Performers: Hundred Waters, Eartheater, Second Woman, Machinedrum and over 40 Artists shine a spotlight on trends in art and technology at the 2018 Gray Area Festival.
San Francisco, CA - The Gray Area Festival is pleased to announce its lineup including over 40 global artists. Since its inaugural edition in 2015, the Gray Area Festival has grown to become the world’s premier event focused on art and technology for social, civic, and cultural impact. Over the past three years the Festival has hosted over 150 artists with more than 6,000 people in attendance. Now in its fourth year, this 4-day festival continues to bring the most groundbreaking speakers, educators, artists, and performers together from around the world in a future-defining conversation on the cultural impact of technology. This year features special spotlight on Blockchain and Distributed Systems, presenting the largest collection of Blockchain based artworks ever assembled on the West Coast. The Gray Area Festival takes place at the historic Grand Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District, Thursday July 26 – Sunday July 29th, 2018.
Featured Speakers include:
Singer of the pop group YACHT and the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women who Made the Internet, Claire L. Evans (US); Artist and co-Founder of openFrameworks, an open-source library for writing creative code in C++, Theodore Watson (US); the co-Author of Blockchain and the Law published by Harvard University Press, Primavera De Filippi (FR); co-Founder and co-Director of Furtherfield & co-Editor of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain, Ruth Catlow (UK); Max Hampshire (NL) with terra0, a scalable framework built on Ethereum that provides automated resilience systems for ecosystems; Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Avant.org, Sam Hart (US); Founding Director of NEW INC and one of Business Insider’s most influential women in technology, Julia Kaganskiy (US); co-Founder and Editor of ARTS.BLACK, a journal of art criticism from Black perspectives, Jessica Lynne (US); and two members of Vienna-based, RIAT Institute for Future Cryptoeconomics.
Featured Exhibiting Artists/Projects include:
Nicolas Maigret (FR) & Maria Roszowska (PL) from Disnovation.org a working group based in Paris at the crossroads between contemporary art, research and hacking; Berlin-based contemporary artist Simon Denny (NZ), representative of New Zealand at the 2015 Venice Biennale; Rhizome 7-on-7 participants Matt Liston (US) and Avery Singer (US) with the 0xOmega cryptocurrency-based “religious framework”; Gabriel Dunne (US) and Cullen Miller (US) with Claves Angelicæ, an installation inscribing magical Words onto the Ethereum network; Bail Bloc, a Monero cryptocurrency scheme to post bail for low-income people; Prix Ars Electronica 2016 Golden Nica winners Christoph Wachter (CH) and Mathias Jud (CH); and the Tetrapylon from #NEWPALMYRA, a global community platform for creative reuse of architecture, inspired by executed Syrian-Palestinian software developer Bassel Khartabil.
Performing artists include:
Hundred Waters, with music that’s part acoustic, part electronic and completely captivating, musicians Nicole Miglis, Trayer Tryon & Zach Tetreault makeup Hundred Waters. The fusion of their talents quickly gave rise to a sound that has fans raving and critics drawing comparisons to Stereolab, Bjork and Four Tet. It attracted the most unlikely of label bosses, Skrillex, who signed the band to his OWSLA label. Since then the band has taken its live show around the world, touring with artists such as Alt-J, the XX, Jack Ü, Grimes, Julia Holter & more. The band is also responsible for co-founding and curating the application based micro festival, FORM Arcosanti.
Eartheater, Eartheater (aka Queens based artist Alexandra Drewchin) distills foley-filled digital production, a three-octave vocal range, and classical composition into works suspended between obsessively detailed sonic tapestries and almost recklessly romantic and gestural electronica.
Second Woman with Pfadfinerei, "Second Woman" is actually two men: Turk Dietrich of Belong and Joshua Eustis from the legendary Telefon Tel Aviv. Both Americans are obsessed with sound and production processes and have been working together for some time to shape a dystopian, piercing, taciturn and amazingly magnetic electronica; complex and demanding music that sits perfectly on the Editions Mego sub label, Spectrum Spools. They describe their sound as borrowing elements from footwork, dub, house and techno, manipulating them until unrecognizable and unconstrained from established conventions. When performing live these sounds are visualized, almost becoming tangible, thanks to a powerful AV show created together with Berliners Pfadfinderei, one of the most reputable filmmaking teams in the world (already well known to Sónar for their work with Moderat, Tiga, Paul Kalkbrenner and Boys Noize, among others).
