Gray Area presents an exhibition of works by international artists attempting to understand, illuminate, and refigure our world through superimposed inquiries into nature, power structures, representation, order, virtual art/architecture and world building. The pieces in “Nonlinear Perspectives” use new lenses to map our world, through with 3D printing, virtual reality, projection mapping, computer gaming, and interactive installation.

In 1435 the technique of linear perspective was created, conceiving the canvas as a window onto a virtual plane, and enabling the dissection our world into a rational order. This exhibition rejects this traditional, disembodied, and serial view, and offers a collection of collateral works entangled in their efforts to reflect new ways of understanding through creative use of technology. Joanie Lemercier brings a group of works exploring projections of light in space and its influence on our perception; Angela Washko’s immersive installation The Game: The Game simulates the experience of being targeted by speed seduction techniques; Hyphen-Labs’ NeuroSpeculative AfroFuturism innovates on how we will engage with black women through content in their digital future; Nora al-Badri & Jan Nikolai Nelles’ The Other Nefertiti explores issues of cultural appropriation and digital neocolonialism; Can Buyukberber’s Metafold focuses on human perception, exploring new methods for non-linear narratives, geometrical order, synergetics and emergent forms; Memo Akten’s Equilibrium shows a snapshot of a moment of harmony, amidst chaos and disorder; and DiMoDa, the Digital Museum of Digital Art, is the preeminent institution showcasing virtual reality contemporary art from eight different artists.

The exhibition opening will also host a very special performance by Moor Mother, experimental musician and one-half of the Black Quantum Futurism collective.

May 4, 7pm - 11pm
Opening $5-$20 sliding-scale entry. Special performance by Moor Mother.

May 5, 12pm - 6pm
Free and Open to Public (Quiet viewing during conference) (closed during night performances)

May 6, 12pm - 6pm
Free and Open to Public (Quiet viewing during conference)

May 6, 9pm - 1am
For ticket holders during night performances

May 7, 11am - 6pm
Free and Open to Public (Quiet viewing during workshops)

May 8 - 12, 11am - 6pm
Free and Open to Public

On the opening night of our Exhibition, we are proud to present a special performance by Moor Mother. Moor Mother, or Moor Mother Goddess, is an experimental music project by Camae Defstar, a musician and poet from the United States.

Her work has been labeled “hardcore poetry,” “power electronics,” “slaveship punk,” and “protest music.” Ayewa herself resists categorization, preferring to self-identify through terms such as “time traveller” and “truth teller.” A self-described Afrofuturist, she uses spacetime-bending sound and lyricism to reformulate concepts of memory, history, and the future in an afrocentric or afrodiasporic tradition.

Ayewa is one half of the Black Quantum Futurism collective, along with Rasheedah Phillips of the Afrofuturist Affair. She has performed in the punk band The Mighty Paradocs, and is also the co-founder of Rockers! Philly, an “event series and festival focused on marginalized artists”. In June 2016, Ayewa and Phillips opened the Community Futures Lab, an “afrofuturist community center” in North Philadelphia where they lead workshops and teach-ins, provide space for artistic practice, and fight gentrification in the area.

Her debut album Fetish Bones was named one of the top experimental albums of the year by Rolling Stone, and Pitchfork as well as one of the best albums of the year by The Wire. The album is available on her Bandcamp page, along with several EPs, experiments, and collaborations from earlier in her career.

This piece is part of the Wall drawing series, installations where a visual is drawn or printed directly onto the wall and augmented with a layer of projected light and ambient sound. The visual is composed of straight lines, and repetitive patterns that represents structure of landscapes, rocks, planets, caves, made out of simple patterns, moiré, tessellated patterns. The image drawn is a symbol of “the Universe“ inspired by the Pantheistic belief. It plays with light, depth and visual perception, this series is strongly Inspired by Sol Lewitt’s wall drawings.

In his new plotter drawing series, Joanie explores the capacities of a drawing machine. Creating visuals with repetitive patterns, complex and detailed compositions, the use of a robot will reveal mechanical glitches coming from the machine, wear and ink glitches coming from the pen, crashes and unfinished lines coming from the custom software. The drawings are not perfect and so original shapes emerge from artifacts.

A contemplative journey across a generative landscape. Motion and perspective bring a different sense of scale, details, and space. Despite the minimal monochrome wireframe aesthetics inherited from earliest videogames, the viewer might perceive details in rocks, erosion, sand valleys, all made from a single line of code.

A tiny planet made of thousands of dots. This unique drawing was made by a plotter machine: dots are layered on paper, thanks to a Voronoï algorithm creating gradients and a depth illusion when seen from a distance. The polygonal planet is augmented with a layer of projected light: comets, stars, moons or suns, reveal the triangular structure of the minuscule world.

‘The Game: The Game’ is an immersive installation and platform to experience the first chapter of a video game presenting the practices of several prominent seduction coaches (aka pick-up artists) through the format of a dating simulator. In the game these pick-up gurus attempt to seduce the player using their signature techniques taken verbatim from their instructional books and video materials.

Players explore the complexity of the construction of social behaviors around dating as well as the experience of being a woman navigating this complicated terrain. The video game is presented alongside the video and print-based source materials from the seduction coaches themselves as well as handmade cyanotype prints, videos and books produced by the artist in response to her experience investigating this field and the ways in which women are literally presented as objects in physical and digital space.

