For the past three years, we’ve been pretty busy here at GAFFTA. We’ve taught open-source digital tools to over two hundred students, curated eight museum-quality exhibitions, produced two city-wide festivals around digital experiments, facilitated eight hackathons around creative and social applications of technology, fostered the creation of over fifty new prototypes, hosted an array of world-leading artists and thinkers, and given a home to countless events and meetups for our community. Since our founding in 2008, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (@GAFFTA) has grown our budget over 700%, created six jobs from the ground up, built dozens of relationships in our Mid-Market neighborhood, and supported many resident artists, collaborators, and project teams.

Though it’s never easy to make a name for yourself as a cultural organization, people are starting to pay attention. This year, our work has been featured in The New York Times, GOOD, Fast Company, The San Francisco Chronicle, and many others. We’ve worked with and are supported by a wide range of artists, institutions, and organizations including the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), American Express, Google, The Creators Project, and Duran Duran.

We’ve been so busy, in fact, that we could never find much time to pause and reflect on all of the work we’ve done in this rapidly changing state of arts and technology. Fortunately, this is about to change! Today, we’re excited to announce the Gray Area Blog, our outlet for curated discussion of everything GAFFTA-related.

This means pieces of everything you’ve come to know and love from us: a healthy mix of generative art, open-source creative technology, interactive media, data visualization, web cartography, physical computing, local fabrication, citizen sensors, spatial sound, smart cities, digital urbanism, rapid prototyping, and multidisciplinary hacking that creates social, civic, and artistic value will be highlighted in one place – our blog! In short: we’ll capture anything and everything furthering our core mission of promoting social consciousness through digital culture.

We are extremely excited to provide this forum to capture the incredible stories of our most powerful asset – our community. Among other things, we’ll provide social and artistic commentary; profiles of our students, faculty, residents, and project teams; summaries and content from our events and classes; progress updates on GAFFTA projects; and previews of upcoming events at GAFFTA and our community at large.

What can you expect from the Gray Area Blog?

The new, the creative, the unexpected. Stay tuned.