New Value Institute

About

New Value Institute is a practice-based research institute and artistic intelligence framework initiated by Jingyi Wang. It develops from an expanding body of Live Art practice in which artistic works function as prototypes, methods, and testing grounds for value systems.

NVI works through three connected layers: Works create live situations, Labs extract mechanisms and protocols, and Research gives these methods theoretical, methodological, and public language. Through this structure, artistic practice becomes a way to study how value is produced, judged, negotiated, contested, legitimized, governed, and transformed.

About

New Value Institute takes value as its primary field of inquiry.

It begins from artistic practice because Live Art can construct temporary institutions with real rules. Within these situations, people, institutions, technologies, resources, promises, emotions, conflicts, and forms of attention can be placed into designed conditions. Value becomes something that can be experienced, tested, judged, exchanged, negotiated, and questioned.

NVI develops these artistic situations into labs, protocols, research, archives, and collaborations. Its works create testing grounds. Its labs extract mechanisms. Its research gives these mechanisms theoretical and methodological form. Its archive preserves the materials through which the works can be studied. Its collaborations carry artistic intelligence into new institutional, technological, civic, and economic contexts.

The institute grows from Jingyi Wang’s long-term artistic practice, including Post Capitalistic Auction, JUDGE ME, Voice to Voice, and The Butterfly Entangled Effect as key background projects. These works form part of a larger and expanding research trajectory on value, judgment, legitimacy, labour, ecology, AI, governance, and future institutions.

Statement

NVI treats value as one of the central public questions of the coming decades.

Value is shaped by systems of measurement, exchange, judgment, governance, legitimacy, attention, care, computation, and utility. These systems decide what counts, who is heard, what is rewarded, what is excluded, what can be converted, and what remains outside existing forms of recognition.

Today, value is increasingly organized through AI, automation, tokenization, metrics, rankings, financial instruments, institutional criteria, and algorithmic decision systems. These tools can make value more visible, transferable, scalable, and actionable. They also intensify a deeper question: how can societies work with values that are incommensurable, incomputable, incalculable, or resistant to utilitarian reduction?

New Value Institute develops artistic intelligence as a way to work with this question in public. Artistic intelligence is the capacity to create forms, situations, and protocols through which complex values can be perceived, tested, negotiated, contested, and transformed.

NVI begins from Live Art because artistic situations can construct temporary institutions with real rules. Within these situations, value can be acted on before it becomes a price, a score, a ranking, a KPI, a token, or an algorithmic objective. Artistic practice becomes a testing ground for forms of judgment, negotiation, legitimacy, governance, and exchange that existing systems often struggle to hold.

The institute is practice-based and research-driven. It works through artistic works, labs, writings, archives, protocols, and collaborations. Its purpose is to develop new value frameworks for a world where economic, technological, ecological, and human systems are increasingly entangled.

At its core, NVI asks what should count, who has the authority to judge, how legitimacy is produced, and how future institutions might be built around complex forms of value.

About the Founder

New Value Institute is initiated by Jingyi Wang, an interdisciplinary artist, researcher, director, and mechanism builder born in Beijing who has long lived and worked between Norway and China. Her practice constructs performative systems for testing how value is produced, exchanged, judged, narrated, and legitimized beyond market price.

Her major recent works include Post Capitalistic Auction, JUDGE ME, Voice to Voice, and The Butterfly Entangled Effect. Across auctions, trials, interviews, listening structures, living systems, and AI-mediated environments, she turns social forms into public mechanisms for examining value.

Wang holds degrees from Peking University, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the Erasmus Mundus Master in Performing Arts. Her projects have received long-term support from Arts Council Norway; JUDGE ME was selected for ISPA's 2023 New Works program and received the Arte Laguna Prize in 2024.

NVI gives this body of work a long-term institutional form. It is a place to develop the methods, writings, protocols, archives, collaborations, and future structures that have emerged from her artistic practice.

Jingyi Wang speaking with a microphone