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DJ_Dave + Char Stiles, Meuko! Meuko! + NONEYE, Rick Farin + Actual Objects, haute.rod + Idea Unsound (AV Club)
Gray Area Festival 2024 Performances

On Day 3 of Gray Area Festival 10, experience an evening of groundbreaking immersive audiovisual acts by DJ_Dave and Char Stiles, Meuko! Meuko! and NONEYE, Rick Farin with Actual Objects, and haute.rod + Idea Unsound from AV Club.

DJ_Dave + Char Stiles, Meuko! Meuko! + NONEYE, Rick Farin + Actual Objects (world premiere), haute.rod + Idea Unsound (AV Club)

Saturday, September 14, 2024

Doors: 9PM

Included in the Gray Area Festival Pass

View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests.

All Ages

Standing Performance

Strobe Warning

Gray Area Festival 10 presents a genre-defying live performance featuring experimental electronic-pop artist DJ_Dave and computational artist Char Stiles, both known for their pioneering approach to algorave creative coding. Also performing together are Meuko! Meuko! and interdisciplinary developer and media artist NONEYE, whose immersive, glitchy soundscapes and ritualistic performances explore the mythological landscapes of Taiwan. The lineup includes Rick Farin with Actual Objects, for the word premiere of their immersive A/V show blending original music with stunning visuals and CGI & AI characters, all centered around a vertical LED wall. Also performing is the AV Club, featuring SF-based algorave visualist haute.rod and left-field electronic producer Idea Unsound, who will add their own futuristic, layered aesthetic to this cutting-edge showcase.

Get access to our performances, conference talks, and exhibition with the Gray Area Festival Pass, or attend each night of performances with individual tickets.

About the Artists

DJ_Dave

DJ_Dave is an experimental electronic-pop artist, DJ, and producer, who creates and performs her music using code – a style called algorave. As the first to combine live coding and DJ mixing simultaneously in her shows, Dave is paving the way in bringing this style of producing and performing to the masses. Ranging from her signature state-of-the-art live-coded performances at Grimes’ MET Gala Afterparty, the Whitney Museum, and the META headquarters to drawing crowds at culturally significant festivals like Coachella, Portola, and Art Basel, to DJing underground parties with NYC icons like UNIIQU3 and umru – DJ_Dave has become one of the next generation’s most in-demand live acts. Her glimmery, dancefloor-ready tracks, such as “Castles ” (over 1.4M streams), reflect the infectious, futuristic energy of her innovative production & writing style. She is a regular contributor on Frank Ocean’s Homer Radio, and has done official remixes for electronic legends like Tove Lo, Channel Tres, and Uffie. DJ_Dave just finished up a successful tour opening for JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown, and recently released her entirely self written and produced debut EP Intercell.

Char Stiles

Char Stiles is a computational artist, educator, and programmer based in Brooklyn, NY. She works creatively in the lower levels of graphical computational systems & makes jokes about how computers work. She is currently at the MIT Media Lab's Future Sketches group researching the future of creative coding in performance. She is a part of the Livecode.nyc collective & she co-founded Hex House, an artist studio and event space in East Williamsburg. She has performed internationally, including festivals such as Electric Forest, Portola, and Mutek Nexus. She has lectured and led workshops at Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, University of Limerick, MIT, and NYU.

Meuko! Meuko!

Meuko! Meuko! is a solo project of Taipei based artist Pon, the experimental music producer and live performer. Meuko! Meuko! bursted into the experimental music scene in 2017 with her unique sound - its shadowy atmosphere undercuts glitchy dance tracks loaded up with samples and toy noises together with A/V created in collaboration with Taipei Based Visual & Installation group NAXS corp. Each performance contains improvisation and elements of new works, combining disciplines of improvisation with conceptual ideas of noise, clubbing, strange sounds, field recordings that conjure at times ritualistic performances with sources tracing back to Taiwan’s own spiritual landscape. Between traditional religion and techno-animism, is the myriad of a cityscape with tropical humidity, it’s greenery enveloping the molding concrete city blocks. Release in 2018 on Danse Noire, ⻤島 Ghost Island blends mythology and instruments with electronic beats and cacophonous samples on a release inspired by life in—and the urge to escape from—her home city of Taipei. ⻤島 Ghost Island is received as the epitome of merging traditional sounds with contemporary electronic music to bring new purpose to this juxtaposition, using the harsh sounds of modern life to give her music a distinctly 21st-century tension. "⻤島 Ghost Island Live A/V" by Meuko! Meuko! & NAXS corp. elevates audience experience of the mythical world of ⻤島 Ghost Island and goes even further with its immersive VR space. As music traverses the anti-utopian ruins of Ghost Island and Cyber-Dreamscape, the audience might find that this is not a fantasy or a fable, but the mythological reality in which we all live. Based on Meuko! Meuko!'s dreamscape, NAXS corp. has built the lost world that inhabits abandoned statues, floating ruins, stray dogs and hieroglyphics. As a multi-format Audio-Visual project, <Ghost Island> has been presented in numerous festivals and Biennales all over the world including: Transmediale (DE), Taiwan Biennale 2020 (TW), Sónar (HK), Primavera Sound (ES), Sonic Acts (NL), Hyperreality by Wiener Festwochen(AT), Soft Centre (AU), L.E.V. Festival (ES), and WSK Festival (PH) whether as Live A/V, online immersive experience in cyberspace, or VR installation. Ever since its inception Meuko! Meuko! continues to tour across South/East Asia, China and Europe over more than 20 countries. In 2020 Meuko! Meuko! presented “AFTERLIFE網路來生", the online experimental project as a chief curator and performer for the UNSOUND Festival 2020. Most recently she co-founded the online platform “0xCORE” with NAXS corp., integrating techno-animism, virtual avatar and motion capture in an online multiplayer scape to experiment with alternative methods of communication and experience with her vision of soundscape.

