Gray Area: Incubator Artist Salon 2023.2

Gray Area Incubator projects explore the intersection of art, technology and social critique.

6:00pm: Doors open
6:30 – 8:00 pm: 10 Minute Talks

Open to the public sliding scale entry $0-$30
Free for Gray Area Members

View our FAQ page for more info, or contact us at info@grayarea.org with any accommodation requests.

All Ages, 21+ Bar

Select members of the Gray Area 2023.2 Incubator cohort will share their projects in development and we invite you to contribute your feedback. Incubator artists will present their work in a TED-style talk with a question and answer period from the audience. Gray Area will be streaming the Artist Salon live, so you can join whichever way you prefer. All ticket purchases include in-person and online access.
Learn more about our Incubator members here.

Incubator Mentors
Mark Hellar
Interim Education Director

Current Incubator Members

Alec Pla
Hi! I don’t love writing bios, but here’s mine – I studied international politics and business in college (WI) and grad school (Denmark), moved to the Bay in 2016, ended up grinding to a full-time job in retail demo marketing for Oculus VR in 2019 when the original Oculus Quest launched. Realized it wasn’t for me, but fell in love with VR in the process, decided to quit in fall ’21 and since then have learned to code proficiently in C#, and became an intermediate Unity developer. I’ve been working toward this ‘create movement through music’ idea for the past 1.5 years, basically. Now I need to take the next step with the visual component and it’s both intimidating and exciting! But mostly exciting. Overall I’m living the dream, and plan to work in VR/AR art for the foreseeable future, a field with so many possibilities to unlock expression & creativity!

Chia Amisola
Chia Amisola is an internet & ambient artist from Manila, Philippines. Amidst a postcolonial internet of extremes, their (web)site-specific art (sites, poetry, games, social networks, archives, & tools) posits self-preservation as communal preservation, creation as synonymous with liberation, and identity as a source of infrastructure-building. They received a BA in Computing & the Arts from Yale University in 2022 and are a NEW INC Art & Code member. They are the Founder of the Filipino critical technology institute Developh and the Philippine Internet Archive, operating on the premise that the history of the Filipino internet is the history of people.

Cristina Isabel Rivera Sangama
Cristina Isabel Rivera Sangama (she/her/ella) is an Interdisciplinary Artist and Director based in Oakland, CA, and Miami, FL. Born to Peruvian/Puerto Rican parents and raised in the United States, Rivera brings a unique perspective to her work that is deeply rooted in her cultural heritage, background in social/behavioral studies, passion for sustainable artistic practices, and global creative community building for social change. Rivera’s background is in film, photography, and multimedia production. Her work explores the themes of magic, nature, and interconnectedness, with a focus on finding the beauty in everything and the magic that exists in the world around us. Through her art, Rivera challenges traditional norms and encourages viewers to think about the world in new and imaginative ways. Her work has been featured in film festivals, major publications, and has won several awards including a Knight Arts Challenge grant from The Knight Foundation for her work with the Sound and Vision collective in Miami, FL. In recent years, Rivera has taken her work in a new direction by exploring the use of technology and artificial intelligence in her art. She is currently working on developing new, interactive experiences that utilize her 15+ year archive of work, light field displays, and code in her new project called Selva Sonica (Sonic Jungle). She continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in art, and is always eager to learn and explore new technologies and techniques.

David Aughenbaugh
Artist, photographer, musician, some coding. 30-year career in visual effects for film and television including work on the Oscar-nominated short film “Pearl” in 2016, and feature film “First Man” which won the Oscar for Visual Effects in 2019. I am now using my knowledge of technology to create artwork of my own.
Ari Kalinowski

Delta_Ark (Ari Kalinowski)
Delta_Ark is an experimental atelier that explores climate change, artificial intelligence and belief; philosophically, the studio is committed to refining and developing an ideology of ecological transhumanism with queer Jewish flavoring. Delta_Ark’s previous works are embodied in games (Gevurah, Hod/Yesod/Tiferet, Malkuth/Netzach/Chesed, Binah), audio-visual sets (Novascene Hekhalot), architectural research (sketchbook, swarm based construction, 3DML architecture, wave function collapse city) and applied artificial intelligence (reinforcement learning, geo-based natural language generation). Also formerly in large scale projections in pavilions (The Beacon, Core, Islands/Accidents, Dreamcatcher, Archive of the Ecological Future, Light Atlas). Delta_Ark’s collaborators have been Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Audio Visual Club SF, The Ruby, Autodesk, Noisebridge, The Letterform Archive, Syzygy SF, Double Union, New Art City, Occupy, Biome Arts, Mary Mattingly, Digital Language Arts at Brown, Digital + Art at RISD, The Anti Eviction Mapping Project, B4BEL4B Gallery, CODAME, Eyebeam, and Buzzfeed.

Domingo Rafael Narvaez
Domingo Rafael Narvaez (Dom) is an interactive multimedia artist born in Managua, Nicaragua and raised in Miami Beach, Florida. Dom’s work plays with the interchangeability of reality and perspective.

isorhythmics
Sean Russell Hallowell (aka isorhythmics) is an audiovisual artist from the Bay Area. His performances and installations synthesize compositional techniques developed from hand-built electronic circuitry with a cosmic perspective on music’s origins in number and time. In his art, visual and auditory phenomena emerge as dual manifestations of what Medieval European musicians called the “arts of number” – i.e. music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. Concert works and multimedia installations of his have been showcased at festivals and galleries across the US as well as in Mexico, Chile, South Korea, the UK, Belgium, Croatia, and Iceland. He holds degrees in music theory from Brown University (AB) and Columbia University (PhD) with a specialization in 15th- and 16th-century Franco-Flemish vocal polyphony.

Koi Ren
Koi Ren is an artist whose practice is centered around the intersection of the human body and emerging technologies. Using wearable devices, gaze trackers, emotion sensors, and biofeedback, immersive tools, Koi’s work challenges traditional power dynamics and provides agency to marginalized perspectives. She encourages audiences to consider their own roles and possibilities in shaping the future through the use of novel media and its effects on emotions, desires, and behaviors. Her art delves into the ways in which technology shapes society and the human experience, with a particular focus on the concept of the “gaze.” In her projects, Koi examines the ways in which the gaze is used to construct and reinforce power dynamics. She draws on contemporary media studies and psychoanalysis to explore the tension between the subject and object in relation to the “collective consciousness” and the “panopticon” concept. Through her work, Ren aims to create a critical lens through which to view the ongoing technological revolution and to provoke thought and dialogue about the implications of these emerging technologies.