For our 7th edition, Gray Area Festival presents Worlding Protocol — a survey of interdisciplinary creators drawing upon indigenous knowledge, transhumanist philosophies, regenerative ecologies, and autonomous organizations to imagine new relational ontologies beyond utopian and fatalist worldviews.

In advance of this year’s festival, we'd also like to invite you to review last year's Gray Area Festival: Radical Simulation. Curated by Kelani Nichole, Radical Simulation aimed to showcase how new possibilities can be born by testing the limits of new media and the ways in which the virtual can be used to reshape the actual.

This year's festival programming builds upon the ideas instigated in 2020, pushing the concept of radical simulation to encompass the restrictions & limitations of simulation technologies. From Radical Simulation, we must also conceive of a new kind of Worlding Protocol, one that takes an interdisciplinary, interspecies, and interplanetary approach. By looking holistically at the systems that surround us, we can use radical simulation techniques to create new social, technological, political, and even physical protocols and rewrite our world.