"Late one afternoon along San Francisco's Mission Street, I walked into a sublime panic. The Gray Area Cultural Incubator cohort was setting up its culminating exhibition, premiering in the Grand Theater just hours after my visit. Mostly I crept around in awe of the artistic fervor, installations going up in every corner of the theater, giant interactive video screens and vintage tech CRTs."
"Clearly in charge of the whirl, Hannah Scott described the space as an open-ended ecosystem that supports artists in cultivating "anti-disciplinary collaboration." The program is an intentional counter to the silos that might try to contain fashion or video game design. That cross pollination of disciplines excites the innovation instinct in the teams, and the findings of these artistic experiments present ways of sustaining "art's influence in technology, science and the humanities." "
"In between groovy Fry's Electronics-esque bead curtains sparkling over a retro living room interface and a horror-adjacent interactive sculpted trash heap, the visual aspects of installations belied a great variation in approaches to the common themes of the Cultural Incubator. It's a six-to-eight-month program that emphasizes the intersection of art and technology, and in particular the critique of current deployments of technology that might limit our imagining of what we can do with tech, and who gets the benefits of it."
A culminating exhibition transformed the Grand Theater with installations, giant interactive video screens, and vintage CRTs. The space operates as an open-ended ecosystem that supports artists in cultivating anti-disciplinary collaboration across fashion, video game design, and other fields. Cross-pollination of disciplines stimulates innovation within teams and produces experiments that explore sustaining art's influence in technology, science, and the humanities. The Cultural Incubator runs six to eight months and emphasizes critique of technological deployments that constrain imagination and equitable benefit. Gray Area Foundation for the Arts runs the theater and programs with a near-25-year focus on creative technological exploration within community contexts.
Read at East Bay Express | Oakland, Berkeley & Alameda
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