Exhibition Details
February 11 – 15, 2026
All Ages. Strobe Warning.
Gray Area / Grand Theater
2665 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
Exhibition Schedule
Wednesday, February 11:
Superradiance Opening Reception
• 6 – 7 PM | Member Happy Hour Preview RSVP
• 7 – 9 PM | Exhibition + Artist Talk Get tickets
with Memo Akten & Katie Hofstadter and Dawn Danby & David McConville (Spherical Studio)
Thursday, February 12:
Superradiance Exhibition Open Hours
• 6 – 9 PM | Get tickets
Friday, February 13:
Superradiance Live Performance
• 8 – 10 PM | Get tickets
Sunday, February 15:
Superradiance Exhibition Open Hours
• 5 – 8 PM | Get tickets
From February 11 – 15, 2026, Gray Area presents Superradiance, an internationally acclaimed immersive artwork and performance by Memo Akten & Katie Hofstadter that explores planetary consciousness and interspecies realities through technological embodiment.
Incorporating artificial intelligence, generative software, and game engines, the work unfolds as a large-scale, multi-channel film experience in the Grand Theater, open for public visitation during regular hours. On Friday, February 13, the artists will deliver a live audiovisual performance inside the installation, culminating their development of the Superradiance project to date.
About Superradiance
Superradiance is a multiscreen video and sound installation, film and performance exploring embodiment, technology, and planetary consciousness. It invites the viewer to extend their bodily perception beyond the skin and into the living environment.
The work combines poetry, dance, and insights from neuroscience, woven together with code, simulations, and generative AI to evoke a visceral, intimate connection to the living planet.
In the words of the artists:
It's one thing to intellectually know that we are deeply entangled within complex assemblages of life, interdependent physically, chemically, and biologically, across multiple scales of time and space. But how can we feel this connection in our own bodies?
Dance is one of our earliest biotechnologies. We dance to express ourselves, to connect to each other. Through ritual and ecstatic dance, we dance to experience union with the universe directly.
We draw upon the cognitive phenomenon of ‘embodied simulation,’ where, as you observe another person moving, you feel their movement in your own body. As Vittorio Gallese writes, “By means of a shared neural state realized in two different bodies ... the 'objectual other' becomes 'another self.’”
Superradiance leverages the cognitive phenomenon of ‘embodied simulation,’ in an immersive, ritual sanctuary, where invisible dancers embedded in animate environments transform forests, oceans, and deserts into extensions of our own bodies. And where technological mediation becomes a means of exploring embodied consciousness rather than escaping it.
Embracing a superposition of epistemologies and holding space for complexity, we want to challenge the boundaries of self, biology, geology, and technology – contemplating the whole planet as a living cyber-organism which exists across space and time.
Superradiance Opening Night
Wednesday, February 11, 2026
6 – 7 PM | Gray Area Member Preview — RSVP
7 – 9 PM | Open to the Public
The evening features an artist talk with Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter on their process of weaving dance, poetry, and neuroscience into an immersive ritual sanctuary.
Discover "embodied simulation," where animate environments—from forests to oceans—become extensions of the human form. Join the artists to explore how technology can deepen our connection to the living planet and encounter a vision of planetary interconnectedness when it is needed most.
Get Tickets
Superradiance Performance Night
Friday, February 13, 2026
8 – 10 PM
Experience the live performance of Superradiance, where Memo Akten and Katie Hofstadter explore planetary consciousness through a unique spoken word performance.
On-screen, witness dancers move through immersive environments of forests, oceans, and deserts, their bodies serving as portals for "embodied simulation." Through a fusion of generative AI and immersive installation, this visceral ritual challenges the boundaries between biology and geology, offering a breath-taking encounter with planetary interconnectedness.
Get Tickets
Memo Akten & Katie Hofstadter are Southern California-based interdisciplinary artists, researchers, and collaborators whose work investigates the entanglements of technology, consciousness, embodiment, and culture. Merging backgrounds in dance, writing, poetry, drawing, sculpture, computer science, artificial intelligence, computational art, and public practice, they create speculative simulations, data dramatizations, immersive installations, and narrative experiments that probe the human condition in an age of artificial intelligence and accelerating transformation.
Memo Akten, originally from Istanbul, Turkey, is an artist, musician, and researcher whose practice bridges machine learning, consciousness, perception, and spirituality. A pioneer in artistic explorations of Deep Neural Networks, he holds a PhD in this topic from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is Assistant Professor at UC San Diego. His works have been exhibited worldwide, from the Shanghai Ming Contemporary Art Museum, to the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, to the Grand Palais in Paris, the Venice Biennale, and he is also a recipient of the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica.
Katie Hofstadter is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work investigates the complex relationships between embodiment, consciousness, and technologically mediated imagination. Her projects have been exhibited worldwide, and her writing appears in publications like Flash Art, BOMB, and The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. She is co-founder of global public art campaigns such as the ARORA network and the Climate Clock in NYC.
Together, their collaborative research and practice explore how emerging technologies— particularly AI and data systems—interact with the embodied, emotional, and ecological dimensions of human experience.
Sponsor
Epson
Generous equipment support is provided by Epson.
