Gray Area Showcase Winter 2020

This work bridges the domain of audio and the dimensions of visual inputs. The participants manipulate effects allowing an exploration of embodied sonic textures, developing one’s intuition for how non-musical parameters take on a melodic role.
Sonic Apparatus uses p5.js and Tone.js to stimulate the visuals by reacting to the sounds, synthesizing sonic properties and textures. Dissonance and harmonies become apparent, and harder-to-grasp concepts of effects take on physical form for the eyes to understand. 

This year has been one in which we've been challenged to ask ourselves about our relationship to the world and our communities. First, we were confronted with a virus and a pandemic that meant we had to take extraordinary actions to help limit its spread. Then, there was the social upheaval resulting from the unjust murders of black citizens by our police. And finally, we experienced a huge amount of misinformation and anxiety relating to our electoral/political process. We've been challenged as a society in a way that none of us can fully comprehend. We are left with doubt, fear, anxiety, and exhaustion.

San Francisco's landscape was altered by both the emptiness caused by the pandemic and the natural disaster of this season's fires. This became the basis of these meditations. Mandalas help us to focus and create a sacred contemplative space where we can observe our environment and understand where we find ourselves in it. This work seeks to create a space where one can explore both the interior self and the exterior world. 

At the start of the 2020 pandemic, and for many, what has been the enduring reality since then, the city’s vibrant street life, its daily rhythms and ebbs and flows have dissolved. At the same time, most have retreated to their interior bubbles, leading to isolation. 
Heightened thresholds seeks to highlight the division between the interior and exterior exacerbated during the pandemic and highlight the heightened emotional threshold between the two. 

At the start of the 2020 pandemic, and for many, what has been the enduring reality since then, the city’s vibrant street life, its daily rhythms and ebbs and flows have dissolved. At the same time, most have retreated to their interior bubbles, leading to isolation. 
Heightened thresholds seeks to highlight the division between the interior and exterior exacerbated during the pandemic and highlight the heightened emotional threshold between the two. 

CRAYONS is an exploration into becoming a character inside a child’s drawing.

Computer vision, edge detection and facial recognition are often used for research projects and functional applications. How might we use the technology for creative activities to bring joy through familiar visual artifacts, and explore new ways of sketching on the digital canvas?

The project takes inspiration from children’s crayon and oil pastel drawings, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings, and Myron Kruger’s works on body movements to blur the lines between the physical and digital spaces.

This discursive tool engages people in a technologically mediated experience with nature as climate change fundamentally alters our experience of it. Climate change, in conjunction with our historical suppression of forest fires, has caused these now regular catastrophic seasonal events. It is a self perpetuating cycle as the carbon sequestering and climate change mitigating power of forests is negated as their biomass burns. The tool enables the user to ‘identify’ burnt tree leaves falling from trees in burning forests. However, more importantly, it is intended to increase awareness of relationality between ourselves and nature, with the belief that such engagement is the first step in positive futuring.

Using AR on your phone, you can view burnt leaves, which are brown, warped, broken, and sometimes bubbling, falling down around you. Tap on a leaf to identify the species. The leaf images used are ones posted on social media, by people either asking for help with identification or just reaching out to others sharing their disbelief of how far some of these leaves have traveled. Many of these leaves have drifted in with ash from trees burning miles away. In that regard, the project also shows how physical distance and sense of place becomes truncated in our shared experiences of poor air quality and falling ash. You can explore the map at this link to see spatial data about fire perimeters retrieved from open-source government data, and locations where the leaf specimens were found: https://www.alexandraharker.com/Leaf_AR/map

Eventually, the AR tool can evolve to use the user’s geolocation, real-time spatial data about wildfires, and machine learning to provide specific leaf identification suggestions. For example, identification suggestions can take into account specific characteristics of different leaf species when burnt, wind directions, locations of wildfires, user proximity to wildfires, and data on tree species in wildfire locations.

Thank you to the following people who generously shared their photos and stories with me for this project:

Barbara Harker
Chris Holmes
Christine Jennings
Denise Gilmer
Heide Keeble
Jennifer Jewell, Cultivating Place
Karen Gebbia
Kim Armstrong
Laura Nininger Devlin
Loren Roman-Nunez
Michelle Halbur
Sarah Reid
Vivian Watkins Lenzini
Peggy Edwards

This discursive tool engages people in a technologically mediated experience with nature as climate change fundamentally alters our experience of it. Climate change, in conjunction with our historical suppression of forest fires, has caused these now regular catastrophic seasonal events. It is a self perpetuating cycle as the carbon sequestering and climate change mitigating power of forests is negated as their biomass burns. The tool enables the user to ‘identify’ burnt tree leaves falling from trees in burning forests. However, more importantly, it is intended to increase awareness of relationality between ourselves and nature, with the belief that such engagement is the first step in positive futuring.

