Restructured Futures
For our very first partnership with Gray Area and utilizing their historic theater in the Mission District, musicians and visualists explore virtual and imagined architectures through sound, movement, and visual storytelling to dismantle our notions of both physical and digital space. As San Francisco is currently experiencing rapid transformations of our cityscape, artists Surabhi Saraf, Nonagon, Colin Evoy Sebestyen, and Drought Spa reinterpret how our constructs echo ourselves in our minds and our bodies – the interconnections between the communities and the spaces they inhabit, and transparent realms inbetween.
8:00pm: Doors Open
8:40pm: Drought Spa (featuring movement by Julia Litman-Cleper, Rae Diamond, Lara Durback and Randy Reyes)
9:15pm: Nonagon and Colin Sebestyen
9:50pm: Surabhi Saraf (featuring movement by Shinichi Iova-Koga and words by Dorothy Santos)
Surabhi Saraf is a media artist, composer, and performer based in San Francisco. Surabhi has performed solo at Thessaloniki Contemporary Art Biennial, Greece, Currents International New Media Festival, Santa Fe, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, SF and Max Mueller Bhavan Goethe Institut, Mumbai & New Delhi among others. Her collaborative work has been performed at NETMAGE 10 International Live Media Festival, Bologna, Soundwave Biennial ((5)), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.
https://surabhisaraf.net/
Musician Nonagon and visualist Colin Evoy Sebestyen will explore the constant state of flux and shifting dichotomy of the San Francisco landscape in their work Start Up/Shut Down. The two artists will tightly integrate audio and visual performance, where larger conversations shape the resulting pieces. Whether for reasons of worship, commerce, residence, punishment, or leisure, a city tells the story of its people and the concerns of those people. This work is not a judgement of this moment, this economy, or the situation of the current. This work is about analyzing and contrasting this moment with the ineffable and infinite.
As a performer, Nonagon (aka John Brian Kirby) brings the skill and technique of a traditional instrumentalist to the cutting-edge of live electronic music. His live sets are heavily improvised through hands-on manipulation of a carefully-curated combination of commercial and hand-built hardware and software.
https://nonagon.net/
Academy of Art University professor Colin Evoy Sebestyen creates cinema-quality live concert visuals from an all-original palette of 3D rendered imagery, motion graphics, and manipulated photography. Colin combines the immediacy of live performance with the multidisciplinary study of design, animation, and code.
www.movecraft.com
A generative visual, sonic, and literary performance, based upon an essay by cruse which attempts to “parse the symbology of architecture in technological, corporate realms: of opaque, secretive data centers and tech-industrial zones”. Via a patch created by Lo, the reading of said text will loop, fragment, dissolve into itself and offer moments of clarity, and otherwise parallel the transmissions of textual data and its attendant signal noise as it traffics through our networks. Lo will control a series of iterative visuals that rework cruse’s own simulations of digital 3D landscapes.
Featuring movement by Julia Litman-Cleper, Rae Diamond, Lara Durback and Randy Reyes
alex cruse is a writer, artist, and educator, whose work synthesizes the disciplines of poetry, video, installation, and new media. She is interested in systems of governmentality/surveillance as social modalities; technology’s capacity to both build and dismantle informational and linguistic structures, and the politics of representation produced therein.
Kevin CK Lo is a composer, choreographer, writer and artist living between Oakland and Melbourne, Australia. In his compositions for live performance and installation, he utilizes instruments, digital sound processing and generative programming environments to examine spatial and auditory sensitivities, topological structure and audience kinesthetic response while seeking to corrupt conventional compositional/performative/installative rationale.
The Architecture
Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, Inc. is a 501(c)3 Non-Profit Organization supporting Art & Technology for Social Good. Their mission is to apply art and technology to create positive social impact through education, civic engagement, and public programs. They use digital tools to create art and design projects that benefit society. They 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. They apply the promise and inspiration of digital art to a broader social context. Their programs are transforming cities into creative outlets, applying technology to solve problems, and shaping how art is created and consumed in the digital era. https://grayarea.org/