Grey Area Foundation for the Arts

https://grayarea.org/

We use digital tools to create art and design projects that benefit society. We test and scale projects with high impact potential, teach digital tools to support artists and technologists, and inspire our community by promoting meaningful new work.
We apply the promise and inspiration of digital art to a broader social context. Our programs are transforming cities into creative outlets, applying technology to solve problems, and shaping how art is created and consumed in the digital era.

Gray Area started as a curatorial project of Founder and Executive Director, Josette Melchor. A Queer Mexican Woman from the Coachella Valley in Southern California. She was raised by a single Hispanic Mother and wasn’t exposed to art spaces until she visited her first art museum when she moved away from home. After this initial visit Josette immediately dedicated her life to exposing as many people as possible–no matter their socioeconomic background– to the Arts. Understanding the value of artistic vision and spaces for experimentation, she leased her first warehouse in 2002 forming, Gray Area’s first gallery and studio program in Los Angeles. A move to San Francisco in 2005, created an opportunity to nurture the intersection of art and technology.

In 2007, Gray Area was invited by SF Mayor’s Office to move its location from the South of Market (SOMA) District to the underdeveloped Mid-Market/Tenderloin area. Josette began to research what the curatorial focus area might be to develop a new arts center. Josette met Peter Hirshberg in late 2007 and begin discussions around the need for artists and engineers to collaborate. In April 2008, Gray Area produced its first media arts show in a SOMA warehouse as a solo show for data artist Aaron Koblin. This exhibition brought together an important group of Founding Board Members including Peter Hirshberg, Chloe Sladden, Chris Delbuck and a partnership with Recombinant Media Labs including Naut Humon and Barry Threw. Gray Area Foundation for the Arts became a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization in 2008, while renovating a former adult theater, 55 Taylor, (now the Center for New Music) into gallery and studios. Several notable civic engagement programs were developed to activate local communities to respond to urban issues in Mid-Market, including the Urban Prototyping Festival in 2012. In April 2014, Gray Area relocated its headquarters to the Grand Theater, a historic landmark originally built in 1940 based in the Mission District. After a successful crowdfunding campaign to support its revival, this 10,000 square foot building, leased for 10 years, has transformed into a community center to further our mission and host our programming. In addition, the location further solidifies Melchor’s vision to reach diverse audiences as the organization has become a resource for the local community. As an act of community service during 2016 and 2017, Gray Area distributed over $1.5 million to provide relief and recovery efforts for the Oakland Ghostship Fire after losing many artists in our community.

https://grayarea.org/press/inside-googles-first-deepdream-art-show/

This weekend the first art exhibit and auction dedicated to neural networking—curated by Joshua To, a design and UX lead for VR at Google—opened at the San Francisco gallery and arts foundation Gray Area. The idea for the show, according to To, evolved directly from the explosion of online interest in the project. “DeepDream had gone viral and everyone’s experience was seeing the work on their phone or laptop screens,” he told me over email. “We thought it would be powerful to curate a collection of pieces so that people can experience the work printed large, high quality, and framed professionally with gallery lighting.”

Inside the gallery, art from 10 different artists and engineers hang on the walls, chosen to represent the sheer diversity of ways computer vision can be used to make art. Each artist has a unique background, ranging from the VR filmmaker Jessica Brillhart to Josh Nimoy, a computational artist who worked on Tron: Legacy. While it would have been easy to let the bizarre—and quite beautiful—imagery stand alone, To says that explaining the ideas behind neural networking was absolutely crucial. But if you’ve ever tried to explain DeepDream out loud (and you don’t work in AI), you know that’s easier said than done.

What emerged was a classic problem of information design: How to communicate the remarkably complex and cerebral ideas behind neural networks to a public, without using the relatively esoteric language and ideas native to AI—all in a digestible format that visitors could take with them. Led by Gray Area, the exhibition team came up with a brochure filled with metaphor-rich language explaining the basics (“DeepDream is almost like cloud-watching,” writes featured artist Mike Tyka).


But it also included a symbol-based wayfinding system for understanding the tech behind each piece of art. First, it lays out four different techniques—DeepDream, Class Visualization, Style Transfer, Fractal DeepDream—that were on view in the gallery, in dead-simple terms. Then, it assigns each technique a graphic symbol. Beneath each piece inside the gallery, a placard identifies not only the artist and year, but also an icon that corresponds to the technique the artist used.

It’s a semantic wayfinding system designed to help visitors navigate the esoteric world of artificial intelligence.


For example, take this piece by the self-described code artist Mario Klingemann, a sepia-toned tangle of eyes and jawlines. In the gallery, the piece is labeled with an overlapping series of concentric rings. Take a look at the brochure, and you’ll see this symbol refers to a straightforward use of DeepDream, where a trained neural network is fed an image (presumably here, a woman’s face), which is then incrementally changed by the algorithm, the curators explain, creating a feedback loop between the original image and the neural network’s reading of it. “This process gets repeated many thousands of times to create unique imagery,” they write.

Parting From You Now Mario Klingemann

According to Gray Area’s Josette Melchor, the full process of developing and organizing the show, auction, and accompanying symposium with Google took a full six months. “It was incredibly important to us that people who attended the event could leave having a solid understanding of neural networks and DeepDream,” To says. “We put in a lot of work to achieve this goal.” The auction of the pieces this weekend raised almost $98,000 to benefit the gallery’s mission of supporting young artists working with technology through scholarships.

Each of the featured pieces represented a collaboration between a machine and a human. Finding a way to explain that complex and very nascent working relationship to the public isn’t just important in the context of the exhibit, it’s important in the context of advancing artificial intelligence in general.


By Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan

It has become apparent to my own project that education is an important factor, I shall now try to find a way to reveal a little of the mystery inside the final work. I really like the fact they call the work a collaboration of machine and human.