As an extension of our first in-person Artist Showcase since the pandemic, Gray Area hosted the virtual spotlight exhibition SPECULATIVE BIOLOGIES, featuring two new interactive media works from our Creative Code Intensive by Elizabeth Leister and Nathan Schager. Installed online and available for the public to experience for free, the pieces included in this selection speak to the capacity for simulation to serve as a mode of speculative discovery.

In this exclusive interview, these two artists spoke about their process, the concepts and execution behind their work, and what drives their artistic practices. Leister is an established media artist and a professor at CSUN who didn’t necessarily have a coding background before the intensive; Schager is programmer at TikTok and Stanford graduate with a creative side that was brought out by the intensive. Each with their unique backgrounds of practice, both artists worked in A-Frame to build 3D Web speculative biological artwork and VR experiences as part of Gray Area’s Creative Code Intensive.

We are excited to have Nathan Schager join as an instructor for the next in-person session of the Creative Code Intensive course starting on Tuesday, September 20th! Click here for information on how to apply, create, and showcase your creative code projects like these.

Elizabeth Leister’s “mad song of a little bird”

Elizabeth Leister is an LA-based digital media artist and professor whose practice includes video installation, drawing performance, and through the Intensive, augmented reality. For SPECULATIVE BIOLOGIES, Leister introduced her work “mad song of a little bird,” a two-part virtual and physical piece.

The virtual component of the work is an imagined 3D landscape suggesting land and sea plant-life, cohabitating in a future nature. Invoked into action by the climate crisis and need for environmental policy change, Leister was inspired to make an experiential piece to immerse her audience in an interactive world. She walked us through her process of creating this piece.

“A lot of artists during the pandemic were trying to build spaces as a way of escaping what was happening in our real spaces.”

And so her virtual garden of “mad song” is filled with abstract life, many of them models created by Leister in TiltBrush during Gray Area’s Creative Code course in early 2022. Amongst these models of life are interactable images that seem to recite lines from Clarice Lispector’s novel Agua Viva (Stream of Life).

Rather than merely presenting facts and data about bird populations and species disappearing, Leister to us she took a more poetic approach.

“It was really challenging working in HTML this way … but I imagine this is just the starting point. I imagine building three different gardens, one about birds, one about butterflies, and one about bees.”

Leister also created a physical simulation of what it might feel like to walk into that virtual space. Using projection mapping, Leister took video capture from that virtual world and projected it into her studio, leveraging her other practices such as performative drawing and experimental play. Created during the recent Roe v. Wade overturn, this portion of the work was both a companion piece to the virtual world of “mad song,” as well as commentary on our relationship with the environmental health of our planet and individuals’ body sovereignty.

“My work is always this push pull. I’m very interested in the digital and technology, but I’m also very interested in performance and the body.”

“I think that there are definitely connections to landscape, the environments, and feminism and women’s experiences, and it’s something that I’ve touched on in many of my projects in many ways … The struggle for autonomy, for respect for the body and the environment.”

“mad song of a little bird” is available online to explore here.

Nathan Schager’s “Abyssal Connections”

Nathan Schager is an augmented reality, media artist, and programmer exploring unfixed and liminal, the in-betweens of identities and transformation. Based in the Bay Area, his work explores the use of simulation to create spaces for dialogue to occur between otherwise distant points. As a member of the Gray Area Incubator, Schager showcased his piece “Abyssal Connections” as part of SPECULATIVE BIOLOGIES.

“Abyssal Connections” is an interactive aquatic simulation of ethereal, glowing invertebrates. These creatures are individuals, communicating through a procedurally generated language only understood to them, but perceivable to the viewer through their bio-luminescent glowing. Inspired by the simplicity of their own pet snail, Schager focused on how invertebrates might communicate.

“In this current ecological situation, what would these creatures have to say to us?”

Schager started by thinking about language, specifically from the perspective of Wittgenstein’s concept of a language-game. In this approach, words are not assumed to carry any fixed meaning. Instead, the meaning of a word is reliant upon the “game,” or verbal context, in which it is being used. Various generated language-games form the basis of the languages that Schager’s creatures use to communicate.

For the in-person showcase, this environment was projected into the space, and visitors were invited to interact with its creatures through a mobile UI. They could choose to feed or talk to the invertebrates, and watch the creatures’ reactions.

Schager plans to continue their work on this piece by adding more complexity to the ecosystem simulation, as well as by adding streaming information from real data sources such as ocean temperatures.

“I’m interested in exploring this interaction between humans and these creatures … I like the idea of attaching this digital ecosystem to a real one, even to create a voice for the ocean.”

“Abyssal Connections” is viewable here.

We at the Gray Area are proud to showcase these amazing artists and their work coming out of the Creative Coding Intensive. Want to hear more? Check out the livestream of their spotlight, and apply for the upcoming Creative Code Intensive here!

The Creative Code of SPECULATIVE BIOLOGIES was originally published in Gray Area Learn on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For our 7th edition, Gray Area Festival presents Worlding Protocol — a survey of interdisciplinary creators drawing upon indigenous knowledge, transhumanist philosophies, regenerative ecologies, and autonomous organizations to imagine new relational ontologies beyond utopian and fatalist worldviews. Our annual survey of culture through the lenses of technology and creative practice features artist presentations, conversations, workshops, and an exhibition — now accessible online around the world.

Wade Wallerstein is a digital anthropologist and curator whose work addresses the emotional, embodied aspects of our online experiences. Founder of Silicon Valet and Co-director of TRANSFER Gallery, Wallerstein has brought his deep engagement in the internet art community to Gray Area Festival, resulting in a far-reaching roster of artists and thinkers grappling with what it means to be human in the digital age.

What kinds of conversations informed this year’s festival program?

Last year, my mentor and close colleague at TRANSFER Gallery, Kelani Nichole, curated the Gray Area Festival, which was titled Radical Simulation. I wanted to take this idea of Radical Simulation, this idea that we can use technology to create new futures, and I wanted to complicate it a little bit. I think that there’s other aspects to this story related to identity, surveillance, data policy, and all these different protocols that confine and constrict people. So this year we’re taking that idea of Radical Simulation and expanding it, complicating it, and rooting it in a way of looking at the world that takes into account a holistic approach to planetary dialogue, and that acknowledges the possibilities, but also the pitfalls.

Can you talk more about WORLDING PROTOCOL? What was its genesis? What do those words mean to you?

“Worlding” is about taking an expansive and a holistic approach to what a world is. It’s about creating a universe that incorporates all the different pieces, all of the living and nonliving beings all together. It’s looking at all of the pieces of what makes a world and incorporating them in all their complicated, contradictory, paradoxical ways. Amidst all of that, I’ve been fascinated with this idea of protocols. One of the speakers at this year’s Gray Area Festival, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, wrote a book in 2006 called Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, which took a realist approach to the current technological dystopia that we live in. I don’t even really like the word dystopia because I think it’s reductive and counter to this idea of holistic, expansive worlding. The crux of Chun’s book is that the Internet is neither a total control state nor a utopia. It’s not this Jeremy Bentham-esque panopticon, but neither is it this free territory where we can do whatever we want. The internet is controlled by a physical protocol — the fibers, the cables, and the data packet switching that makes it all possible. All those different pieces of infrastructure have politics and social dynamics that are embedded into them and how they function. At the same time, the internet is too big and too diffuse to be a total control state, so we’re in this interesting place between control and freedom.

I’ve always been interested in worldbuilding and the capacity for technology to imagine alternative pathways, but I’m also really interested in this idea of protocol. Protocol isn’t just a technological term. Protocol refers to social protocols that we’re not even conscious of, to physical protocols like gravity, to all of these things that define how we live and operate and move through the world. I wanted to kind of bring these two together, and think about how we can work within the protocols around us to think through new ways of worlding, to imagine different possibilities, and to conceptualize who we are as a planet of human and non-human beings. Thenmozhi Soundarajan is giving a talk about the “metaverse,” which has been a prominent buzzword over the past year, and how ridiculous it is that people are investing in a metaverse when Black and Brown people are still persecuted all around the physical world. Her talk is really going to pose a lot of questions about why we can’t just leave physical reality behind. That’s the perfect encapsulation of Worlding Protocol — we have the possibilities to create an alternative metaverse, but we also can’t disavow what’s happening to our bodies. We as human beings have to breathe, have social interaction and be loved in order to function properly. We have to work with that, or we have to figure out a way to rewrite those protocols.

Tell me more about DIORAMA, the festival exhibition in New Art City.

DIORAMA is the immersive virtual exhibition that accompanies Gray Area Festival. It exists in the multi-user, online, three-dimensional environment of New Art City, which was founded by d0n.xyz, and is now led by Sammie Veeler, who’s the Gallery Director. I invited Don and Sammie because I’ve always been impressed with their ability to create tools that allow artists to build their own worlds.