Using AR on your phone, you can view burnt leaves, which are brown, warped, broken, and sometimes bubbling, falling down around you. Tap on a leaf to identify the species. The leaf images used are ones posted on social media, by people either asking for help with identification or just reaching out to others sharing their disbelief of how far some of these leaves have traveled. Many of these leaves have drifted in with ash from trees burning miles away. In that regard, the project also shows how physical distance and sense of place becomes truncated in our shared experiences of poor air quality and falling ash. You can explore the map at this link to see spatial data about fire perimeters retrieved from open-source government data, and locations where the leaf specimens were found .

Eventually, the AR tool can evolve to use the user’s geolocation, real-time spatial data about wildfires, and machine learning to provide specific leaf identification suggestions. For example, identification suggestions can take into account specific characteristics of different leaf species when burnt, wind directions, locations of wildfires, user proximity to wildfires, and data on tree species in wildfire locations.

Thank you to the following people who generously shared their photos and stories with me for this project:

Barbara Harker
Chris Holmes
Christine Jennings
Denise Gilmer
Heide Keeble
Jennifer Jewell, Cultivating Place
Karen Gebbia
Kim Armstrong
Laura Nininger Devlin
Loren Roman-Nunez
Michelle Halbur
Sarah Reid
Vivian Watkins Lenzini
Peggy Edwards

This discursive tool engages people in a technologically mediated experience with nature as climate change fundamentally alters our experience of it. Climate change, in conjunction with our historical suppression of forest fires, has caused these now regular catastrophic seasonal events. It is a self perpetuating cycle as the carbon sequestering and climate change mitigating power of forests is negated as their biomass burns. The tool enables the user to ‘identify’ burnt tree leaves falling from trees in burning forests. However, more importantly, it is intended to increase awareness of relationality between ourselves and nature, with the belief that such engagement is the first step in positive futuring.

Using AR on your phone, you can view burnt leaves, which are brown, warped, broken, and sometimes bubbling, falling down around you. Tap on a leaf to identify the species. The leaf images used are ones posted on social media, by people either asking for help with identification or just reaching out to others sharing their disbelief of how far some of these leaves have traveled. Many of these leaves have drifted in with ash from trees burning miles away. In that regard, the project also shows how physical distance and sense of place becomes truncated in our shared experiences of poor air quality and falling ash. You can explore the map at this link to see spatial data about fire perimeters retrieved from open-source government data, and locations where the leaf specimens were found .

Eventually, the AR tool can evolve to use the user’s geolocation, real-time spatial data about wildfires, and machine learning to provide specific leaf identification suggestions. For example, identification suggestions can take into account specific characteristics of different leaf species when burnt, wind directions, locations of wildfires, user proximity to wildfires, and data on tree species in wildfire locations.

Thank you to the following people who generously shared their photos and stories with me for this project:

Barbara Harker
Chris Holmes
Christine Jennings
Denise Gilmer
Heide Keeble
Jennifer Jewell, Cultivating Place
Karen Gebbia
Kim Armstrong
Laura Nininger Devlin
Loren Roman-Nunez
Michelle Halbur
Sarah Reid
Vivian Watkins Lenzini
Peggy Edwards

‘All the Faces We’ve Seen’ is a visualization of the keepsake box we store in our minds. We’ve all seen countless faces in our lives. Some of these faces are engrained deeply within us and are connected to deep emotion while other faces are gone in a moment but will always be linked to a certain familiarity. This piece is a simulation of where all of these faces are stored. 

Tap-a-lap-splash is an interactive rhythm experience about seeking flow and calm. This year I haven't been able to swim since March, with public pools closed and the ocean inaccessible without travel. I've missed swimming in open water particularly. There's a certain irony to missing the chosen isolation of being out in the ocean, away from anything but the water, when so much of this year has been a forced isolation. 

In the practice of open water swimming, managing your heart rate and spatial awareness with rhythmic timing of strokes and breaths allows you stabilize yourself amidst an unstable and often unpredictable environment. I miss the focus and intention of that practice, and wanted to make something to share that experience.

'Early words' is an abstract model of the fascinating language acquisition process of 18 to 36 month olds. It aims to cast light on word comprehension and production. The data used is intentionally cross-linguistic to serve as a reminder that multiple languages can be acquired simultaneously in the same abstract space and be enriched by it. 

The words displayed are filtered by age, but not by language. Eggs hatch to reveal them as they are acquired by the hypothetical multilingual toddler. The words occupy a space above the grass made out of the sounds of babbling. Today, out of approximately seven thousand known languages, only a handful are dominant. Words from all languages are valued equally in this abstract space. 

The piece was created with the Wordbank: An open database of children's vocabulary development from Stanford University's Language and Cognition Lab.

Primary data source: Frank, M. C., Braginsky, M., Yurovsky, D., & Marchman, V. A. (2016). Wordbank: An open repository for developmental vocabulary data. Journal of Child Language. doi: 10.1017/S0305000916000209.

