Get access to our performances, conference talks, and exhibition with the Gray Area Festival Pass, or attend each night of performances with individual tickets.
Plural Prototypes – Exhibition Opening Party
Gray Area Festival 2023
A special presentation of CripTech Metaverse Prototypes, C/Change Projects,Decentralized Web Artworks, and live performances.
Gray Area Festival 2023 Performances
Nat Decker w/ Jules Chimes Gårder
Sammie Veeler
Thursday, October 19, 2023
Doors: 7pm
Performances: 8pm - 10pm
Our performances will be live-captioned, but there will be no ASL interpreter on site. Access doulas will be on site to facilitate fantastic experiences for all attendees.
View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at [email protected] with any accommodation requests.
Indoors event
Standing Program, with many comfortable and accessible seating options available
All Ages
N95 Mask Required
For Plural Prototypes, Gray Area is pleased to present a special presentation of artworks from across our prototype programs. Join us for an opening celebration, showcasing accessible metaverse prototypes in VR, historic artworks exploring concepts at the core of the decentralized web movement, and video presentations of cultural communications projects.
Representing the CripTech Incubator, C/Change Program, and Open Source Decentralized Web Curriculum, this exhibit offers multiple access points to introduce audiences to the innovative ideas, methods, and outputs centering our approach to Plural Prototyping.
Performances
This opening event features two captivating performances that expand upon the themes of access, inclusion, and communication:
Dead Name - Sammie Veeler
Dead Name is an ongoing multimedia performance project started in October 2022 through a commission by Octobre Numerique Faire Monde and the Tezos Foundation. Each performance in this series is unique, published as an essay, documented with audio, and archived in a persistent network of virtual worlds on New Art City. Dead Name conducts poetic performances of expertise and ignorance, mapping the temporal disjunction of gender transition onto the production of collective histories online.
Assembling Intimacy - Nat Decker with Jules Chimes Gårder
Assembling Intimacy is a multimedia performance by Nat Decker. and Jules Chimes Garder - reenacts the repetitive assembly and disassembly of Nat's mobility scooter. By compressing and mirroring the muscle memory of everyday actions, they demonstrate how seemingly simple routines of care can emerge as significant forms of intimacy. Nat develops their sensorial relationship to touch as someone who's embodiment expands to the plastic and metal mobility objects frequently maneuvered by the hands of others. Extracorporeal touch is felt, and distinctly so when generating what Mia Mingus describes as 'Access Intimacy,' or the closeness which results from access needs being met and understood / a certain feeling of safety and ease with another within an ableist paradigm.
Exhibition Artists
CripTech Metaverse Lab Prototypes by
Decentralized Web Artworks by
Accessibility Note
This event will be accessible to guests in line with our overall accessibility guidelines for Gray Area Festival. Our performances will be live-captioned, but there will be no ASL interpreter on site. Access doulas will be on site to facilitate fantastic experiences for all attendees.
Visit our FAQ page to read all of our access considerations. If you have further questions, access requests, or concerns, please write to [email protected].
Artists
Sammie Veeler
Sammie Veeler is a Los Angeles based artist examining the problematics of digital representation, the role of archives in the production of personal and shared histories, and the psychic transits between physical and virtual spaces. Her work takes the shape of undulating loops in time playing out across writing, performance, digital media, and world building. As co-founder New Art City, she was responsible for developing the gallery's virtual curatorial practice and cultivating a growing community of artists. She initiated the New Art City residency program and accessibility panel as touchpoints for building community into the gallery’s governance as an institution.
Nat Decker
Nat Decker (they/them) is a Chicago born, Los Angeles based artist. In June 2022 they graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles with a degree in Design/Media Arts and Disability Studies. Weaving these two fields, they work within the realm of disability arts as an inherently political practice, driven by the personal, and desires for care and collective liberation. Employing digital and sculptural mediums, they explore the aesthetics of access, the intimacies of lived experience, technology and crip fantasy. They use the mobility device as a site of crip narrative, reimagining the wheelchairs, walkers, scooters, canes they use each day with fluid impractical form, vivid celebratory color and questions about desirability. With Cielo Saucedo, they are creating a web archive of digital disabled embodiment, offering a repository of disability related 3D assets, avatars and motion-capture.
Jules Chimes Gårder
Jules Chimes Gårder (they/she) is a Los Angeles based artist working across mediums to create work centered around themes of mourning, memory and sexuality. Their practice incorporates sculpture, large-scale ceramic, video, painting and performance. As someone who lost a parent as a child, Jules is interested in how embracing ongoing relationships with the dead can shift our lived experiences and recenter what we value. Born in Sweden and raised in Maine, they are interested in pushing against unrealistically expedited faux resolutions to life altering events (a flattening that is often expected in service to productivity in our contemporary world). They will graduate from UCLA with a BA in Art this Fall 2023.
