This exhibition curated by Salome Asega is an exploration of artists working in Radical Simulation - using immersive world building to reimagine adjacent possible presents through themes of embodiment, social justice, identity, de-colonialism, and regenerative ecology.
Gray Area Festival Exhibition Radical Simulation: Bin Ends (2020)
The Making of 'No State' (2018-2020)American Artist, Digital Video
Sommer of Hate (2018) Margot Bowman, Digital Video, Digital Images
5hundred lives without debt (2016) Tongkwai Lulin, Single-Channel Digital Video
The works in this virtual exhibition are video clips, character sketches, sound and textural experiments that didn't make the final cut from a range of new media projects - short films, animated series, immersive experiences, sound installations, sculptures, and more. These offcuts give us a deeper look into an artist's iterative and editing process. Think of the four rooms you're about to enter as the special extended edition of your most prized DVD where you're able to explore the twists and turns an artist takes on the path to building a story and world.
Every year, Gray Area Festival presents an exhibition exploring critical issues of our time through artistic perspectives. For the first time ever, the Gray Area Festival Exhibition will be experienced online as we continue to reimagine our relationship with art in an increasingly digital world. Hosted in a networked virtual gallery on New Art City, the exhibition format explores new ways of experiencing art together in online spaces.
Now in its 6th year, Gray Area Festival expands beyond its focus on experiential exhibitions into an exploration of artists working in Radical Simulation - using immersive worldbuilding to reimagine adjacent possible presents through themes of embodiment, social justice, identity, de-colonialism, and regenerative ecology. In this unique online festival, experience artist presentations from within virtual worlds, and engage with a global community bringing together diverse backgrounds and perspectives to creatively address the critical issues facing our rapidly evolving reality.
Visit the exhibition directly here
Works on View
The Making of 'No State', (2018-2020)
American Artist
Digital Video
For the exhibition Black Gooey Universe (2018), American Artist made a suite of sculptures about technology. Using dirt, tar, silicone and old smartphone parts, the exhibition set out to convey an alternate realm of technology where the black backdrop of the original command-line interface continued to serve as the blank canvas of digital creation rather than the white backdrop of the the graphical user interface introduced to personal computers in the 1970s.
The sculpture No State featured a matrix of hundreds of smartphones with black cracked screens set in a grid on the floor. The title implied that the phones were in no particular state, neither dead nor alive, but in a liminal space of possible usage and value. This video depicts the final stage in the process of creating the sculptural phones where Artist picks up a phone—composed of a recycled phone case, black silicon, and cut window glass—and drops it onto the floor at a particular distance to achieve the desired crack pattern in the glass.
View the work in Editing Suite 1 on New Art City
2 Lizards, (2020)
Orian Barki & Meriem Bennani
Single-Channel Digital Video
2 Lizards is an animation show about life in NYC during the first wave of the COVID19 pandemic.
View the work in Editing Suite 3 in New Art City
Sommer of Hate, (2020)
Margot Bowman
Digital Video, Digital Images
Sommer Of Hate is a feminist sci-fi cartoon where political uncertainty plays out its character’s sex lives, commissioned by Channel4 Television as part of Random Acts.
View the work in Editing Suite 2 in New Art City
Excerpts from ‘Dreams of the Jaguar’s Daughter’, (2020)
Alfredo Salazar-Caro
Three-Channel Digital Video, 3D Sculpture
Dreams of the Jaguar’s Daughter is a three-part Surreal VR Documentary where Achik’, the spirit of a young immigrant, guides viewers through her dreams and memories of the arduous journey north. Starting in the Guatemalan jungle, traveling through central Mexico and reaching the Arizona Desert. Each chapter is composed from documentation of immigrants’ journeys during the 2018 Caravan, using 3D scans, drones, traditional footage, interviews and 360° footage.
View the work in Editing Suite 3 in New Art City
MHYSA_OneInAMillion_outtakes, (2020)
E. Jane
Three-Channel Digital Video
The artist presents three outtakes from MHYSA-OneInAMillion.mp4 (2020), the fourth video in the Lavendra/Recovery series. In the Lavendra/Recovery series, Jane recreates and reinterprets R&B music videos from the 1990s collected in a digital film archive using webcams, green screen, cellphone footage and found videos and images from the internet. In these videos, Jane’s alter-ego MHYSA acts as the performer while dancing, lip-syncing, and singing (often joyfully off-key) in a fangirl homage to the Black Diva Archetype.
In these clips you see hidden moments—where a makeshift tripod fails, where the artist exerts control as both performer and director, asking MHYSA/her body to try different gestures, etc. As a Black femme, the artist proclaims agency and autonomy: a restorative act to have so much control over their own body given oppressive histories of slavery and subjugation.
View the work in Editing Suite 2 in New Art City
5hundred lives without debt, (2016)
Tongkwai Lulin
Single-Channel Video
5hundred lives without debt ( 5ร้อยชาติปราศจากหนี้ ; 2016) was a site-specific, interactive prototype at Wat Buddha Thai Thavorn Vanaram Temple, in Elmhurst, Queens NY. As a 1-year nationwide mourning period was established in Thailand late 2016, temple visitors in Queens experienced a 3D environment on a TV monitor alongside sermons and prayers. Between folk rituals, communal preaching and state-sponsored grief, 5 hundred lives without debt infiltrates diasporic places of memorabilia.
View the work in Editing Suite 4 in New Art City
The Future Conditional,(2020)
Romi Ron Morrison
Digital Video
The Future Conditional is a series of interactive tactile sound installations. This work centers a series of conversations about black feminist futures and the future conditional, asking “What are the things, often forgotten, that we need to carry with us?” and “What can we now allow to fray and break, and be ok with the brokenness?”
Various black feminist scholars, artists, family members, and friends have been recording their reflections and are mixed as a 4 channel sound composition that are woven into soft circuit fabric transducers embedded in hanging quilts. This work takes up The Freedom Quilts as a black feminist archive of ancestral communication guiding our paths towards freedom, encrypting information through culture, building extensive relationships of trust to ensure our survival beyond this world and into the next.
View the work in Editing Suite 1 in New Art City
Partial Dreams Visions with no beginning no end infinite melancholy infinite bliss, (2020)
Olivia McKayla Ross
Digital Video
This work is an early sketch of video poetry thinking about power, surveillance, and the divine. The artist’s eyes glow white while attempting to eat the camera Ross has had for three years.
View the work in Editing Suite 2 in New Art City
Two leather harnesses that came in through the Port of Beirut, one from a sex shop on AliExpress, (2020)
Bassem Saad
3D Sculpture, Digital Video
Two leather harnesses that came in through the Port of Beirut (one from a sex shop on AliExpress and the other from Conwell, a South Korean medical supplier) are modeled by two embracing figures on a rooftop facing the Port. It is overcast and the humidity is 72%.
From The Future Conditional, a series of interactive tactile sound installations, this work centers a series of conversations about black feminist futures and the future conditional. The works ask: What are the things, often forgotten, that we need to carry with us? What can we now allow to fray and break, and be ok with the brokenness?
View the work in Editing Suite 4 in New Art City
