SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 27, 2011 – Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA), a civic-minded nonprofit focused on building an appreciation for and participation in digital culture, has launched Gray Area’s Seaquence – an online “social artwork” experiment that allows anyone to explore and build an ecosystem of musical lifeforms while simultaneously making a donation to support the burgeoning digital arts community.

Gray Area’s Seaquence is a browser-based sequencer – a device designed to play back musical notation – that allows donors to create music-making “seaquences” through individual compositions.  Each “seaquence” is given a unique visual and musical DNA (affecting “waveform, octave, scale, melody, envelope, and volume,” as this demo explains), and is then added to a constellation view that serves as a global “donor wall.”

“Gray Area’s Seaquence takes inspiration from social games and the purchasing of virtual goods,” explains Josette Melchor, executive director of Gray Area. “Each seaquence micro-donation allows an online contributor to create digital art, and simultaneously support this organization and the creative coders who are transforming online and offline experiences.”

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts is committed to funding more creative projects like Seaquence through Gray Area Labs – an artist-in-research program focused on the development of creative experiments.  Recognizing the importance of the digital arts movement, WordPress.org and Twitter.com are supporting the launch of Gray Area’s Seaquence. Twitter is supporting through their new Promoted Tweets for Good product, use hashtag #GAFFTA.

“Seaquence is an example of the creativity and innovation at the confluence of art, technology and social media,” says Peter Hirshberg, chairman of Gray Area.

With the donation feature layered on top of the initial platform, Gray Area’s Seaquence is an extension of Seaquence, an original project created at Gray Area Labs by Gabriel Dunne, Daniel Massey, and Ryan Alexander, with support from GAFFTA.

Headquartered in a 5,000-square-foot art and technology center in San Francisco, GAFFTA serves a diverse community of creative coders, data hackers, engineers, composers and technologists. GAFFTA has received support from IBM, National Endowment for the Arts,WordPress.org, Twitter, The Knight Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, WHH Foundation, KQED and the City and County of San Francisco. Learn more at http://gaffta.org.