SAN FRANCISCO, June 29, 2026

One Saturday afternoon in May, a crowd of almost 50 people — mostly in their 20s and 30s — sat before a DJ performing a live-coded set a block away from Union Square. Sunlight brushed through the front windows and across the concrete floor as the performance artist generated and manipulated music in real time through computer code.

A cross-shaped arrangement of screens flickered along one white wall. On the opposite wall, a television displayed an interactive piece; after watching it for a time, a mother steered her child away. Between them, a robotic arm whirred to life atop a display stand.

It was the closing reception for “If/Then Amen,” the ninth exhibition hosted at the first physical — albeit temporary — home of the group known as The Intersection of Art and Technology.

TIAT came to occupy the space through Vacant to Vibrant, a program led by the nonprofit SF New Deal and the city of San Francisco that seeks to revitalize downtown by activating empty retail spaces with temporary shops and community uses. The 4,900-square-foot gallery sits at the corner of Powell and O’Farrell streets in a unit formerly occupied by Japanese eyewear retailer JINS, which closed its doors in 2022.

Since opening to the public in November 2025, TIAT has hosted at least one exhibition each month and almost 250 total events, including hands-on workshops, book clubs and raves. Having already outlasted its three-month Vacant to Vibrant contract, the future of the space — which supports one of The City’s emerging creative communities — remains uncertain.

“We’re definitely just taking this month by month and seeing what happens,” said Brandon Tran, a TIAT gallery attendant and computational artist. “We’ve been in this space longer than anyone ever expected.”

TIAT founder and Director Ash Herr said that when she moved to San Francisco in 2018, the small yet humming creative technology scene enthralled her. But as the COVID-19 pandemic dampened The City’s rhythm, the communities she joined quieted and the people she met moved away.

Determined to reconnect with other creative technologists (a term that Herr said includes anyone with the desire to create with technology, from media artists to product designers), she began hosting salons to showcase projects. They took place at The Commons in Hayes Valley and Gray Area — a creative-technology gallery that opened in The City in 2008 — before finding a more consistent home at the Internet Archive in the Outer Richmond, where TIAT still hosts quarterly salons.

“When I came to a salon, I was like, ’How did this happen?’” said Avital Meshi, a San Jose-based new-media and performance artist, of one gathering she attended. “I was really surprised, very amazed and quite excited about what I saw there.”

When participants started using the salons to pitch their startups, Herr shifted to a more curated approach, selecting projects in advance to keep commercialization out.

“Early feedback, and still the feedback that I get today, is that it’s cool to have a forum where it’s not strictly about making money or building a business,” Herr said. “What it’s turned into now is the event that I wish existed, one that’s more media-, art- and creative-technology-centric.”

Herr found success in promoting the salons on social media — particularly X — and attendance grew from dozens to sometimes about 400. The nonprofit Mozilla Foundation noticed those social-media posts and proposed an artist-in-residence program titled Creative Futures: Counterstructures, requiring TIAT to formalize as a nonprofit.

The residency also needed a physical home, leading Herr to apply for the Vacant to Vibrant program in June 2025. Shortly thereafter, TIAT was accepted as one of the program’s few arts organizations — its other recipients are primarily food and boutique businesses.

TIAT, which contracts four paid part-time gallery attendants, is supported by a rotating group of over 80 volunteers. Herr, who dedicates her full time to TIAT, wants to pay all artists, though that currently depends on whether an exhibition has sponsors — something most shows have lacked.

“Every arts organization is struggling right now with top-level budget cuts, with government funding and whatnot,” Herr said. “We aren’t supported by any big foundation, and there’s no billionaire funding us.”

Beyond Vacant to Vibrant, Herr credits ticketed events, workshops, residencies, incubators, event rentals and grants for sustaining the organization. TIAT also offers a $55-per-month membership that includes event admission, gallery coworking (normally $10 per day), a one-time merchandise redemption and an optional website shout-out.

From a cultural perspective, Tran said he sees creative technology as a “counterculture” to artificial intelligence and optimization, the trends currently ascendant in the tech community.

But that position isn’t always understood from the outside. Tran said he recalled someone once asking him — aggressively, he felt — whether his art was being used to train AI. He said those who think that, or are reflexively critical of TIAT, probably don’t know what it’s actually doing.

Halim Madi, a San Francisco-based computational poet, said any criticism he receives isn’t about his art but the medium.

“Often the critiques are just that technology is bad, technology drains your attention or technology is bad for society,” he said. “All of these are ideas that have calcified. The invitation of all creative technologists is to show a more complex picture.”

One of Madi’s works is a browser-based instrument to which audience members submit words, which are then assembled into a poem that modulates the performer’s voice via a synthesizer. The piece premiered at TIAT in January.

Madi said he sees his work at the gallery as part of a broader effort by creative technologists to reclaim technology from pure utility and the mundane.

“The gift of the artist is to make us reconsider, make us pause and sit with the things that we have taken for granted,” he said.

Meshi expressed a similar view. Much of her art practice, she said, is about “inviting people to spend time with the technology, and then provoking more thoughts in relation to it.”

One of Meshi’s works is an arm-worn device that listens to what someone is saying to her, generates a GPT response and whispers it into her ear, which she then repeats to the other person as if the words were her own.

While TIAT’s downtown space provides a home for artists such as Madi and Meshi, and reflects real demand for the events and opportunities it offers, it might be part of a cycle that’s unsustainable.

Barry Threw, executive and artistic director at Gray Area, has seen this cycle before: downtown real-estate collapses, people questioning what to do and deciding to bring in artists to prop up the value. Short-term programs for arts organizations follow, the value of the area rises — and those organizations are then priced out because they don’t have ownership or equity and are forced to relocate.

Instead, Threw said, the solution requires a coordinated long-term commitment across city government, public and private companies, and foundations. He said he wants San Francisco to treat cultural sustainability “seriously as the economic driver for the city that it is,” with a plan that considers the next 100 years.

“For pocket change for a lot of these companies, we could have the most vibrant cultural scene on Earth in San Francisco,” he said.

Civic leader Charles Collins, the president of the San Francisco Arts Commission and a member of the SFMOMA board, also said Vacant to Vibrant is not the long-term solution that’s necessary, although it’s a vital first step.

He said the initiative’s action should extend beyond downtown to neighborhoods such as Parkmerced and Bayview-Hunter’s Point.

“If San Francisco is going to be a great city, I hope that it is measured by the greatness of its equity,” Collins said.

Even though Vacant to Vibrant isn’t the sole reason TIAT is still operating — as proven by its success amid its nomadic past — the revitalization program has accelerated the nonprofit’s maturation and given its creative technologists a new place to call home.

“If it stops, it would be — for me — a sign of deterioration of the city.” Meshi said of the gallery’s uncertain future. “I always hope for more, and TIAT has been giving me that more.”