The idea of diorama came out of thinking through the possibilities and the restrictions of a web environment where people can be together in a three dimensional immersive online space. It’s not totally possible to build an entire world because there are file and bandwidth restrictions and other technological barriers. There’s a reason companies like Blizzard Entertainment or Riot Games or any of these other huge companies employ thousands of people to build their immersive game environments; it’s very complicated. So in New Art City, what we can do really well is create a diorama. I’ve been working with online display environments my entire career, and what I’ve noticed is that many times what we create isn’t necessarily an entire world, but it’s a diorama of something much larger. Most of the artists I work with are thinking about entire universes, entire cosmologies in their practices. How do you present that? Maybe on paper, maybe in someone’s mind, maybe in writing, maybe through pictures that give you windows into it — we get all these kinds of fragments of the world. But when we put those fragments together, it creates a dialogue or a sketch of something much bigger. All the artists in Gray Area Festival are doing just that — they are engaged in their own practices and worldbuilding, and what they’ve created are ultimately small dioramas, small windows or scenes that give you the sense of what the world is, but it’s not the full world. It creates a really interesting dynamic between the possible and the not possible, the possible worlds and the restrictions that are put in place by the tools we have available.

On top of that, the diorama is a museological technology that has been utilized for hundreds of years to impart information, to tell stories, and to ultimately preserve and disseminate knowledge. It’s a really complicated and problematic device. Dioramas have roots in colonial, patriarchal, and racist practices that are damaging to communities and the environment. Each artist is presenting a diorama of their worlds and in doing so, is both critiquing and experimenting with this much longer narrative of what the diorama has been in our museological environments.

The work is an idea, the art is the idea, and the artwork is a diorama of that idea. In order to fully engage with DIORAMA, you can’t just go to the exhibition, you have to see the diorama and then enter the full world of the artist. I think a great example of this comes from Keiken, which is a collective that will be presenting a work called Wisdoms for Love 3.0, a metaverse game piece. It comes from their larger practice of worldbuilding where they’ve created an entire universe and this game is only one piece of that universe. We have created a diorama that represents objects and moments from within that game world, so you get this glimpse of the Wisdoms for Love 3.0 universe and you have the opportunity of clicking through and actually entering that game universe. We’ve tried to provide all of these different windows into these worlds, so that the show is a small representation, but then you can click past and click through and actually go to some of these places.

I love this idea of glitching or re-mixing the “protocol” that is the museological diorama format. It also reminds me of your anthropological background, this glimpse into the artist’s world. Is that academic training something that informs your curation of the exhibition?

I went to UCL in London and studied digital anthropology. It gave me this perspective where I want to look at artworks not for their monetary value, for their rareness, or even for the technical skill required to produce it. I’m much more interested in what the artwork is doing, how it affects people, how it moves through our society, and what that means on a much broader, sociological level. The core tenet of my curatorial practice is rooted in the word phenomenology, which is a totally academic word, but it’s really meaningful. According to Christopher Tilley, who I studied under at UCL, phenomenology is the relationship between being and being in the world. Phenomenology happens in the distance between the subject and the other, so there’s this difference, or alterity, that exists in between. I think that is one of the richest ways that we can think through art, society, politics, and the kind of problems that we face. It’s thinking about our relationship to this thing, as a subject, as a viewer. Oftentimes, when we look at curated shows, it’s more about what it’s teaching us and not about what it’s doing to us, not about how we are being transformed by what we’re looking at. If we root our curatorial endeavors in this idea of experience, we can connect more deeply to how it’s going to impact the viewer.

How do you and the artists create meaningful, emotional experiences with virtual art?

Embodied is the key word here. We experience the world through our bodies, there’s no way around that, no matter what ability you have, you still experience the world through your body. That is our entry point into everything. Even if we’re looking at a virtual experience as an avatar or cursor, our bodies are engaged, our eyes are looking at the screen, we’re sitting in a chair, we’re moving a mouse, and we’re touching something in order to make something happen. All of those embodied experiences are what make understanding and learning happen. Something else that is really important to consider here is that everything that we do, from the way that we pick up a spoon to the way that we open our laptops and send an email, it’s all socially constructed. It’s all learned behavior, and nothing is natural. There are certain protocols for our behavior, but those protocols are determined by how other people have decided to use their bodies. It all comes back to this kind of constellation of experience, social construction, and the world around us. And I think by kind of plumbing those depths, we can reach a richer connection to the artworks and ultimately be able to investigate them and put them into practice in ways that are more tangible and more effective.

The framing for the festival wrestles with the tension between utopian and fatalist approaches to technology. Can you talk a bit about how/whether you see technology as a tool humans can wield to enact the futures we want?

As a curator, I come up with a hypothesis, and then I ask a bunch of artists to think about that hypothesis, and then we figure it out together. Sometimes we find answers, sometimes we don’t. And that’s kind of the fun of all of it. There are so many conversations around topics like gaming, net neutrality, and technology addiction, and we’re barraged by either ultra-utopian or ultra-fatalistic views, and there doesn’t seem to be a lot of stuff in the middle. Not to be corny, but I wanted to explore the gray area between these two worldviews. Worlding Protocol tells us it’s a little more complicated than that. Everything is interconnected, and there isn’t one answer. But I hope that by embracing complexity and taking a holistic approach, we can think through problems in more useful ways that are more encompassing of what is possible. That’s where we find richness. That’s where we find meaning. And that’s how we can look at these problems in ways that will be more ultimately beneficial to everyone.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Just that this show was only possible because of the contributions of every single artist and producer involved. I don’t really work as a solo curator, I’m always thinking collectively. As much as my name is coming up as the curator for this show, I’m just one of a number of people who have been exploring this idea. I can’t say enough about how amazing Sammie Veeler is and how she’s helped me think through this idea of the diorama. This idea of Worlding Protocol got really personal really fast for everyone involved. We have a number of artists whose pieces I had selected, but they decided to make entirely new pieces in response to the theme because they felt they needed to deal with the questions in a different way. But again, what we’re presenting is just a tiny slice. They’re small windows into much larger worlds with much bigger questions. I hope that, more than anything, this program is generative for the audience members and helps them develop a set of skills to analyze the protocols that govern the world around them.

Tune in October 20–26 for the 2021 Gray Area Festival at grayareafestival.io.

This interview was conducted by Hannah Scott, and has been edited and condensed for clarity.

May 19, 2021 — Over the past half century, the Grand Theater on Mission Street has been home to a cinema, a dollar store, and now an eclectic creative community of media makers. This group of artists and producers has assembled around Gray Area’s revitalization of this historic Mission District building. As an invitation to join this creative community, Gray Area, ZERO1, and Crowbar Corner have teamed up to launch the Grand Creative Resource Library — a lending library offering the tools needed to make your own media art.

Paired with access to workshops, labs, incubators, and events produced by the contributing partners, this collective resource will eliminate barriers to creation at the forefront of art and technology. Our shared vision is to put creative power into the hands of fellow community members who want to express themselves in innovative new ways, regardless of the resources they may have available to them. Bridging the digital divide begins with a sharing of resources and skills. The network formed through this simple reciprocity will bind the creative community we build together.

The Library launches on May 19, 2021 with an initial focus on tools to create electronic music and sound art. Thanks to a generous donation of unique analog synthesizer equipment by New Systems Instruments, Mr. Bill, Shawn Allen, and Ryan Smith from Crowbar Corner studio, paired with MacBook Pros and iPads loaded with Ableton Live, VCV Rack, and other production software, we will be making available portable, self-contained, sound studios.

Borrowers from the Grand Creative Resource Library will receive a basic orientation to the equipment they check out. They will then be given priority access to active workshops in the Grand Theater community that employ these tools. We are proud to offer resources to sustain and advance an inclusive creative community. The Grand Creative Resource Library prioritizes opportunities for students and creators from diverse backgrounds that are underrepresented in the fields of art, music, and technology.

Those interested in borrowing our equipment to realize their sonic dreams can access the request form on the Grand Creative Resource Library page here.

The Grand Creative Resource Library is a collaboration between Crowbar Corner, Gray Area, and ZERO1.

About Crowbar Corner

Crowbar Corner is an electronic music production studio with a unique collection of instruments both vintage and modern, high end monitoring and I/O. It has been the laboratory for acclaimed electronic music releases as well as cutting edge sound art and large scale performances at the Gray Area Theatre. Members: Ryan Smith, Marc Kate, Jacob Sperber.

www.grayarea.org/create/crowbar-corner/

About Gray Area

Gray Area is San Francisco’s premier cultural hub catalyzing creative action for social transformation — applying antidisciplinary practice towards some of the most complex challenges facing our world. Gray Area’s mission is to apply art and technology to create social and civic impact through education, incubation and public events. www.grayarea.org

About ZERO1

ZERO1 is a nonprofit arts organization that addresses complex social challenges by producing community driven emerging media and digital art projects. We believe that artistic experimentation with emerging technologies inspires novel creative strategies and broaden our critical understanding of the world. Through a global network of partners, we bridge governmental, academic, corporate, and cultural worlds to build engaged and vibrant communities that drive social action. www.zero1.org

By tywen kelly

Process is a new series that builds on the themes of the Gray Area Festival 2020: Radical Simulation, using immersive worldbuilding to reimagine adjacent possible presents. Process asks artists to narrate the chronology of specific works, from inspirations to iterations to incarnations. By telling the story of how new media art is made, Process spotlights the side of it which is soft, ever in flux, and most importantly, made by people.

