way. Art-and-technology programs, in particular, have tended to valorize the experimental, the prototype, the proof of concept, the demo that gestures toward a future application or work that may never arrive. Backslash asks for something more committed. The fellowship exists not to explore a question or test a hypothesis but to make something that can stand on its own in a gallery or museum, something complete enough to meet an audience–the echo of the campus’s open studio spirit I mentioned at the beginning. This is a subtle but significant distinction. It means that the collaboration is accountable not just to the institution or to the collaborators themselves but to the broader public that will eventually encounter the work.

For all its strengths, however, the program has room to grow in various ways. One is the need for a dedicated space, both for collaboration and for presenting finished work to the public. The Backslash studio inside the Tata Innovation Center, which opened more recently, is a gesture toward addressing this, and the sporadic use of Cornell Tech's MakerLab offers another partial solution, although many of the artists I spoke to mentioned they rarely worked within these spaces. Also, Backslash still lacks an exhibition space or gallery of its own. Perhaps this has been a blessing in disguise, forcing the projects developed through the program to truly live outside the university, at museums, in galleries, and institutions where they can reach broader audiences. The program could also benefit from thinking more systematically about the longevity of the works it produces. Some previous Backslash fellows I talked to expressed concern that the pieces they created might not be exhibitable just a few years down the line, a familiar problem in technology-based art, where hardware becomes obsolete, and software stops running.

Another area that might benefit from attention is the selection process itself. Without naming anybody, a couple of the artists I spoke to intimated that they felt they were "the wrong person for the program." Some questioned the fit between their practice and the program. In some cases, the projects didn’t seem to run too smoothly, both in conceptual and practical terms. A more rigorous emphasis on artists already committed to thinking critically and materially about technology might strengthen the program’s identity. Then again, too much definition might run counter to the spirit of openness and flexibility that has allowed Backslash to evolve as it has. The tension, perhaps, is the point. One thing is clear to me, however. Beyond the particulars of how the program has operated over the past decade—its evolution, what distinguishes it from similar initiatives, and the areas where it might improve as it enters its second decade—Backslash has served as an incubator, in the most literal sense, for thoughtful artworks born from collaboration between artists and technologists. And these works have proven to be, as we say in the industry, “exhibition ready.”

A final thought about the value of this program. Although, as I have argued throughout this essay, Backslash insists on visible, concrete outcomes, often as works of art that can be exhibited, experienced, and encountered by a public, it has also produced some unexpected returns: it has launched careers. Alap Parikh, who collaborated with Weinstein on The Living End, used his experience with Backslash to immerse himself in the culture of art and technology. “Back then,” he told me, the thought of being an artist “was a pipe dream.” Since his fellowship, Parikh has worked on numerous creative projects involving VR and storytelling through XR. He credits Backslash with helping him reorient his entire career; without it, he suspects, he’d be working at some startup. By chance, I ran into some of his post-Backslash work in the wild at an exhibition at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. He served as technical director on Captured (2018–21) by Hanna Haaslahti, a piece now in the ZKM collection. The fellowship, it turns out, was not just an incubator for artworks but for the people who make them.