Media & Technology Company Moving Headquarters to Mass MoCA
NORTH ADAMS, Mass. — A media and technology company is moving to Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts.
The Mass MoCA Commission on Monday approved a tenant agreement for Kinetek Inc., which will relocate its headquarters from Montpelier, Vt., to Building 1.
Principals Hugh and Debra McGrory and their new business partner Eyal Rimmon were introduced by Morgan Everett, head of public initiatives and real estate for MoCA.
"Kinetic is generative media company, working at the intersection of film, art and emerging technologies. They do a lot of amazing work," he said. "We're incredibly excited to welcome them to the Mass MoCA campus and to the North Adams community. They're an amazingly talented group and I can't wait for all of you to get to know them and see their work."
The McGrorys had worked in the field in New York City for a dozen years before shifting to Vermont during the pandemic. They've now moved to North Adams with their 4-year-old daughter. Rimmon said he was glad to be back in North Adams and had worked for a prior technology company at MoCA for four or five years.
They hope to become more involved in North Adams and in the arts community.
They also have an office in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where Hugh McGrory is from. He told the commission how that city is undergoing an economic resurgence in part because of HBO's "Game of Thrones" and later "Blade Runner" and "Star Wars" setting up production there.
"We think that they can learn a lot from also Mass MoCA and vice versa," he said."So we're kind of, you know, we're going to be building a pipeline to try to marry the best of both worlds."
The three will be working out of the 1,300 square foot studio for clients creating large-scale digital art.
"We're gonna be developing large-scale kind of immersive experiences that can tour globally," McGrory said. He compared it to the popular Van Gogh immersion show. "That that was made like 18 months ago but was like 180 years ago in technology nodes. So that was like a glorified slideshow. ...
"What we can do now is so bigger and greater than that, and it's such a joy to be able to be partnered with a museum and able to talk to fabricators and curators and marketing teams that can work with us to go, 'how can we take that from maybe 2 percent where it is now and imagine what like 90 percent could be."
Debra McGrory said she and Rimmon were more on the producer side and that they have connections in creative fields such as music and artificial intelligence generation "kind of all the niche specialties to make Hollywood-level immersive experiences."
Hugh McGrory gave an example of the work they could do. Their chief AI artist working in Belfast had won a prestigious short-film festival last year with a film he created on a single computer.
"We're not just tenants at MOCA, we feel like this is a partnership and one of the missions that we see ahead of us is that as you know, MoCA has a lot of artists coming to be there in residence," Rimmon said. "We want to be the shop, the AI, the new technology shop that basically opens the door to all these artists to come in and enhance and explore and think about new ways to design and to basically exhibit their art."
While most of their work in international, McGrory said they want to introduce their capabilities locally. "We want to have an open door we want to meet as many people as we can we want to be as useful as we can," he said.
Kimma Stark, project coordinator at MoCA, also gave the commission a review of upcoming events.
• Holiday week hours will be Wednesday through Monday from 10 to 5 except for Tuesday, Dec. 26, and closing at 3 p.m. on Dec. 24. Closed Christmas Day but open on New Year's Day.
• Family Storytime, a partnership with North Adams Public Library, for families with children up to 6 years old. The story times are at 10:30 a.m. with related exploration in the galleries for free, on Thursday, Jan. 4, and Saturday, Jan. 20. The story times run twice a month.
• Community Free Day is Saturday, Jan 27: the annual free community celebration offers thematic museum tours, art-making in Kidspace, "Firebird" installation viewings throughout the day, and more.
• The "Firebird" installation, the culmination of Touki Delphine's residency, contains more than 600 recycled car taillights, sourced locally in the Berkshires, will illuminate the dance of the firebird. The premiere is Friday, Jan. 26, at 8 p.m. with tickets $10.
Tags: new business, mass moca, technology,
