Open to Festival attendees October 19 – 22 during festival hours
Public visiting hours October 23 – 24 between 4-8PM

Gray Area, San Francisco (MAP)

Featuring work by:

0xDEAFBEEF, Indira Allegra, Chia Amisola, Taeyoon Choi, Nat Decker, Scott Draves, Sarah Friend, Jonathan J. Harris, Melissa Malzkuhn, mai ishikawa sutton, Rhea Myers, ngọc triệu, Mimi Ọnụọha, Steve Pikelny

 

Curated by Roxi Shohadaee & Wade Wallerstein

RSVP to the Exhibition Opening Party

CripTech Metaverse Lab

co-presented by Leonardo/ISAST

Featuring Work By: Indira Allegra, Nat Decker, Melissa Malzkuhn

Co-produced by Leonardo/ISAST and Gray Area, the CripTech Metaverse Lab gathered a national cohort of disabled creatives in San Francisco to experience immersive artworks. The lab conceives of the metaverse broadly as the ecosystem of extended reality technologies that reflect, project and interact with the world we know. Yet, VR, AR and spatial audio present significant access frictions and communication barriers for disabled users and creators.

Melissa Malzkuhn “Deaf Club” (2023), VR – a CripTech Metaverse Lab commissionThis experiential lab generated collective, participatory access through convenings that invited artists working in different modalities—from sound design and dance to virtual reality—to imagine or “crip” new creative pathways for experiencing metaverse artworks. The lab draws this methodology from what Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch call crip technoscience, a “non-compliant knowing-making” in which disabled people dismantle systems and technologies “by working within and around them.”

In their engagements with immersive media, the cohort encountered access frictions that span hardware and software design misfits to navigational and cultural incompatibilities. These moments of 
in-access stimulated playful and transgressive creative design solutions, or crip hacks. The cohort imagined metaverses grounded in lived experiences of disability that emphasize multisensory avenues for aesthetic experience, cross-disability customization, agency, belonging, and joy.

In collaboration with industry partners VIVE ARTS and VIVERSE, as well as New Art City, the CripTech Metaverse Lab commissioned artists Melissa Malzkuhn, Indira Allegra and Nat Decker to prototype these worlds. As experiments in creative access, these works deepen our perception of these emerging realities and redefine the social field.

The DWeb Pluriverse: An Historical Overview

Featuring Work By: 0xDEAFBEEF, Chia Amisola, Taeyoon Choi, Scott Draves, Sarah Friend, Jonathan J. Harris, mai ishikawa sutton, Rhea Myers, ngọc triệu, 
Mimi Ọnụọha, Steve Pikelny

In 2023, Gray Area received support from the FileCoin Foundation to develop a decentralized web curriculum for creators. Spearheaded by Roxi Shohadaee, Regina Harsanyi, Kelani Nichole, Sarah Friend, Sarah Grant, and mai ishikawa sutton, this initiative will present a prototype for open source education surrounding this burgeoning technological movement.

Rhea Myers “Blockchain Aesthetics” (2014-2015), HTML5 and JavascriptFor Gray Area Festival: Plural Prototypes, this exhibition presents seminal works about the decentralized web that paint a picture of why it is important that this knowledge be open source and accessible. Spanning the last twenty years, these works explore ways of thinking about distributed networking, non-hierarchical structures, data sovereignty, blockchain verification, cryptographic currencies, and more broadly what it is like to preserve and direct contemporary data flows.

In lieu of showcasing a demo of the finished the DWeb Curriculum for Creators, which is currently in development for an anticipated launch in 2024, this special presentation nestles canonical explorations of decentralized technologies amongst prototypes developed for the CripTech and C/Change laboratories. This show underscores their urgent relevance to today’s creative landscape. With the aim of demonstrating the broad scope of what decentralization means, these works offer specific experiences that point towards the radical potentials for these technologies to change the future.

 

Artists

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