Sarah Friend has found a way to play with software protocols. Specializing in peer-to-peer (p2p) and blockchain development, she has a deep technical toolset and a spirited knack for intervening in large systems. She works as an engineer at Circles UBI, a project which equalizes wealth distribution on the blockchain, and is founder and curator of the ongoing Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft. Her works range from browser-based experienced, such as ClickMine, to decentralized protocol art such as Remembering Network, a p2p digital seed vault, to physical installations, and AR experiences.

Sarah will be hosting a three-part workshop at Gray Area called “Your Friendly Guide to NFTs And Blockchain for Artists” starting on April 24. I chatted with Sarah about her work in the world of p2p and blockchain artistic development.

How did you get interested in peer-to-peer technologies?

I’ve been writing software since 2014, and I’ve been writing blockchain related software since 2016. I first started at a place called The Recurse Center, which is kind of like an unschool, retreat, or residency, for software developers. It was there that I took time and took a moment to learn about this new subject, which was blockchain.

Blockchain was a different world back then. None of the things that people talk about now, like NFTs, existed. I was obsessed with the idea of creating digital places, like digital nation states, that were alternative places where we could be citizens, and that could meet the needs our own governments weren’t meeting — maybe.

I felt that these alternative online nations needed to look like actual places. So at Recurse Center, I worked on a library integration with the game engine Unity. In hindsight, it still sounds like a crazy far out project — there was barely any documentation, and it was such an unusual combination of technologies.

Were you always interested in computer science?

I have an art degree. I studied painting, and I learned to program a little bit later. In 2006, when I started at OCAD, it was a really different world: software wasn’t accessible the way it is now. You couldn’t just Google how things work and teach yourself with the ease that you can now. There are all these moments, when I think about, in my life before I decided to teach myself to code and focus on it, where I almost learned to program, but I kind of missed it somehow. There was no computer class in my high school, I didn’t have any family members who understood that that was something that they could encourage, none of my teachers understood what it was. So there are instead these moments where I just missed it: like writing adventure games through an Excel spreadsheet as I kid. When I think about it now, that was programming.

When you start at OCAD, you don’t have a major. You pick your major in your second year. And I don’t want to be a cliche, but I think there is a really gendered dynamic to me turning away from software for a while and focusing on painting.

So you were a painter. Did you learn anything from your painting practice that you think has carried over to your work today?

Okay, this is a joke, but I like to say it. I think that art school is really great, especially painting. Painting has such a chip on its shoulder. You have to justify yourself as a painter. Why am I painting this? Why didn’t I take a photograph of it? You get really good at explaining yourself [laughs].

I think that artistically, there’s a lot of modalities that I learned from the more traditional art world that I applied in the software world. And one of them is definitely undertaken by many artists in the glitch art territory too but I think it’s something that I learned from painting, which is that sometimes a mistake, or the thing that you paint wrong, ends up actually being the most interesting and best part of the work.

And so as an artist who makes software this means I am writing it line by line. I’m engaging with the code as a craft process, which is very similar to how I used to engage with painting: with my hands in it. There’s definitely a category of artists who work with software who are movie directors, and then there are others who have their hands on the camera. And I think that it’s a different type of working to work with your hands on the camera like that. By painting, I learned a really engaging-with-the-medium, almost formalist approach to software.

Is there a time where working with your hands in the code affected the project?

I have a project that I’m going to launch in the next couple of weeks. It’s an NFT project. But it’s a really weird NFT project. And I’m not launching it on an NFT marketplace, I’m actually making my own NFT marketplace, because I’m crazy and I love to work and hate having fun [laughs].* The project has changed a lot while I was making it as a result of the specific library that I was using.

At first, I found this directory listing of all major device screen sizes since the iPhone 3, which I scraped. Then I thought, with all these NFTs with their shiny 3D people and whatever, wouldn’t it be just really comical to list 300 solid black JPEGs which will fit perfectly on your device? And so I was scraping this site, and I thought, I kind of want to learn Rust for no real reason at all. So I decided to make my NFT project in Rust, and it turns out the library for generating and saving images in Rust — which deserves to be shouted out, it’s called Image—makes it so easy to work with images. It has such a nice interface for changing the value of a single pixel.

From there I thought, “This is not hard at all to change a couple pixels here and there.” And I thought about hiding data in individual pixels. It’s not a QR code, but it’s a piece of data that’s hidden in black on black pixels, two shades that are distinguishable from a computer but not to the human. And the data that’s hidden is going to be encrypted in such a way that it can only be read when you have all or two thirds of the images on your computer.

That’s a software story about the way that a tool can change the work. If I had been hiring someone else to write the software, there’s no way the project would come out the same. Now the whole project is about hiding stuff in the images. [Editor’s note: this project was later released under the title “Off”]

Also, going back to your previous question, I also think that in the nondigital traditional art world, there’s a concept of making something that is “site-specific.” And this is something I think about a lot a lot with the way I work with technology now: technologies as platforms or as places that we make site specific interventions into. It’s something I think about a lot in my peer to peer work, and actually all across my practice is one of the biggest themes.

How do you make something site-specific when blockchain is inherently site nonspecific?

Maybe the site in that case is the protocol itself. Right? What does the protocol afford or enable uniquely that other protocols don’t afford and enable? That’s kind of the question that I’m always asking. The blockchain world enables creating digital things that can behave like assets, it enables engaging with finance, directly. I mean, to me, the thing that’s always been interesting about that is asking “Oh, cool, what if I fuck with them?”

Your idea of protocol as site peeks through in your piece ClickMine (2017). Can you talk more about the process of working with the protocol as a medium there?

ClickMine (CLK) is an ERC20 protocol token. It was created in 2017 when we were experiencing a blockchain news hype cycle. ClickMine is a really satirical project. Although it is issuing an actual ERC20 token, it is issuing an ERC20 token that mechanically speaking is designed to be useless in just about every way that it can be. And one of the mechanisms is that you can get it for free. By clicking in the game, you just have it minted to you. But you don’t even just get it minted with every click, you get minted more and more of it the more you click. So everyone ends up with these astronomically high silly balances, pretty quickly. The total supply of CLK and circulation of CLK is some number I don’t even know how to pronounce. And this was extra funny to me at the time.

There’s a huge sense of speculative-imaging in your work. With regards to your art, what do you think a desirable future is for you?

I’ve been talking about it a lot with the crypto world actually lately, because I think it’s important to not build dystopian things. The world is making dystopias faster than I can imagine them. It’s so easy to appropriate the tactics of something that I don’t like or want and then just…. ClickMine is like this. I would not make ClickMine today, because ClickMine exists mostly in the mode of satire. It’s mostly just replicating and accelerating things that are already going on that I may be critical of. And so with the new NFT project, I actually see it as being hopeful. I really hope everyone will share and that together they’ll have the final better thing of the secret being revealed.

And Circles, which I worked on, was also this. Circles is a community currency and is supposed to work like a universal basic income, or at least like a currency that has a more equal wealth distribution. I always thought there’s almost no chance this project will get majorly adopted, but it’s important to make this science fiction gesture of how it could be. We have this ability to invent new monetary systems, the possibility space is huge, and Bitcoin is the one you picked? Like really, everybody?

I don’t have a great answer for that: what should future worlds look like? Actually, no, I do, I totally want to live in Star Trek [laughs].

I do think in the past few years I have been trying to make work that is not only critical, but suggestive of ways to maybe engage with the many things that are very bad and scary, and also show a way through them. Anyone who sits there and stares and tells you that they know, and they have one idea for what the future utopian world should look like, that person is a totalitarian, maybe a fascist. Nobody knows! We need to allow flexibility in this. There’s no answer. We’re gonna get there slowly.

*Editor’s note: Sarah clarified that she will avoid launching on a PoW chain like Ethereum 1.0, to avoid environmental costs.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Sarah Friend
Sarah Friend is an artist and software engineer, specializing in blockchain and the p2p web. She is a participant in the Berlin Program for Artists, a co-curator of Ender Gallery, an artist residency taking place inside the game Minecraft, an alumni of the Recurse Center, and an organizer of Our Networks, a conference on all aspects of the distributed web. She has been working in the blockchain industry for over 5 years, from the perspective of both an artist and a software developer at one of the largest blockchain companies in the world. Her most recent project is Circles UBI, an alternative currency that tries to create more equal distributions of wealth.

By tywen kelly

Process is a new series that builds on the the themes of the Gray Area Festival 2020: Radical Simulation, using immersive worldbuilding to reimagine adjacent possible presents. Process asks artists to narrate the chronology of specific works, from inspirations to iterations to incarnations. By telling the story of how new media art is made, Process spotlights the side of it which is soft, ever in flux, and most importantly, made by people.

How do you make art across many mediums, delve into a range of motifs, and come out the other side with a cohesive oeuvre? Caroline Sinders knows how. Sinders is a cross-disciplinary artist of many talents: she writes research papers, creates data sculptures (Between Systems and Selves), installs interactive experiences (Higher Resolutions), and hosts long-running conversations (Feminist Data Set). She engages with topics like artificial intelligence, human rights centered design, and online harassment. Despite the range of themes and materials, Sinders treats each with the same degree of rigor. Behind every piece is devotion to thoroughness. No stone is left unturned.

