 A hundred years ago, the Bowery was one of the roughest places in New York. It was the eastern border of Five Points and home to the Bowery Boys, one of America's first street gangs. A lot's changed. Now it's an arts center, home to a bunch of restaurants, a handful of artists, studios, and importantly for us, the New Museum. Inside the museum, things get pretty weird. Right now the second and third floor are devoted to the Polish sculptor Paweł Altomare, and Paweł himself is wandering through the building, stripped naked to the waist and covered in yellow body paint. The fourth floor is open to the public. Anyone can paint whatever they want on the walls. The fifth floor is decked out to look like a Soviet spaceship. They pride themselves on showing off the newest, most innovative art in the city, but this month they're launching a project that's really unlike anything a museum's ever done. It's called New Ink, a kind of half-workspace, half-incubator that's being set up in a building next door to the museum. They've already signed up the experimental architecture program Studio X from Columbia, and Rizome, an arts and tech organization that's affiliated with the museum. Starting today, they're looking for designers, creative coding projects, basically anyone doing cool things with a computer. All of these people, their common thread is that they're kind of working with technology in an experimental way. By placing all of these different disciplines in a small space together, new ideas might emerge through the sort of creative collision of all of their different practices. There's a really rich tradition of art on the Bowery. Artists like Maya Lin and Bela Bartok have had studios just across the street. Arts have also launched here. Kickstarter's first offices were just a couple blocks away. Part of the point of the incubator is to bring those two traditions together. If all you need is a workspace, it's easy to find a cheaper one. New Ink is going for something more, a cross-pollination between art, tech, and design, the kind of magic you get when a lot of smart people are all doing exciting things in the same place. The interesting thing is that's happened on the Bowery before. Whether it's 70s punk or 60s pop art, this one street has seen this kind of neighborhood renaissance over and over again. In the end, New Ink is betting on one more renaissance that designers and coders can piece together another golden age.