NONEYE

KUO Chih-Yi, alias NONEYE(@n0neye), is an Taiwanese inter-discipline developer, media artist, co-founder and director of the new media art group NAXS Corp. His works are often a combination of different media, including virtual reality, multiplayer gaming, audio-visual performances, installations, and theater space. He builds system structure to connect layers of physical and virtual spaces and body forms, seeking a dialectic perspective between mythological and technological narratives. Co-founding the new media group NAXS Corp in 2015, he has led the team and served different roles such as director, technical coordinator, visual/space/installation/sound designer. From 2015-2018, he devoted into the immersive virtual theater series <Render Ghost>, and the audio-visual project <Ghost Island> collaborated with music producer Meuko! Meuko!. Since 2019 he has focused on networked experiments, developing a series of online multiplayer performances, exhibitions with self-developed gaming techniques, under the titles of NAXS Corp and 0xCORE. Works he directed and co-created have been presented at Transmediale(DE), Ars Electronica(), Unsound Festival(PL). From 2022, he founded Protoworld, creating tools and virtual spaces, as a platform of experiments for other artists alike.

Rick Farin

Rick Farin is a director/musician who, along with his partner Claire Farin, founded the creative studio Actual Objects, working between live action, CG, A.I., and VFX to create radical new narratives about the future for artists and musicians. Rick & Claire have been behind forward-thinking and avant-garde work for artists such as Yves Tumor, Eartheater, Bad Bunny, Marine Serre, MoMA, Charli XCX, Joji, Hood By Air, Caroline Polachek, VTSS, Sega Bodega, Nike, and A.G. Cook, to name a few. Rick & Claire were both recently featured on the Dazed 100, and have recently premiered their first gallery installation “Vicky” in collaboration with Case Miller at 180 the Strand in London. As a musician, Rick Farin has performed with artists such as Ecco2k, Amnesia Scanner, and Coucou Chloe. 2024 will see Rick releasing his debut album to be accompanied with a live A/V show developed in collaboration with Claire and the Actual Objects team.

Actual Objects

Rick Farin is a director/musician who, along with his partner Claire Farin, founded the creative studio Actual Objects, working between live action, CG, A.I., and VFX to create radical new narratives about the future for artists and musicians. Rick & Claire have been behind forward-thinking and avant-garde work for artists such as Yves Tumor, Eartheater, Bad Bunny, Marine Serre, MoMA, Charli XCX, Joji, Hood By Air, Caroline Polachek, VTSS, Sega Bodega, Nike, and A.G. Cook, to name a few. Rick & Claire were both recently featured on the Dazed 100, and have recently premiered their first gallery installation “Vicky” in collaboration with Case Miller at 180 the Strand in London. As a musician, Rick Farin has performed at MIRA Festival in Barcelona, as well as performing with artists such as Ecco2k, Amnesia Scanner, and Coucou Chloe.

haute.rod

haute.rod (Rodney Folz) is a SF-based algorave artist and cofounder of the AV Club artist collective. Their art explores the interplay between computer systems and human agency, combining organic forms and layered feedback to create living works that are even pleasant to look at sometimes.

Idea Unsound

Idea Unsound is a left-field electronic music producer & DJ who mixes broken beats, futuristic vocal chops with a melodic, dubstep palette. His musical style is strongly influenced by his classical training, his love for science and technology, and his roots in dance music. His sound has been described as ‘jazz-inspired electronic music with a futuristic twist’.

Gray Area Festival 10
Celebrating a Decade of Culture and Innovation in San Francisco

Join us from September 12–15 for the 10th edition of Gray Area Festival, our annual survey of culture through the lens of creative practice, featuring a conference, performances, workshops, and an exhibition.

This year, to celebrate our 10th Festival, we’re doing something special: when you purchase a Festival Pass, you’ll also receive a Gray Area Co-Creator Membership, valid for one year.

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