Caroline Sinders is both a practicing artist and a researcher at Convocation Design + Research, an agency she founded which focuses on the intersections of machine learning, user research, designing for public good, and solving difficult communication problems. She will share her knowledge across these fields in her new course at Gray Area on Ethics In UX: Human Rights & Privacy starting on April 17th. I spoke with Caroline to discuss her artistic process and its roots.

For some artists it’s easy to say, “they’re a sculptor,” or “they’re a writer,” or “they’re a teacher.” I feel like your work spans everything. If you had to put a label to it, what would you say you do?

I’m pretty medium agnostic. I describe or think of my work as either translating or telling stories about really complex things. I started my career off as a photojournalist, and then I got a master’s in interactive technology. I like to use aspects or rubrics of research and journalism and apply them to tech art. A good friend of mine, Anna Riddler, describes my work as “expanded documentary,” which I think is a very, very eloquent way to describe what I do.

What does “expanded documentary” mean?

All my projects are really constrained by data. They’re really constrained by research. And I think a lot of my work is sort of direct in a way because it’s really constrained by data, but I want it to be constrained. I feel like a lot of the more traditional art or fine art, even if it’s like tech based art, ends up being a poetic interpretation of an idea. And I feel like my work doesn’t want to be a poetic interpretation. It wants to be a poetic analogy of data, or rather, it wants to be closely tied to data.

This is where expanded documentary is a really good framing for my work, because I want to have a conversation, and I want to have that conversation under the auspices of research driven critical design. So if a lot of poetic art is a sentence, or a tweet about a subject, I’m much more interested in writing an essay about that subject. As an artist I’m interested in not just making work about research, I’m interested in generating the research and then making artistic interpretations about it.

I have a solo show coming up with Telematic in San Francisco called Architectures of Violence, and it’s on harassment, harm, and protests. A lot of the pieces are focused on white supremacy in digital spaces.

Another example in the project Higher Resolution with Hyphen Labs, we were having really specific conversations about policy. A lot of the text we were using was referencing policy discussions that were happening in the UK and in the US. We discussed facial recognition and emotion recognition. We were getting people to talk about and vote on why these features should be banned. And so the work was a bit more advocacy-based and had a call to action.

How did you get interested in technology?

I have always really liked technology. In high school, I didn’t want to build websites, but I was interested in the people who decided things about LiveJournal. There was this moment when I got into this weird internet argument with this girl who was a friend of my best friends, and she was kind of a bully. I wrote about her bullying me on my LiveJournal, and she read it, and showed her mom. And then her mom told our mutual friend’s mom and they called my mom and they sat us all down and we’re trying to talk about why you shouldn’t talk about people on the internet.

Except the problem we were facing was that I had described her bullying me. I just remember looking at all of the parents, really struggling to talk about LiveJournal, and realizing, oh, our parents literally have no idea what’s going on with technology. And I just remember thinking at age 16, well, that’s really fascinating. Is there a way that I could work on this, helping people understand technology?

You also worked with photography and photojournalism before going into research and art.

I went to NYU Tisch undergrad for photography. My photo work in undergrad was very inspired by Tina Barney. She would photograph her family in ways that were very evocative of casual wealth. But the photographs themselves looked like they could be photojournalistic photos. They were photographed in a way where they looked almost like 18th century paintings. Everything was too perfect, and also too casual. That aesthetically had a really big impact on my work. And so my senior thesis in undergrad was a meditation on my family surviving Hurricane Katrina — my whole family’s from the Gulf Coast of the American South. I made 12 photographs that I arranged in a specific formation on a wall, and it was called Foundations. The photographs were of my family reenacting the casual moments we had, but in our new homes that we moved into after Katrina. I think all of that really shaped how I saw image making and how I saw truth reporting and the manifestation of facts. And I still lean back on a lot of stuff I learned in undergrad.

How do you bring that process of truth reporting to your process today?

If I’m engaging with a subject, it’s because I find it so interesting that I’m going to spend months or even years on it, and I’m going to research many different sides of it. When I decide to manifest it into an art project usually what happens is I’ll first write something. So it’ll be an essay, it’ll be an article, it’ll be a research paper. Then I think about, well, do I have an advocacy or an activist role there. Usually, I’m looking at something related to harm — something that’s problematic or something to be solved. So then I have that lens as well, where I have an idea of what I would want to see different or changed. Then out of all that I make art.

All of those steps are really important to me. Because I’m interested in change, and I’m interested in documentation, but I’m also interested in future imaginaries and advocacy based speculation.

Right, when I look at your work I don’t think it’s this pure cynicism of the tech world. There’s something beyond that.

I’m interested in criticism in the way I’m interested in investigative journalism or breaking news — I’m more interested in the “Yes, and.” When people say, “Here are the problems with misinformation.” I say, “Great, what are the experiments we can try right now? What is the alternative to this if we could completely start over?” With Feminist Dataset, for example, that asks: what is an equitable way to create a dataset together? How do you make a feminist Mechanical Turk, without augmenting Amazon? What would a cooperative look like if we rebuilt it totally from scratch? Those kinds of conversations are the ones I’m really interested in having, and they’re very difficult conversations to have, because it’s asking people to think in a purely imaginative way by recognizing the faults of where we are, right now.

And so for me, I am really hopeful about the internet. And I don’t know if that’s a form of self preservation. For me to keep doing the research work that I do, which is about human rights, technology, and research, I have to be hopeful that something is better that we are improving, or I don’t know if I’d be able to do this work. But I am hopeful, I am hopeful that we can build aspects of the web we want.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Caroline Sinders
Caroline Sinders is a critical designer and artist. For the past few years, she has been examining the intersections of artificial intelligence, abuse, and politics in digital conversational spaces. She has worked with the United Nations, Amnesty International, IBM Watson, the Wikimedia Foundation and others. Sinders has held fellowships with the Harvard Kennedy School, Google’s PAIR (People and Artificial Intelligence Research group), the Mozilla Foundation, Pioneer Works, Eyebeam, Ars Electronica, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Sci Art Resonances program with the European Commission, and the International Center of Photography. Currently, she is a fellow with Ars Electronica AI Lab with the Edinburgh Futures Institute and a visiting fellow with the Weizenbaum Institute looking at labor and systems in AI and platforms. Her work has been featured in the Tate Exchange in Tate Modern, Victoria and Albert Museum, MoMA PS1, LABoral, Wired, Slate, Quartz, the Channels Festival and others. Sinders holds a Masters from New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.

Process is a new series that builds on the the themes of the Gray Area Festival 2020: Radical Simulation, using immersive worldbuilding to reimagine adjacent possible presents.. Process asks artists to narrate the chronology of specific works, from inspirations to iterations to incarnations. By telling the story of how new media art is made, Process spotlights the side of it which is soft, ever in flux, and most importantly, made by people.

“How do we exhibit internet art?”

This is a question Don Hanson has been grappling with for a while, he tells me. Hanson goes by the handle d0n.xyz. His handle is also the internet address to his website. He explains that when his handle is published online, sometimes it is automatically converted into a hyperlink, generating a bit of foot traffic to his site. Clearly Don understands how things work on the web, which makes sense, as he is a practicing internet artist.

“Does it make sense to take internet art out of digital space and put it into a physical gallery? Maybe not.”

We’re discussing a recent project Don has been working on with a small team for the past year called New Art City. It’s an online virtual exhibition space that runs in the browser. It’s not the scroll-a-thon kind with an endless grid of square PNGs and size 11pt font captions. Nor is it Zoom call. No — New Art City is a depth-realistic depiction of 3D space, an almost video-game-like experience set in a gallery space (or not), 3D models, virtual picture frames housing videos, and spatial sounds. On top of that, one can see diamond-shaped avatars wandering and jumping around the virtual gallery, veritable extensions of viewers tuning in from their homes. It’s also been popular. Art galleries and individual artists alike, from bitforms to Rosa Menkman, have used the New Art City toolkit to easily imagine and realize their virtual exhibition spaces.

Don believes in “not going against the grain of a digital piece.” If a digital piece is exhibited in physical space, or vice versa, then that piece is mediated and part of its essence compromised. His oeuvre is testament to practicing what he preaches. Take More Plants (2018), a chrome extension that places images of houseplants randomly over your browser viewport which can be clicked and dragged out of the way if it blocks something. More Plants is a piece endemic to the digital. Presented in a physical gallery it would be mediated, compromised, if it could exist at all, as a physical entity wouldn’t be able to impart an interactive experience, a crucial component of the work.

In March of 2020, Don was in the midst of an MFA at San Jose State University when lockdown hit, and suddenly he and his classmates were not allowed to gather in a real space to exhibit their theses. “The prototype was really born out of necessity,” says Don. All of a sudden a wave of public need aligned with his research. Art galleries could no longer show work in-person, so they turned to look for virtual alternatives. Now, his problem was everyone’s problem.

