The 5th Annual Showcase For Experiential Art, Featuring US Debut of Two Immersive Experiences
When: July 25–28, 2019
Where: Grand Theatre, 2265 Mission Street. Additional events at Pier 70, San Francisco
Price: Price varies depending on events/days; $20 — $250
Tags: #immersive, #interactive, #AugmentedReality, #VirtualReality, #ContactAdvisory, (See Below)
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Press Release Follows
The world’s premier gathering of leaders in art, technology, and culture is coming up in the heart of the Bay Area at the 5th annual Gray Area Festival on July 25–28. For the last decade, Gray Area redefined the role of art and culture in the epicenter of technology innovation, continuing with this year’s focus on AR, VR, XR, and immersive world-building installations.
This year, the Festival unveils the US debut of two international sensory-enveloping art experiences. From Berlin, the ISM Hexadome is a 360° cinema featuring two 90-minute sets of audiovisual collaborations by artists including Thom Yorke & Tarik Barri, Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst, Suzanne Ciani & AudeRrose, and more. From Montreal, robotic music performance Inferno engulfs participating audience members in an exoskeleton that directs their movements, pushing the limits of interactivity and offering a visceral sense of how machines shape our experience.
Tickets are available to the four-day Gray Area Festival, where attendees will meet and participate in a future-defining conversation with groundbreaking artists, technologists, educators, and performers on technology’s social, civic, and cultural impact. The speaker roster includes Jaron Lanier of Microsoft, author of You Are Not a Gadget and Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now; Monica Bello, head arts curator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research; Sarah Brin, who runs strategic partnerships at Meow Wolf, the Santa Fe immersive arts collective; Jax Deluca, Media Arts Director at National Endowment for the Arts, and many more (full list below).
Every night, performances will be open both to festival attendees and the broader public:
anyone can buy interactive, participatory tickets to be encased in an exoskeleton as part of the Inferno performance, or general admission tickets to view the robotic performance. Additionally, anyone can participate in Sunday’s Workshop Day, providing a chance to learn creative technical fabrication and coding skills from talented instructors recognized for actively shaping their fields and practices.
Since its inaugural edition in 2015, the Gray Area Festival has hosted over 150 artists from around the world, with more than 9,000 people in attendance. This year, Gray Area Festival 2019 is partnering with the Knight Foundation to debut the new Gray Area Experiential Space Research Lab. The Research Lab invites a public reimagining of immersive art experiences, challenging traditional modes of art viewing, and studying how artists are developing new models of enactive environments as critical thinking tools and creative practice.
Featured Speakers:
Jaron Lanier, Microsoft (Berkeley, US)
Monica Bello, CERN (Geneva, Switzerland)
Memo Akten, Artist (Istanbul, TR)
Jessica Brillhart, Vrai Pictures (New York, US)
Sarah Brin, Meow Wolf (Santa Fe, US)
Augustin de Cointet de Fillain, L’Atelier des Lumières (Paris, France)
Brenda Laurel, Scholar (San Francisco, US)
Timoni West, Unity (San Francisco, US)
Salome Asega, Artist (New York City, US)
Chris Barr, Knight Foundation (New York, US)
Jax Deluca, National Endowment for the Arts (Washington, DC US)
Jiajia Fei, Digital Strategist (New York, US)
Kathleen Cohen, The Collaboratorium (Los Angeles, US)
Fri Forjindam, Mycotoo (Los Angeles, US)
Nicholas Fortugno, Playmatics (New York, US)
Domhnaill Hernon, Nokia Bell Labs (New York, US)
Rosa Menkman, Artist (Berlin, DE)
Sasha Samochina, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (Los Angeles, US)
ISM Hexadome North America Premiere
In partnership with the Institute for Sound & Music (ISM) and the Goethe-Institut, Gray Area Festival will host the North American debut of ISM Hexadome, a 360° audiovisual platform featuring surround cinema works by world-renowned artists including Thom Yorke, Holly Herndon, Ben Frost, and the world premiere of Suzanne Ciani’s Under the Electric Sea at the historic Pier 70 in San Francisco.
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