Check this out! City Centered is a festival of locative media and urban community spanning two busy weekends in the Tenderloin District, with a variety of interactive exhibits in and around Gray Area Foundation.

For more information about all of the events, the exhibits, and to register, visit:
http://www.citycentered.org/

Invite your friends on Facebook!

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Friday, June 11
1:00pm – 5:00pm
Symposium: Sensing the city – Data visualization and urban life
KQED, 2601 Mariposa St. SF CA

City Centered begins with a gathering of data visualization, mapping and tracking projects including installations, online maps and projected art developed with research and collaborations with neighborhoods organizations. These projects can be experienced in the Tenderloin on Sunday, June 13.

7:30pm – 10:00pm
Opening event at GAFFTA (Gray Area Foundation for the Arts), 55 Taylor St, SF CA featuring Exploring Urban Futures , an exhibition by MIT’s SENSEable Cities Lab.

Saturday, June 12
9:00am – 5:00pm
Symposium: Location, Politics and Community
KQED, 2601 Mariposa St. SF CA
Keynote by Joel Slayton, Director of ZER01 SJ Bienniel
followed by morning panels on Location as Political and afternoon panels on Location and Community.

Sunday, June 13
10:00am – 4:00pm
Public walking tours of Citycentered projects
Experience the Tenderloin community through wireless technologies, the Internet and a walks led by artists and community members.

Walks will start at Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (55 Taylor Street). They will visit the Luggage Store Gallery (1007 Market Street), the Tenderloin Tech Lab (150 Golden Gate), the Shih Yu-Lang Central YMCA (387 Golden Gate) and the 900 block of O’Farrell Street.

Saturday, June 19 and Sunday, June 20th
Community education workshops
KQED, 2601 Mariposa St. SF CA
Free and open to the public. Please register here . All workshops begin at 10am.

For more information and event details, contact citycentered [at] gaffta.org

Gray Area Foundation is pleased to announce:

SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures, featuring the works of MiT’s SENSEable City Laboratory.

Please join Researchers from MiT Senseable City Lab and Gray Area Foundation for the exhibition opening night reception:

Friday, June 11th, 2010 7:00pm – 10pm

Exhibition OPEN Hours: Tuesday and Thursday 4pm-7pm

Exhibition Description
Since 2003, MIT’s SENSEable City Laboratory [http://senseable.mit.edu/] has been investigating how emerging digital technologies can be employed to make cities more livable, sustainable and efficient. We recognize that the digital revolution has lent our cities a new layer of functionality and that now is the time to explore how sensors, cellphones, micro-controllers and networks of other handheld devices can be used to more effectively manage city infrastructure, optimize transportation, analyze our environmental impact and foster new communities.

In this, the first retrospective of the lab’s work, we have chosen 15 past projects that represent the potentials of this new world of pervasive computing. A collection of works from MoMA, Venice Biennale, Expo 2008, and Design Museum Barcelona. The work ranges from a pollution-sensing e-bike, to tiny sensors that can detect the final journey of trash in the waste removal system, and from real time visualizations of calling patterns during Obama’s Inaugural speech to a new smart building from the London 2012 Olympics.

SENSEable Cities: Exploring Urban Futures commences with a series of public events, June 11th- 13th, with related programming running through August 11th.

Below are a few projects included in the exhibition:

Copenhagen Wheel

Cars have GPS and traffic awareness; now bicycles can, too. But the Copenhagen Wheel has a new feature no ordinary auto navigation awareness has: it can track pollution awareness as well – in real time. The state of the art hybrid bike also saves power when you pedal and lets you use it when you need a bit of a boost. Copenhagen Wheel is an example of the city data dialog taken to the next level – beyond dialog to interactive decision making.

New York Talk Exchange

Exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York Talk Exchange asks the question: How does the city of New York connect to the global conversation? Using phone and IT data, the images reveal the real time connections between various boroughs and the countries they connect to.

iSpots

The iSpots project maps the dynamics of MIT’s wireless networks across campus, revealing the ebb and flow of daily life.

Obama One People

For President Obama’s 100th day in office, MIT SENSEable City Lab created visualizations of mobile phone call activity that characterize the inaugural crowd and answer the questions: Who was in Washington, D.C. for President Obama’s inauguration day? When did they arrive, where did they go, and how long did they stay?