To actually create the online exhibition space, Don tapped Three.js, an open source library that allows developers to efficiently run 3D graphics in the browser. It was a tool he had already been experimenting for a few years already, and this knowledge allowed him to quickly iterate on designs and features for New Art City. He began with adding the ability to upload pictures, randomly disperse them in space, and the ability to walk around and check them out from all angles.

Right away understanding the scope of the project, Don brought on two collaborators, Martin Mudenda Bbela and Benny Lichtner to unite forces on New Art City’s development. Don tells me, “We were just three developers for a pretty long time, figuring it out, building stuff.” With early prototypes they would share drafts with a core group of other internet artist friends, iterate on their feedback, then another draft to a wider audience on social media for more general feedback.

At this stage an early prototype was used to exhibit undergraduate work at San Jose State University (SJSU). 30 students uploaded their works for their end-of-year show, during which they banged on the product as de factor beta testers. The New Art City prototype also ended up hosting the SJSU digital art department’s commencement, underlining to the trio the effectiveness of creating a virtual space with copresence. As interest continued to grow, the three brought on Sammie Veeler to lead external conversations in bringing on new exhibitors. A little later Christina Lelon joined the team to lead user research. Don emphasized that New Art City was a group effort all along, and not a one-man show. “I didn’t have to convince any of my team members to join this project. Everyone was excited to put the time in and help it grow.”

Don cited the “net.art” art group in the 90’s, who were early movers in the art genre called net art or internet art, and how they were a group early on to display their art online, in situ. New Art City is a work that builds on this legacy, but is different in that it provides an easy-to-use toolset: “What we’re creating is a reproducible format. This is a tool that can make many, many exhibitions.” For those who want to be able to put on an online exhibition, one no longer needs to code or hire a coder. The interface for those creating exhibitions in this toolset was designed to be accessible to non-coders. “It’s really like a content management system, just like a Squarespace, but it’s 3D.”

To date, New Art City has been the conduit to 30+ public exhibitions with more than 30,000 visitors from 120 countries. And they’re scheduled to drop 10 more shows in March with their first New Art City Festival. Its widespread usage is in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the mandated lockdown orders in many states. Traditional art galleries, historically averse to moving art online, could no longer show work in-person, and were forced to turn to virtual alternatives.

Don started New Art City as a way to replace the need for a space to exhibit art, but he now sees the project less as a way to replace the role of traditional art galleries, and instead offer an entirely new architecture for understanding digital art. If you take a look at the exhibitions currently up on New Art City, you’ll notice that there is a huge variance in the content shown. Some spaces attempt to mimic a real-life white cube gallery, others get into the experimental side of it, constructing hallucinatory funhouses, as a type of digital installation art. Which points to the amazing potential of New Art City which is not just showing art that could exist in the real world, but in showing art that could only exist digitally.

You can check out more of Don Hanson’s work at d0n.xyz.

Artist Ayse Demir is a resident artist in Gray Area’s Incubator who tells stories through code. With a professional background in data science, Ayse joined the Immersive Program in 2019 to build on her knowledge towards a more creative practice. She joined the Incubator to continue developing her creative work, including developing a multimedia meditative experience Hidden Empathy which debuted at the Gray Area Spring Showcase this year when our programs transitioned online.

We got the chance to talk to Ayse about her unique approach to storytelling, and how her interests in art and creative code have been shaped by her life experiences and philosophy. Ayse will also be leading a workshop on Data Visualization Design: From Theory to Practice on October 3rd.

How did you first become interested in art, and how have you gotten to where you are now as an artist?

I think everybody is born as an artist, it’s just a matter of practice. Like everyone else, I scribbled a lot as a kid, but became serious about it in high school as I was building my figure drawing portfolio for fine arts college. My father convinced me to study in the US and pursue a degree in business, so I decided to get a little adventurous and move to America for college. In the meantime, I began taking photographs, not necessarily for the purpose of producing art, but as a practice for me to really tune-in and listen to my surroundings. I moved to San Francisco and started working in data science, but my interest in art has always continued and there came a time where I realized l wanted to do more in the art area. First, I got my Masters in Digital Arts, then changed my career direction to become a data visualization designer. That’s when Gray Area came into the picture.

I joined the Gray Area Incubator program in January. Before that, I was in the Creative Code Immersive program, where I learned more about coding for visual arts. I really like the idea of having a dedicated community where you can practice your art, and Gray Area is a really special place because it gives you an instant feeling of community. Art is something that should be accessible to everyone, and Gray Area is very respected within the community because it has a lot of hardworking and dedicated people, but doesn’t create this elitist culture where you feel like you don’t belong. So, as an immigrant woman coming here from Turkey, having that instant community feeling was essential. I have certain anchors in my life, and Gray Area is one of them. Ironically, it’s these anchors that give my life a sense of movement in times where there is very little movement at all.

How would you describe your unique approach to art? What informs your decisions and philosophy in how you see the world?

Being in a different country on your own comes with advantages and disadvantages. A few years ago, I fell into a deep existential crisis where I questioned who I really was, and what I was really interested in. Through trial and error, I found out that I need to be telling stories; I want to be expressing myself and creating a movement to make sense of the world, but I didn’t know how. I was still doing drawings and taking photographs, but I didn’t necessarily think that these were my most preferred mediums.

Now, working with digital media gives me this gratification of working with rhythm and a sense of agility. I see the practice of art as an experiment which helps you approximate towards the truth, and I like the idea of experimenting and crafting through a lot of mistakes and errors. Although I know I cannot get there, I want to keep that mindset of exploring the truth.

There is a very beautiful data visualization book by Alberto Cairo called Truthful Art, and it says that the truth is neither absolute nor relative. In the grand scheme of things, human knowledge is just too limited to make conclusions about the ultimate truth. We can only experiment to approximate towards it. Truth is not something that we can explain very well; maybe we can experience it, maybe we can feel it in our bodies, but it’s not something that we can describe.

Do you find that your background in photography has informed your more current work in abstract digital art?

Certainly. Everything takes practice, and everything takes presence. Photography taught me how to see things. I didn’t know how to see, I think, until I had a creative awakening after this existential crisis. Every song, every note started making sense to me. Over the last few years, I’ve had the opportunity to pursue that awakening, and the idea of really seeing things as they are without attributing my agenda to an object. I still act as a filter, but this concept has become more clear through my photography practice.

Your most recent work is called Hidden Empathy, and as a profoundly abstract piece, it seems to convey meaning through experience rather than inviting analysis. What was your intent in creating this piece, and do you see it as more meditative and immersive than activist?

There was a very intense period where everybody was in front of computers during COVID times. Then the Black Lives Matter movement gained national attention, and I think everything was sort of happening on a mental plane for a lot of people. There was a lot of share conversation, whether around topics like the Black Lives Matter movement or the collective experience of living through COVID. The fact that we are not able to move physically between spaces really put us in this mental plane.

For this project, I wanted to help people explore and listen on a deeper level rather than giving them conclusions. I wanted to help people reconnect to their bodies and create a somatic experience, while being careful not to contribute to this information overload we’re all experiencing. I think as humans, we need time within our bodies to digest and integrate all of the information that’s coming at us, so that we don’t become machine-like. My idea with this piece was to help people get out from their mental planes a little bit, and put them back into their bodies. There’s a strong parallel between immersive and meditative experiences. This parallel exists because they both have the potential to put you in a state of absorption. The idea of an object losing its identity and becoming a symbol of the unknown is activist, but the experience of it is meditative in that sense.

What was your process like for creating this piece?

When I’m creating something, I like to digest the ideas along the way while I’m doing research. First, I start with a theme that stems from something that I’m going through personally, or something that I’m interested in. The experience of the unknown is the theme of this piece, because like most people, I didn’t know what was going to happen in the next six months. I wanted to explore how I can ease into this experience of the unknown, so I stuck with that idea and tried to be objective and experimental when I was doing my research. I’ve found that the research puts me into a kind of flow state. It’s all very mental at first, but then you use your body parts as an extension to execute that idea. Then you digest it a little bit more. And then you integrate it with your body, mind, and emotions as your complete, unified existence grasps that idea.

To create the visuals themselves, I began with a core image, and then worked with different parameters to manipulate the image. This experimental nature of my digital arts practice is what I’m enjoying the most. For me it’s more about the process and experimentation and putting myself in those flow states. I think it’s important to be able to distinguish between the different parts of my being throughout this process. I personally need to be less mental, and put myself more in my body. Therefore I try utilizing my mental capacity minimally in the last part.

Hidden Empathy debuted at the Gray Area Virtual Artist Showcase in June. Your and peers’ artwork was displayed in an online virtual recreation of the Grand Theater, yet some other artists have expressed that there is something lost compared to experiencing these works in person. How do you view the virtual showcase as a space to display your art?

It’s all about adapting and surviving in the grand scheme of human evolution. The showcase might be a minor step to start something different in this context — we don’t know yet. Technology gives us a lot of opportunities to experience different realms in a very unique way. In terms of accessibility, not every city has an Exploratorium, and not every city has a Gray Area. There are many entry barriers to even start as a digital art practitioner. It requires technical knowledge, and it comes with a cost. Producing things online allows them to be more accessible for people across the world. We evolve by trying different things, and learning how to adapt. I don’t know how this is going to evolve, but at least we’re adapting.