'Early words' is an abstract model of the fascinating language acquisition process of 18 to 36 month olds. It aims to cast light on word comprehension and production. The data used is intentionally cross-linguistic to serve as a reminder that multiple languages can be acquired simultaneously in the same abstract space and be enriched by it. 

The words displayed are filtered by age, but not by language. Eggs hatch to reveal them as they are acquired by the hypothetical multilingual toddler. The words occupy a space above the grass made out of the sounds of babbling. Today, out of approximately seven thousand known languages, only a handful are dominant. Words from all languages are valued equally in this abstract space. 

The piece was created with the Wordbank: An open database of children's vocabulary development from Stanford University's Language and Cognition Lab.

Primary data source: Frank, M. C., Braginsky, M., Yurovsky, D., & Marchman, V. A. (2016). Wordbank: An open repository for developmental vocabulary data. Journal of Child Language. doi: 10.1017/S0305000916000209.

Give & Take explores online collectivism through a communal bowl. Inspired by an Exploratorium exhibit, viewers can keep images they like and contribute images for future visitors to discover. Each viewer is alone in their choices, but connected to other viewers as what's in the bowl evolves.

Give & Take explores online collectivism through a communal bowl. Inspired by an Exploratorium exhibit, viewers can keep images they like and contribute images for future visitors to discover. Each viewer is alone in their choices, but connected to other viewers as what's in the bowl evolves.

CRAYONS is an exploration into becoming a character inside a child’s drawing.

Computer vision, edge detection and facial recognition are often used for research projects and functional applications. How might we use the technology for creative activities to bring joy through familiar visual artifacts, and explore new ways of sketching on the digital canvas?

The project takes inspiration from children’s crayon and oil pastel drawings, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings, and Myron Kruger’s works on body movements to blur the lines between the physical and digital spaces.

Every second of every day, millions of bits and bytes of information are thrown across the internet from computers across the world. In every nook and cranny there's 1's and 0's being produced and stored, and like great mountains they sits, untouched. Text logs from hundreds of livestreams go unread by anyone, including broadcasters, and never amount to anything more than visual noise at the side of a screen. After a week, most of them will never be read again.

The aim of Endless Net is to take the cacophonous message spit out daily and transform it into art; to create another intersection for interaction between people. Nonsense made people people, transformed by machines, and sent back to the group for all to see in real time. It never forgets, and it never stops.

Gray Area is proud to present this biannual exhibition of artwork fostered within our Artist Incubator and Creative Code Immersive Education programs. With our physical space unavailable, each artist transitioned their physical installation work into the evolving digital realm. This showcase is hosted solely online in our networked virtual theater developed in partnership with New Art City.

Gray Area Incubator Artists: 
Ayse Demir 
Brandon Eversole
Ryan Smith 
Stephen Standridge 
Steven Piasecki

Creative Code Immersive Artists: Alexandra Harker 
Angela Lee
Apoorva Rao Balevalachilu
Carly Robison
Cecilia Tran
Christopher Stein
Domingo-Rafael Narvaez
Emily Barry
Linh Pham
Mae	Ross
Martha Hipley
Najiyah Edun
Rachel Green

Gray Area is San Francisco's premier cultural hub catalyzing creative action for social transformation applying art, science, technology, and the humanities towards some of the world's biggest challenges. We operate the historic Grand Theater in San Francisco's Mission District, generating platforms that enable creators to transcend boundaries through antidisciplinary collaboration. Through public events, education programs and incubation we bring together diverse cultures and communities to engage creatively with the critical Issues facing our rapidly changing society.

Virtual exhibition developed in collaboration with New Art City.

Gray Area has lost significant revenue from the closure of all live events due to COVID-19. Please consider donating to enable our continued support for the local creative community.

Soundwave NEXT: Re:Seed 

On December 10, Soundwave and Gray Area present the debut performance of Re:Seed, a sonic ritual dedicated to planting new futures. Seeds bear new life and new possibilities for life on our planet. Throughout the cyclical nature of existence, one of the most important components is the planting of seed, something our ancestors have done, and our descendants will continue if we are to survive. In the face of the breaking down of our world structures, reseeding and nurturing the life it brings forth is also what will allow us to to continue to explore new ways of existing. Re:Seed is an audio/visual performance created as a space for us to call in and retrace this simple act and to realize its vast interconnectedness through our past and our future trajectory as beings that only exist because of our interdependence with all other life on this spaceship, to realign us with renewed life affirmation and a space for visioning what we can build if we are also watered and cared for

Transgenesis: Short Film Screening & Artist Roundtable


On December 17, join us for the rough-cut premiere of Transgenesis, a short film made in collaboration with QTPOC artists that collectively re-imagines our relationship to the Bay Area, and what we consider family, our bodies, and the environment.