Ranging from analog visual synthesis to web animation to 3D rendering and AI-enabled video processing, this selection demonstrates the manifold technologies that our community of Bay Area creators applies to moving image art practice.
Video Pulse: Moving Image Selects from the Gray Area Cultural Incubator
On view through January 15, Gray Area presents a selection of video works by four artists from our Cultural Incubator program.
Visit the Gray Area Gallery during any of our events, or email [email protected] to set up an appointment.
The Gray Area Cultural Incubator will begin accepting applications for new members in Winter 2025. Learn more about the program here.
Works on view:
Spencer Chang - html garden, 2023
Runtime: 03:32
html garden is a net.art work that imagines what a “seasonal website” could look like. Hosted on the artist’s server, the web-based artwork rewards visitors for coming back and noticing minute developments and changes–in stark contrast to the constantly shifting nature of the contemporary World Wide Web. The work is composed of digitally-native plants–each species derived from a set of related HTML code elements–that simulate the growth patterns of real plants. Available to explore online on your own device, html garden is presented at Gray Area as a timelapse video of the first two seasons of the garden’s growth. The slow, day-to-day growth of the website–made extremely rapid in this show–invites the viewer to consider what it means to bear witness to the internet’s ongoing evolution.
Delta_Ark (Ari Kalinowski) - Novacene Hekhalot, 2023
Runtime: 09:46
Novacene Hekhalot is an experimental Unreal Engine opera. Using game engine simulation, the work draws upon James Lovelock’s 2019 book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, which presages a new geological epoch as our world transitions from the human (anthropocene) to the intelligent machine (novacene). Through the lens of Jewish Merkahab Mysticism, Delta_Ark’s cyber-futuristic vision employs agent-based AI techniques and machine learning-enabled motion capture to render Lovelock’s world in seven audio-visual acts.
Sean Russell Hallowell (Isorhythmics) - Sacred Geometry, 2024
Runtime: 03:26
Sacred Geometry is a study resulting from a series of video feedback experiments conducted by the artist with the Sandin Image Processor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. When the Sandin’s original color encoder module from the 1970’s stopped functioning in 2022, Hallowell custom-built a new one–which he then used to create the color palette presented in this work. The audio was constructed from a patchwork of samples made with analog and digital sound tools, all of the artist’s own design. In all of his work, Hallowell marries skill for hand-built circuitry to a cosmic perspective on image and sound as conduits of metaphysical energy. Sacred Geometry explores the perception of intention in abstraction through analog composite video. Oscillating between geometric patterns and more gestural forms, Hallowell searches for connections between the viewer’s aesthetic experience of structure and emotional attachment to narrative–inducing critical reflection on our allegiance to known visual codes when confronted with new aesthetic phenomena.
Time Zones (Dan Gentile) - One Million People (in San Francisco), 2024
Runtime: 04:01
In this augmented, found footage music video, Dan Gentile uses AI stem-splitting technology to parse Lee Oskar’s 1978 record, San Francisco Bay. Sampling visual clips from numerous iconic television shows and movies, as well as tourism advertisements from the Prelinger Archive, the artist synthesizes a glitchy, nostalgic atmosphere to accompany his sonic remix of the 70’s harmonica hit. At points familiar and dreamy, the work presents interspersed moments of eeriness that stand out. Universal reference points–like beloved vistas of San Francisco landmarks and the intro to Full House–gain new connotation through Gentile’s discerning audio-visual redux.
About the Artists
Spencer Chang
Spencer Chang is an internet artist and engineer stewarding and making computer forms that embody and empower human connection and creativity.
Their interdependent practice spans open-source tools, internet environments, and computing-infused objects that offer alternative forms of digital being and invite & empower visitors to make their own technology. Their focus on communal spaces and infrastructure embodies a philosophy of solidarity by imagining, realizing, and maintaining technological patterns that nurture our capacity for taking care of our technology and each other. Ultimately, their dream is an internet that feels like a home made for, and tended by, all of us—a patchwork of neighborhood websites, apps, and servers that enable us to play, share, and steward together.
He previously designed and built tools to democratize programming and create a healthier cyberspace for several years at Coda and Verses, and is the creator of playhtml, html garden, Gather, among other computer experiments. Their work has been featured and supported by the de Young Museum, Gray Area, CultureHub, MIT Technology Review, and Frieze.
Delta_Ark (Ari Kalinowski)
Delta_Ark’s current work is a sequence of interactive virtual environments and audio-visual experiences that represent and embody different relationships between human-like entities, artificial intelligences (of various powers) and natural systems (or chimeras) in different science fiction contexts, often involving precipitous technological evolution, climate change or the far future. Many of these works explore future power-relations between AGIs, ASIs and cyberized forms of collective and individual human intelligence in order to sketch out some visions of a post-biological (and/or synthetic-biological) future. Motifs from Jewish mythology, Japanese popular media and contemporary philosophy often form the contextual backdrop of these explorations.
isorhythmics
Sean Russell Hallowell (isorhythmics) is a composer and video artist from San Francisco. His time-based art synthesizes experimental techniques developed from hand-built circuitry with a cosmological perspective on music’s origins in number and time. Concert works and installations of his have been showcased at festivals and galleries across the US as well as in Mexico, Chile, South Korea, the UK, Belgium, Croatia, and Iceland.
Dan Gentile
Dan Gentile is a journalist, DJ, music producer, and video artist living in San Francisco. He began experimenting with video synthesis early in the pandemic as a way to create visual accompaniments to his original modular synthesis compositions. He has performed at venues across San Francisco ranging from 1015 Folsom St. to the De Young museum, and released 6 sold-out NFT collections that combine his music and video art. In 2023, he released his first vinyl LP under the moniker Bellofatto & Gentile on Norway's Horisontal Mambo Records. When not making music or video art, he works as the culture editor at SFGATE, where he has won SF Press Club awards in 2022 and 2023 for commentary and investigative reporting.
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