‘The Game: The Game’ is a continuation of ‘BANGED’ a year-long project in which the artist interviewed ‘Bang’ series author/manosphere figurehead and tried to get in contact with his alleged sexual partners. After working on ‘BANGED’, the black and white ways in which this field has been portrayed seemed too simple and unfair to all parties who encounter it and provoked this question: Is practicing “game” inherently wrong and dishonest or can it be practiced in a way that simply levels the dating playing field in favor of those who are otherwise socially or physically disadvantaged?

By disguising the most notorious PUAs alongside game-less individuals and PUAs-in-training and placing the player into the perspective of a woman forced to distinguish between them all – Washko hopes to add levels of complexity to public conversations around both pick-up and feminism which have both found themselves most often presented in highly polarized, dichotomous positions in mainstream media.

The first chapter of the game was presented at TRANSFER Gallery in NYC along with a musical score composed by Xiu Xiu, whose perverse, challenging, personal and complex music complement the murky, frequently dark, isolating and complicated experiences and aesthetics presented in ‘The Game: The Game’.

‘Equilibrium’ is an interactive abstraction, a data dramatization, of the delicate balance in which an ecosystem hangs – a fragile structure, a snapshot of a moment of harmony, amidst chaos and disorder.

The project was inspired during an expedition to Madagascar with the Unknown Fields Division following the trail of global resource extraction into the heart of one of the most unique ecosystems on the planet, exploring the endangered rainforests, mining landscapes and wild west sapphire towns. The country is a popular hotspot for tourists and wildlife lovers, rich in biodiversity with many endemic species and a unique ecology. It’s rich in resources desired by the affluent world such as rosewood, gold, sapphire, nickel and cobalt; and exploited by lawless industries. While the country’s residents live in extreme poverty – with a tradition of unsustainable slash-and-burn subsistence farming – corrupt battles ensue for political power. The land rich with these different types of resources – ecological, financial, social, political or simply subsistence – is pulled apart from all directions, based on the shifting balance of these values.

A system can be temporarily stable when the forces acting upon it and its components are balanced. At a macroscopic level its behavior may appear to be static or pulsate slowly, even though microscopic interactions might still be occurring and components fluctuating furiously. The system can retain this steady state until an external perturbation, upon which it falls into chaos, searching for a new equilibrium, which it may or may not find.

These behavioral concepts apply to many systems beyond Madagascar: populations and ecosystems on various scales, climate, politics, social and economic trends, and many other biological and physical systems.

Touch the screen, disturb the balance, and watch the system fall into chaos. Then wait for it to settle and reconfigure, self-organize to form a new arrangement, while it searches for a new balance, a new harmony, a new temporary equilibrium.

NSAF innovates on how we will engage with black women through content in their digital future. Exploring alternative content through tangible products, new worlds and 3D landscapes, and scientific research, in order to inform and change the way we depict black women in society, culture, and the future. Hyphen Labs' philosophy is to create an impactful narrative that inspires the next generation of developers and media consumers, to radically transform virtual reality into a world where people of color exist, and to prove that VR and human-centered design can be a tool for the betterment of society.
 

Nefertiti is returning to the place where it was found. For the first time since the sculpture was excavated and stolen over 100 years ago, the iconic artefact will be shown in Cairo. “The Other Nefertiti” is an artistic intervention by the two German artists Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles.

Al-Badri and Nelles scanned the head of Nefertiti clandestinely in the Neues Museum Berlin without permission of the Museum and they hereby announce the release of the 3D data of Nefertiti's head under a Creative Commons Licence. The artists 3D-Print exhibited in Cairo is the most precise scan ever made public of the original head of Nefertiti. With regard to the notion of belonging and possession of objects of other cultures, the artists’ intention is to make cultural objects publicly accessible. The Neues Museum in Berlin until today does not allow any access to the head of Nefertiti nor to the data from their scan.

“With the data leak as a part of this counter-narrative we want to activate the artefact, to inspire a critical re-assessment of today’s conditions and to overcome the colonial notion of possession in Germany” the two artists say.

Multidisciplinary artist Can Buyukberber premieres a new 3d printed sculptural work from his current residency at the Autodesk Pier 9 AiR Program.

Including works:

Rosa Menkman - DCT Syphoning The 64th Interval
Miyö Van Stenis - War Room
Theo Triantafyllidis - Self Portrait (Interior)
Brenna Murphy - Vectoral~Sentience_Stack
Claudia Hart - After The Party
Jacolby Satterwhite - En plain air
Tim Berresheim - Untitled
AquaNet 2001 (Gibrann Morgado, Salvador Loza ) - Carson Trump-Palin

As the preeminent Virtual institution devoted to Digital/New Media Art, the Digital Museum of Digital Art presents the full range of contemporary Digital art, with a special focus on works by living New Media artists. DiMoDA is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting and exhibiting Digital art and its collection while expanding the conscious experience of viewing Digital art in a Virtual space. DiMoDA is arguably the finest holding of twenty-first-century Digital art in the world.

The DiMoDA building is intended as a home for contemporary digital art and incubator for new ideas, as well as an architectural contribution to the Internet’s Virtual landscape.

Conceived in 2013 by Alfredo Salazar-Caro and William Robertson, DiMoDA launched in November of 2015 with its first exhibition as a pavilion in The Wrong Biennale and an IRL exhibition at Transfer Gallery in New York.