Artists

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

Brandon Eversole is a visual artist that enjoys collaborating with musicians and filmmakers. He's currently making interactive installations that use video cubism and spatial augmented reality to sculpt movement through time and is an incubator artist with Gray Area based in San Francisco.

I'm a software engineer and former machine learning researcher with much experience in traditional media. I've been drawing and painting as long as I can remember, and have been recently transitioning to digital generative works. Some of my latest interests have been creating compelling visuals in TouchDesigner as well as exploring latent structures of representation in generative adversarial networks. Moving forward, I think there's a lot of area to be explored at the intersection of traditional media, computer graphics, and the latest in machine learning research.

A detour from his electronic post-punk/synthgaze solo project Never Knows, artist Marc Kate creates static experiments in synthesis that embody the opposite of New Age music. These static, spacious sounds, while haunting and etherial, are anything but spiritual. Instead, Kate’s music is visceral, material and deeply human. Originally trained as a filmmaker and visual artist, San Francisco based producer and composer Marc Kate applies a cinematic and conceptual approach to music and audio production. Faint outlines of melody and song are buried and burdened by an ocean of distortion, self-doubt and melancholy. In effect: a music that undermines itself. Each track is a calculated performance of cathartic release, pitting delicate gesture against brute force. For those familiar with Tim Hecker, Lawrence English or Rafael Anton Irisarri, Kate similarly creates a tension between serenity and dissonance, crossing vintage analog with laptop experimentation. He most recently released “File #08”, his debut for San Francisco label Computer Tapes.

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, both producing experimental electronic music and running the label Geej. He produced a collaborative performance of a 1973 graphics score by avant-garde composer Frank McCarty called Tactus Tempus, a controlled improvisational process for 9 audio visual performers live at Gray Area. He is an expert level user of Ableton and Max For Live, VCV Rack (virtual modular synthesis environment), numerous hardware instruments and an accomplished guitar player.

Stephanie Andrews is an experience designer and creative technologist interested in exploring economies of collectivity, care, and communication. Her work seeks to respond to emergent issues with levity and sentimentality, primarily taking the form of flux kits, software tools, art games, tactile spaces, and participatory installations. Stephanie brings to her art practice an interdisciplinary background spanning software engineering, interaction design, public policy, social work, and community organizing. She specializes in building interactive systems that use digital, physical, and interpersonal mediums to create communal space.

Exploring interaction systems through digital art, Stephen utilizes techniques such as procedural generation, projection mapping,  and physical computing to create interactive installations exploring dimensionality and perception. In the Experiential Space Research Lab, he will further his artistic explorations into the subtle and fundamental dialogue between environment and mind.

Steve Piasecki (stevepi) is an artist who finds inspiration in the landscapes that we inhabit and in the technology that we create. The impact of what humans make and how they alter their landscapes is a major theme of his work. He has been making and showing work at Gray Area since 2019. His work has also been seen at the Lone Star, Gays Hate Techno, Light.Wav, and Dada Bar. With experiences from running small underground events to leading web development teams to helping run large global marketing campaigns, Steve has led a variety of teams and managed many different kinds of projects. As Venue Operations Manager, he brings all those experiences to Gray Area to help support the creative dreams that we bring into existence. Along the way, he has encountered almost every kind of situation, so he brings a unique perspective on how art, life, and a good party can come together to create community.

Vanessa Li is a Canadian sound technologist and software engineer with formal training in music technology, computer science, architectural acoustics, and classical piano. She has worked professionally in the audio software and music streaming industry as a systems and backend engineer for over 8 years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Vanessa’s installations revolve around experiences that take the individual out of their default mode of passive receptivity, often using sound as a medium, to foster conscious reflection on phenomena, ranging from the elemental fabric of reality up to higher-order relationships. Her work attempts to highlight the role between the self and the environment using novel interactions that link one’s internal experience with the external through listening. She has exhibited works in the San Francisco Bay Area at the Gray Area Arts Foundation and Soundwave Festival, in Berlin at Spektrum, and in Budapest at the Spatial Sound Institute.