The COVID reality has certainly affected me as well, but you have to adapt to wherever you are, whatever the condition is. This is a pretty messed up situation, but there are things that I can control, and there are things that I cannot. How can I turn this disadvantage into an advantage? Like I said before, this is about survival, and the ability to be flexible is part of that. There is a lot of fear and darkness around not knowing. Everything coexists within the same realm, and there is power in acknowledging the fear, and then moving towards beauty instead of darkness.

Any last remarks?

Be gentle to yourself :)

Ayse Demir is a San Francisco based advanced analytics and data visualization professional with a passion for creating and seeing beautiful things. In all aspects of life, she loves working with complexity while finding clarity, truth and balance in it. Outside of the data and design world, Ayse is a yoga and meditation teacher working to bring more gentleness, strength and awareness to her life and others. Her interest and curiosity in a variety of areas help her build meaningful connections, and understand the world as it is.

Ayse’s piece Hidden Empathy can be viewed here. Keep up with Ayse’s latest work through her Instagram and her website.

This article was written by Sam Silverman, Editorial Intern at Gray Area.

Ryan Smith is a musician who co-directs Crowbar Corner Studio, San Francisco’s only 24 hr access electronic music production studio, housed within the historic Gray Area Theatre. From touring with the popular band Caribou to working on his own projects like Bathing and Taraval, Ryan continually strives to push the boundaries of electronic music production at Crowbar Corner and beyond.

On Friday August 28, Ryan’s group Bathing will premiere a live performance on Patch in collaboration with Brandon Eversole, a fellow artist from Gray Area’s Incubator program. The show will combine Bathing’s deep ambient music with Brandon’s signature visuals. In this exclusive interview, we got a chance to catch up with Ryan and ask him about his musical journey, the upcoming performance, and his life under quarantine.

What inspired you to pursue music as a career?

I grew up in a household with music in it — my dad played in a really cool 60’s band in Canada, and my mom currently sings in a gospel choir. I grew up with my parents’ record collection, so I listened to groups like Pink Floyd and the Beatles and just got into music that way. I took piano lessons when I was really young, but then I found a guitar lying around and I got into classic rock when I was a kid. I started lessons and played in some bands with friends in high school. And then I kind of just accidentally fell into being a musician through my work with the band Caribou. So, the Caribou, Dan Snaith, is one of my oldest friends. We grew up in Ontario, met in middle school, and stayed friends in high school and college. Dan moved to England to pursue his music, and put out a record called Up in Flames, which is the second Caribou album. At some point before he left Canada I was like, “Look, if you ever want to form a band to play your music live, give me a call.”

I was living in Toronto in my early 20’s, and didn’t really have much of a direction in life, to be honest. Dan just phoned me up and was like, “Hey, do you want to move to London and come play music? I’m going to try and tour this record.” And so I moved over there, and basically just figured out how to turn Dan’s dance music into a live show. So he works by himself in his basement making the music, and then when we do the live thing and figure out a way to bring his music to the stage. It’s fun because I still get to kind of be a fan of his music in a way.

While continuing to tour with Caribou, you also explored your own direction within the electronic scene. How did you begin to forge your own path as a professional musician?

Techno has always been around in my musical upbringing. In my teenage years, the techno explosion in North American and European filtered into the small town I was living in. There was a minimal rave scene in Canada, so I almost came from the psychedelic aspect of it, like in the way that it related to space rock music. I didn’t quite fully appreciate the disco and R&B influences until I was a bit older, and got more into that side of music.

Living in San Francisco for the past few years, I took a stab at making my own music. I was tinkering around at home in between Caribou tours, made a few tracks, and sent them to Kieran Hebden from Four Tet, and I was like “Hey I made this track,” and they were like “Oh this is wicked, make more!” I was actually having a really hard time with it; all musicians struggle with confidence when they first start out. But Kieran was like “Look, I’m gonna put out your music, so you better make some more tracks and finish them up because like, now you’ve got a 12 inch coming out in a few months.” So he pushed me to finish up these tracks, and inspired me to get them how I wanted through this deadline, which is always good for me for working in music.

Bathing is another of my projects. My wife Emma and I wanted to create some fun music, so I showed her a bit about synths, drum machines, and composing at home. It was the most low-stakes music I ever made, but we ended up really liking it, and then we started playing shows and really fun gigs around the Bay Area. It was very casual, but somehow it turned out really nice — maybe the casualness is part of what made it so good. The Bathing music is very minimal and is aimed to be more relaxing and enveloping, so it’s good to have that relaxed vibe.

These days, it seems like all the new innovations in music are coming out of genres like techno and electronic music. Do you find yourself feeling as though you’re on the cutting edge of music?

The edges of music are getting really wild through AI and Machine Learning. I was also involved in the Nsynth project, which was done through the Magenta Labs at Google. The project was pushing towards the future of music technology by essentially using AI to generate novel new sounds. Music technology now is obviously very sophisticated. What you can have just on your computer would blow the mind of someone who was trying to construct a professional studio in the 60’s. These tools are either free or really cheap, and it’s fun to just experiment with them and learn all these cool elemental recording techniques. The cool thing with the digital world of music is not only the incredible sonic tools that you have access to, which could either be like making a really innovative new synthesis method or sequencing method, but also the fact that you have them in your home and can kind of tinker with them in an ‘amateurish’ way.

You’re involved in the Gray Area Incubator program through a studio called Crowbar Corner. How has your involvement in the Incubator impacted your career as a musician?

Crowbar Corner, the studio space, has been around for 4 or 5 years. It was founded by Jacob Sperber, who runs Honey Sound System; he and I are basically co-directors of Crowbar Corner. I had met Jacob really casually before, and he knew that I was looking for a studio space, so I ended up coming on board. From there, I branched into more involvement with Gray Area itself. I put on this performance of a piece called Tactus Tempus, an early generative composition with no central tempo. It was pretty experimental, so it really could have only happened at Gray Area!

I’ve also started teaching some classes on modular synthesis as I’ve got more involved in the art and education side of things. It turned out really well, and it’s the first time I’ve ever taught a class or done anything like that. I really enjoyed it, and it’s ended up being one of my favorite things I’ve been able to do in the last few years. Honestly, Gray Area has been life-changing for me.

Given the contemporary music scene, do you think it’s necessary for aspiring musicians to become familiar with the tech aspects of music production?

As a musician, you have a whole world opening up to you through technology. It’s really helpful to have a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) so you can record yourself, play along to a metronome, or layer up your sounds. I do sometimes think people get a bit caught up in the technology side of it, but I think it’s good to have those tools available to you. Even if you’re just starting to learn guitar, just the fact that you can plug it in, record yourself, and access that is really helpful in learning an instrument. If you’re a musician you should follow your nose, and if you’re not super excited about the tech side of things, then you should just learn the instruments, the songwriting, and the pure performance side of it.

The interesting thing is, if you look at the great bands from the 60’s and 70’s who made enduring music that people still like, there were so many people involved. You’ve got the musicians themselves learning their instruments, plus they might involve a songwriter, and they would also have a studio engineer and a producer. Then they would tour with all these techs and people to fix and modify their instruments, pedals, or amps. Modern technology gives you an opportunity to learn a fair bit of all that stuff yourself and do it at home, but on the other hand, there’s something lost when you’re just isolated by yourself in your house and missing out on that collaborative aspect.

Do you find your music is influenced by other artists working at Gray Area?

Definitely. What’s awesome about Gray Area is that I’ve got this studio space there, and I can just go in and use it as a conventional music studio or to practice music, but then — to give you the perfect metaphor — there’s a wall separating me from the main hall in in the Grand Theater, where performances take place. Sometimes there’s more or less ‘conventional’ music, like a live band playing in there, but more often than not they have more ‘art music’ type stuff going on.

Every once in a while in the studio, I’ll take off my headphones and there will be some amazing sound coming out of the performance space. I’ll go stick my head in there, and there’ll be some incredible composer who’s making music with lasers or something. Being in that kind of environment is amazing. There are some multimedia performance-type places like Gray Area in Europe, but I think Gray Area is really unique for the US in that it works both as a conventional performance space, and then also as this unique art performance space. Those kinds of environments are really inspiring, because one week you might see a more regular band play, the next week it’ll be an art exhibition, and the next something bridging both of those worlds. You can’t help but be influenced by all the cool stuff that’s happening there.

I’ve done collaborations with other artists at Gray Area as well. At the moment, I’m working with Brandon Eversole, who’s one of the other Incubator artists. He does really cool visual art, and he’s creating visuals for a performance with Bathing at the Grand Theater that’s going to go up on Patch. We’re also probably going to do some future collaborations just because we both like each other’s work.

Tell me more about this upcoming collaboration with Brandon. How did that come to be, and can you give us a sneak peak of the performance?

