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Gallery Spotlight: DELTA_ARK


January 10 – March 1, 2024

Gray Area is pleased to present the debut solo show of Gray Area Incubator Member Ari Kalinowski, known by their artist studio moniker Delta_Ark. This focus exhibition presents the artist’s video game work, Binah: Forms for Wisdom (2023).

Built in Unreal Engine 5, Binah: Forms for Wisdom is an art game that takes place in a future where human life has mysteriously vanished. Players exist as the last members of humanity, left behind in a ghost world to uncover what became of the species. The game starts on the island of ‘Binah’, a monument which recounts five ages of technological development that led to humankind’s disappearance: Climate Machines, Cryonics, Brain-Computer Interfaces, Genetic Engineering, and Spacefaring. By exploring Binah, players encounter recorded testimony from citizens of each age—like lost whispers from a future-past.

Binah: Forms for Wisdom employs some of Delta_Ark’s recent experimentations with agent based world design, which seek to imbue digital environments with virtual life that radically alters gameplay dynamics. For example, on the island of Binah, an autonomous maintenance system constantly builds and rebuilds the structures of a lost city. This autonomous simulation runs live during the game experience, revealing and concealing different parts of the map during different playthroughs. Binah: Forms for Wisdom demonstrates the impact of our current technological moment—one in which rapid advancements in machine intelligence and agent design are inspiring artists to consider the great transformations and singularities that humans will face in the short and long term.

This kind of speculative exploration is a familiar playground for Delta_Ark. In their sprawling, simulation-based practice, the studio draws concern to the enmeshed entanglements between natural systems, technological systems, and their impacts on human cognition and emotion. Looking towards biological science, cognitive science, sociology, and religion from a xenofeminist and post-gender lens, Delta_Ark uses game engines to simulate how advancements in tech fields like synthetic biology and atmospheric management might impact the psychological, spiritual and ethical roots of the human experience. Through complex hypermedia narratives that unfold in game experiences, videos and virtual performance, Delta_Ark offers keen insight into the evolving nature of agency, and more broadly the felt impact of living through eras of radical change.

Past Gray Area Gallery Exhibitions

Gray Area Opens New Gallery Space August 25, 2022 with Inaugural Exhibition

We're thrilled to announce the opening of the new Gray Area Gallery on August 25, 2022, a permanent exhibition space located within Gray Area's current home in the MIssion District's Grand Theater.

Gray Area was originally launched in 2006 by Founding Executive Director Josette Melchor as Gray Area Gallery in San Francisco's South of Market (SoMa) to showcase technology-driven art. The Gallery transformed into the Gray Area non-profit in 2008, and exhibited works by seminal new media artists including Casey Reas, Aaron Koblin, Camille Utterback, and STAMEN Design. During this time, the space quickly became a cultural community center, developing notable civic engagement programs activating communities to respond to local urban issues, and expanding with educational programs, research, and live performances.

The new Gray Area Gallery continues the tradition of making genre-bending work accessible to the public. In tandem with broader Gray Area thematic initiatives, the first year of gallery curation will center on the complicated tensions and surface areas between identity, representation, expression, oppression, and technology.


Where We Live? - Steven Piasecki & Michael Meisel (July 2022)

Location & Hours

Gray Area Gallery
2665 Mission Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
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JANUARY 2024

THURSDAY–FRIDAY 6:00 – 8:00 PM


The Gray Area Gallery is open for appointments on weekends and select dates. To schedule your visit and discuss available times, please reach out to our curator Wade Wallerstein at [email protected].

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