I just saw Brandon’s artwork and I was like, wow this is really beautiful! Seabrook, who’s the production person at Gray Area, had asked my group Bathing to do something, so I asked Brandon to do the visuals for us. I think this is the first time he’s done visuals for a band, which is surprising because he’s so talented. He listened to our music, then made a sort of visual system and played the visuals live for this performance. We filmed in the Grand Theater in a kind of socially distant concert with no one there. It was a really beautiful collaboration, and it sort of looks like a 1970’s TV show, like where there’s a band playing with these visuals fading in and out, but there’s a really contemporary edge to it. Brandon works a lot with these incredibly high definition video mapped cubes. He’s done all sorts of really amazing stuff with the video that I can’t wait for everyone to see.

We did both the music and the visuals live. It really looks and sounds great, but it also has that kind of improvisational element; at the beginning Brandon was like “Are you going to play the songs exactly the same?” And we really can’t do that because it’s improv based. It ended up being really beautiful, because things are kind of reacting to one another. He set up this cool visual environment for us where some of our gear was on a screen with the visuals, almost like an animated tabletop. The whole thing is incredible.

How do you feel about live-streamed concerts during the pandemic as compared to traditional shows? Have you or your groups experimented with any live-streaming?

Yeah, so I did a DJ set for Fault Radio, a local streaming thing in SF, where I was just sitting at home playing records from my kitchen table. Right now, I’m working with Jessy Lanza; she makes futuristic R&B music, and I’m helping her with her current release on Hyperdub. She’s been doing tons of live streaming and videos, and so I’ve got to see that experience just a little bit removed from being the performer. She said it’s been a really nice way to connect with fans, it makes that human connection you miss when you’re not on tours. Honestly, I’m of two minds about it. Seeing performances mediated through Zoom, Instagram, and all that is nice, but I’m a little bit skeptical of people trying to replicate the feeling of a live show over Zoom. If you talk to people involved in mental health, generally speaking, experts in that area will tell you that spending a lot of time on Zoom isn’t great for you — it’s a weird human experience. One of the great things about music is the human side of it. So I think there’s something lost there.

What have you been listening to lately? Any recommendations?

Right now I’m listening to this really great compilation of Indonesian psych-rock from the 70’s. I’m really into it because my friend Vincent Bevins just put out a book called The Jakarta Method. It’s all about American covert anti-communist operations in Indonesia in the 60’s and 70’s, and so I’ve been listening to the music from that period. And it’s been really awesome to get into that; to hear the music and read the story of that part of history in Asia.

This is slightly embarrassing, but I’ve also kind of regressed into being a real Deadhead recently. I’ve been listening to loads of live Grateful Dead records from the 70’s and have really fallen under the spell of the Jerry Garcia ballads. I also want to shout-out my friend John Elliot, who was in the band Emeralds, and makes music under the name Imaginary Softwoods and Organic Dial. He’s been reissuing all the Emeralds catalog and also putting out new Imaginary Softwoods records, which are really beautiful. Check them out!

A long time touring musician with the band Caribou, Ryan also produces futuristic techno music under the moniker Taraval, makes modular ambient music in the live electronic duo Bathing, and has a long running collaboration with Jeremy Greenspan of the Junior Boys running the label Geej. He is an expert level user of Ableton, Max For Live, VCV Rack (virtual modular synthesis environment), numerous hardware instruments, and an accomplished guitar player.

Be sure to tune in for Ryan’s stunning audiovisual collaboration with Brandon Eversole on August 28. The concert will be streamed on Patch — you can RSVP here!

This article was written by Sam Silverman, Editorial Intern at Gray Area.

Steve Piasecki is a multimedia artist in Gray Area’s Incubator Program. Since 2016, Gray Area has supported artists through the Incubator, providing them with studio space, resources, community, and public showcase opportunities. Recently, artists from this year’s Incubator cohort exhibited their work at the Gray Area Artist Showcase, which took place in a unique online gallery and continues to draw audiences from across the world. Piasecki’s piece from the showcase, Time is Meaningless When Space Collapses, offers a compelling commentary on how our experiences with the COVID pandemic have warped our perception of time.

In this exclusive interview, we got a chance to ask Steve about how his art explores the pandemic, and societal trends in our rapidly changing world.

Tell us about your background as an artist.

I moved out to San Francisco in the early 90s, and began doing a lot of nature photography in Northern California for a number of years. Concurrent with that, I started doing videos and visuals for live music performers with an event called Gays Hate Techno. So I did that for about five years, which branched into working with different DJs and bands here in San Francisco. And then I started doing installation work; in late 2018 I started doing stuff at Gray Area, got involved through the Creative Code Immersive program, and then eventually joined the Incubator. I’ve been continuing to create new work at Gray Area ever since.

What drew you to Gray Area, and how has your involvement in our programs influenced your art?

For me, 2018 was a big transitional year — the year my father passed away. I spent the first six months of 2018 traveling a lot, helping take care of him and dealing with some family stuff. When I came back, I was trying to figure out what to do with the next step in my life. I’d been going to Gray Area shows and events for several years prior to that, and so I was finally back in San Francisco and I was like, alright, my life is finally settled down and I can focus on what to do next. I saw that they had educational programs, and it was this moment where I was like, well I can focus on these projects and get involved. So I took the Immersive program because I wanted to have a place to work and develop projects, and Gray Area is a really great resource for that. From the different artists in the community to the different events that are held there, you get exposed to a lot of great ideas with a great group of people.

Your latest work in the Gray Area Showcase is called Time is Meaningless When Space Collapses, and explores the notion of how this pandemic has warped our sense of time. However, you offer a deeper commentary on how time can also be somewhat meaningless for marginalized communities when they see things like documented police brutality happen over and over again. Do you think this idea of time being altered in quarantine has played into the worldwide social justice movements we’ve seen recently?

We have a linear existence. We have an amount of space that we can run in or live in — you can change the amount of space you have, and then you change your perception of time. And then all of a sudden, boom, everybody starts having these very different experiences about what time actually means. And then we see this very horrific incident [referring to George Floyd’s death] that has mobilized national protests. I think a large number of people had the realization at the same time that like, wait a second, you know, how is this different than what happened in 1991 to Rodney King? It’s been happening throughout the course of history in the United States, where black people have been treated very, very horribly by the police and by the state.

You certainly drew inspiration from the pandemic for your piece. Indeed, it seems as though COVID has given rise to many dialogues on different aspects of society that we may be ready to reconsider. How do you think the pandemic has impacted society at large?

I think our society is going through a massive change. And I don’t think anybody really knows what it looks like at the moment — I hope that it ends up being something really positive. Large scale pandemics always engender massive social changes. You look back through history and you’ll see anytime that there’s been a disease or a plague like this, something major changes in the society. I kind of see the conservative movement collapsing in this country because they’re just insisting that this is a hoax, or that it’s not as bad as it’s supposed to be. So I think there’s going to be a very big fundamental political shift in this country.

We’re also going to be looking at the implications for the environment, because now we’ve actually seen what it takes to really reduce greenhouse gases. So there’ll be conversations around that, and conversations around what social justice means. When your economic system is suffering in this way, and your medical system is suffering in this way, there’s going to be a lot of big deep fundamental shifts.

As art so often does, your work frequently verges on the political. Do you find that your art is deliberately activist?

There are moments when there are specific messages that art can help amplify. The problem there is that it gets close to propaganda and advertising. And so there becomes a weird line between art, propaganda, advertising, and advocacy. I worked in digital advertising for years, and there’s a very specific line there that I’ve always tried to be very conscious of. There’s a drive to do something at one time, and then there’s a different drive to do something else at another time. I’m always responding to what compels me to take action.

Your piece takes a highly critical view of technology, in particular social media and mass consumerism. In a world where the two are so ubiquitous, how do we begin to dismantle these problematic systems while also being so reliant on them?

We have a very intense relationship with technology — we’re in love with it. We’re seduced by it. And a lot of malevolent actors are able to manipulate that to their own benefits, to their own end. I believe that skepticism is always important for people in any society, between the rulers and the people. Technology makes it really easy to manipulate people, but we’re so reliant on our technology right now to maintain human and social connections and to run our economy and businesses.

When I was first in college, I was studying political rhetoric when the Fairness Doctrine was removed from the FTC. It was removed by the Reagan administration, and it required any broadcast that was in the public interest to be truthful and balanced in providing both sides of any given argument. Essentially now newscasters can lie to people, so there has to be some kind of national conversation about how you set a standard.

This isn’t the first time you’ve done a project that scrutinizes social media and technology. Last November, you debuted an installation at Gray Area called the Magic Mirror. What was this piece about?

Think of Snow White’s magic mirror, but it was a computer monitor with reflective material on it. I sat behind a curtain and actually drove the interaction. So people thought that they were talking to an AI, people thought they were talking to a computer, but they’re actually talking to me. They would get messages about, you know, how they shouldn’t trust the mirror because it lies. The mirror loves you, but not as much as you love it; social media is ruining you. You know, messages like that. So the idea was to convince people that they were talking to an entity that they thought was technology, but it was really a person.

Your work often tries to bridge the rift between the virtual and the real. Appropriately, your piece was recently displayed at the Gray Area Artist Showcase, which took place in an online virtual recreation of the Grand Theater. What did you think about this virtual gallery as a space to display your art?

From my experiences when I was originally doing VRML work — virtual reality modeling language, which was a very early 3D VR standard for the web — we have definitely evolved and gotten to a better place with these sorts of things. Unfortunately, technology cuts off part of the experience of social interaction, and I think we still have that issue with these virtual spaces. There’s something about the fact that it’s online, that you’ve muted some part of the experience, and I don’t know what the actual solution for that is.

We’ll just have to kind of wait and see how we push this forward in the future. I mean, I would hope that once the pandemic’s all over we go back to how humans are supposed to live. When we do, we might have some type of AR glasses or other device that can superimpose virtual worlds or computer generated imagery on the real world, and we won’t be limited to being in front of our computers to explore virtual spaces.

Steve Piasecki is a bay area artist working in photography and video. His influences and inspirations come from dreams, visions, somatic experiences, and nature. His photography has been published internationally.

Born in Iowa, Steve studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a BFA in photography and computer graphics in 1992. He has lived and worked in San Francisco since 1993.

Steve’s piece Time is Meaningless When Space Collapses is still live on our virtual gallery in New Art City. Check out Steve’s website and Instagram to stay updated on his latest work. To read more about the Gray Area Virtual Showcase, check out this article.

This article was written by Sam Silverman, Editorial Intern at Gray Area.

Meet Miriam Hillawi: artist, educator, and 2020 Zachary Watson Fellow at Gray Area. Through her creative practice exploring virtual space through architecture and game design, Miriam creates augmented and mixed reality experiences that explore innovative forms and alternative futures.

On August 15 & 16, Miriam will lead an Worldbuilding Workshop on 3D Augmented Reality to empower the next generation of creators. In this exclusive interview, we spoke with Miriam about her practice, how technologies like AR/VR (Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality) are shaped by the cultures that surround them, and how they in turn shape our unique perspectives on the world.

Tell us about your background as an artist and architect.

I hail from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I grew up with the hope and sense of responsibility to change the city I was raised in and to help move my country and my continent into the future. Thus I was drawn to architecture, and in 2016 I graduated with a B’Arch from the Glasgow School of Art. I then worked at a rural to urban planning initiative while I freelanced as a landscape architect. Following that, I joined the California College of the Arts to pursue my MFA in Design where I hoped to merge architectural practice with industrial design and creative computation. Since then I’ve worked as the Game Design instructor at Bay Area Video Coalition, and have continued to freelance in architectural design and research.

Your work explores recreating and designing new spaces in game design, architecture, and AR/VR. How do you see these technologies intersecting and developing their respective fields?

Game design presents us with the opportunity of enactivism, sometimes embodiment, and also agency through interactivity. Because games are often narrative or action driven, you have a different understanding of space when you’re gaming, like fulfilling a quest or when you’re exploring an environment. There’s a kind of wonder to it. So from that perspective, there could be more of this sense of whimsy in architecture, or this invitation to explore.

The principles and mechanisms of game design could then expand this intersection: as games and architectural designs alike both exist within space, and can be scaled to the user. And so, if you want them to intersect, it can be really useful to explore new forms through interactivity. And this new practice can allow for collaborative and participatory approaches to design within communities.

I’m also really interested in VR as a method of experiencing and conserving heritage sites and artifacts in an experimental way that can be critical: critical of its past, critical of its current use or intended use, and also infusing a multiplicity of stories and purposes. So there are projects that are looking at photogrammetry or 3D scanning and experiencing in VR as a way of gaining and providing access to otherwise inaccessible architectural sites. This emerging practice can continue to entwine with narratives, critical analysis, and speculative futures.

“This new practice can allow for collaborative and participatory approaches to design within communities.”

Your upcoming workshop at Gray Area introduces augmented reality as a tool to shape worlds through memory of place. What do you feel are the advantages of AR/VR, especially in terms of access?

AR has become more accessible because quite a lot of people now have access to smartphones, and almost all smartphones are capable of viewing AR filters. And because of platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Snapchat taking over this wave, AR has become more widespread and entered the frame of pop-culture. But there’s a huge limitation of experience. Whereas VR is completely immersive, AR has us looking through a tiny screen on our phone. So there’s always this break in reality where you’re always aware of the edges of the interface.

Yet there’s an opportunity for worldbuilding with AR. We normally get this through VR, or through game design, but because of how quickly and easily prototypable AR is, it offers a really fun way to overlay culture and create a world that exists within your current reality. You can see it placed in a physical location like in your room, or in your immediate surroundings.

Worldbuilding is a really interesting way to engage with this tension or deadlock of wills we have about the future we’re almost inevitably moving towards. A lot of us feel this cynicism towards our world, towards big companies and corporations using surveillance and data against us, or even our planet’s demise. We feel like we’re losing control. And so, if we use world building and dwell within these worlds light-heartedly, in order to explore new cosmologies or explore our own ideas of them, I think it could be a fun way to break through that dread and come to engage with each other’s ideas of what the future could look like, or what we want our present to look like.

What do you see as the potential for AR/VR, particularly for underrepresented communities?

I’ve found that virtual reality presents the othered with the opportunity to self actualize and take up space that they otherwise could not within their patriarchal and white centered realities. Identity is a spatial praxis and we can explore it through embodiment and enactivism. While the institutionalized practice of architecture effectively excludes the black subject from determining and constructing self invented forms, virtual reality is a new unclaimed territory for black and brown radical imagination. AR/VR and other interactive modes of play like game design are inclusive and inviting mediums that can create entry points to more meaningful concepts and ideals. The dissemination of these technologies, particularly AR and online gaming, through online platforms also allows us to reach a wider and unexpected audience.

“Virtual reality is a new unclaimed territory for black and brown radical imagination.”

Do you see the structures of oppression and violence within our world as being carried over into AR/VR practice? Is that a sociocultural limitation of these technologies?

The industry, much like many design practices, prefers to present itself as neutral ground. I think game design is seen as more contentious now. Similarly, architecture has also begun to see a reckoning. But now VR and AR are both seen as very charming, gimmicky, so there isn’t that much criticality going into why are you doing this, who is this for, and whose gaze it casts. So that’s something that’s really worrying about the medium moving forward. But in this ambiguity, the possibility of worlding or occupying virtual space is something I’m always interested in, especially in the lens of Afrofuturism, or speculative futures.

So I see AR/VR as two things: a tool of representation and a virtual territory for self-actualization. If you think about how cameras were used against the Other by the Occident, the ideology of the “exotic” emerged from the white male gaze being cast through a camera lens at naked indigenous women. So if a tool of representation isn’t quickly democratized, and held by anyone in particular, it could easily be used against you as another tool for exoticizing, othering, and vilifying. So that’s one thing that I’m super wary of.

A couple of projects in VR have made me quite uncomfortable — this practice is already happening. One such project went into Syria and created a VR experience of a family’s house in the midst of a war zone. And it was like poverty porn with a white savior complex, but immersive! And the subjects of this work don’t necessarily have the privilege of privacy or dignity, so we get to experience it as this gamified gimmick. I hated it.

The notion of worldbuilding carries such power because it imagines a world of the future. In many respects, our conception of the future has been colonized via the white hegemony in media and entertainment. How can we use tools like AR/VR to counteract this?

Just thinking about sci-fi throughout the decades, one topic I keep returning to is the dominance of outer-space, or attempts to dominate space by companies like SpaceX. They’re taking this concept of white flight but taking it into outer space. And they’re like, “Okay, we’ve trashed this planet, let’s try to create a domestic version of outer space where the rich will live, like a white suburb, a sanitized modernist environment.”

And again, it takes me back to how sci-fi during my childhood was always visualized as monochromatic, with not a single person of color in frame, no mention of Africa or her diaspora. As if to say there are no black people in the future; there are no Africans in the future.

There are such few examples of a future that has a touch of the continent of Africa, South America, and the Global South overall, unless it’s framed in a way that’s grimey, worn and chaotic. And it’s really important for us to have a vision of what we’re moving towards. In many ways, Africa was and continues to be seen as a testing ground for a lot of ideas — often very dangerous ideas — by colonial agents. So, it is important to visualize: what are we moving towards? Are we moving towards a dystopia that we should be wary of?

I do have a couple of examples where some artists of color have used VR in very impactful and stunning ways. But we need that body to expand more to be its own genre almost, like Afrofuturist VR, or VR for the Other, similar to how games are broken up into genres for us to be able to visualize and critique our future, present, and our past. Because we don’t really have the opportunity to do that, and we’ve seen how sci-fi is always framed. It’s always been from a white lens with a couple of people of color in supporting roles where you’re like, what’s their backstory, why are they there, where are they from?

We need to unify and use our own agency, our own autonomy, to actualize futures that not only include but center us.

Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer and artist from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Her work is centered on the themes of social justice through speculative fiction and design, focusing on Afrofuturism and intersectional feminism. She holds an MFA Interaction Design 2019 at the California College of the Arts, has received a B’Arch in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art in 2016, as well as Part I of The Royal Institute of British Architects License, and is a Game Design instructor at BAVC.

On August 15, Miriam will lead an AR Workshop on Worldbuilding with Gray Area on Patch. You can also check out more of Miriam’s work on her website and Instagram.

This interview was conducted by Tiffany Yau, Content and Editorial, and
edited by Sam Silverman, Editorial Intern at Gray Area.