Amsterdam

Through partnership with mobile operators, Current Cities reveals the inner workings of a city through text messages, articulating the life of Amsterdam, here, These images depict the volume and intensity of text messages during on New Year’s Eve day and night.

Trash Track

Have you ever wondered where your trash goes? MIT researchers attached tags to trash to track it. Some trash is provincial – expiring not far from home, while other objects travel great distances to be disposed of.Trash Track has received wide attention in the national and international press. It has been deployed in several U.S. cities, including Seattle and New York.

–Complete List of Projects–

future NENEL / 2010
flyfire / 2010
the cloud / 2009
AIDA / 2009
the copenhagen wheel / 2009
trash track / 2009
currentcity /2009
spacebook / 2009
eyestop /2009
obama | one people / 2009
world’s eyes / 2009
real time copenhagen / 2008
digital water pavilion /2008
NYTE / 2008
The wireless City /2007
wikicity rome / 2007
wikiCity / 2007
venice biennale / 2006
real time rome /2006
zaragoza bus stop / 2006
tsunami_safe(r) houses / 2005
mobile Landscape Graz / 2005
iSPOTS / 2005
Raster Cities /2005
A.C. Milan / 2004
Sandscape / 2004
Illuminating Clay / 2004
Phoxelspace / 2004
Programmable Window / 2004
Cannes Reloaded /2004

–People–

Carlo Ratti / Director
Assaf Biderman / Associate Director

–Current Researchers–

Clio Andris, German W Aparicio Jr., Rex Britter, Francesco Calabrese, Filippo Dal Fiore, Giusy Di Lorenzo, Jennifer Dunnam, Xiaoji Chen, Carnaven Chiu, Luigi Farrauto, Cesar Harada, Lindsey Hoshaw, E Roon Kang, Kristian Kloeckl, Aaron Koblin, David Lee, Eugene Lee, Mauro Martino, Vincenzo Mazoni, Stephen Miles, Mahsan Mohsenin, Sey Min, Nashid Nabian, Walter Nicolino, Dietmar Offenhuber, Christine Outram, Francisco Pereira, Santi Phithakkitnukoon, Adam Pruden, Francisca Rojas, Christian Somner, Bettina Urcuioli, Malima Wolf, Caitlin Zacharias

–Past Researchers–

Alan Anderson, Burak Arikan, Dima Ayyash, Euro Beinat, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Daniel Berry, Andrea Cassi, Natalia Duque Ciceri, Enrico Costanza, Pedro Correia, Talia Dorsey, Sarah Dunbar, Samantha Earl, Paula Echeverri, Chris Fematt, Lucie Boyce Flather, Saba Ghole, Fabien Girardin, Lewis Girod, Gabriel Grise, Daniel Gutierrez, Tim Gutowski, Margaret Ellen Haller, Alex Haw, Bartosz Hawelka, Guy Hoffman, Teerayut Horanont, Sonya Huang, Myshkin Ingawale, Sarabjit Kaur, Jan Kokol, Sriram Krishnan, Xiongjiu Liao, Alyson Liss, Liang Liu, Jia Lou, David Lu, Andrea Mattiello, Justin Moe, Eugenio Morello, Kenneth Namkung, Kevin Nattinger, Sarah Neilson, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Yaniv Ophir, James Patten, Jill Passano, Fabio Pinelli, Riccardo Pulselli, Pietro Pusceddu, François Proulx, Daniele Quercia, Martin Ramos, Rahul Rajagopalan, Jon Reades, Bernd Resch, Renato Rinaldi, Susannes Seitinger, Andres Sevtsuk, Louis Sirota, Najeeb Marc Tarazi, Bo Stjerne Thomsen, Musstanser Tinauli, Andrea Vaccari, Kenny Verbeeck, Yao Wang, Sarah Williams, Shaocong Zhou

–Advisory Board–

Eran Ben-Joseph, Rex Britter, Gillian Crampton Smith, Joseph Ferreira, Dennis Frenchman, Hiroshi Ishii, Michael Joroff, Bruno Latour, Frank Levy, William J. Mitchell, Antoine Picon, Adele Santos, Saskia Sassen, Lawrence Vale, Mirko Zardini

TRANSPOSE
Opening Reception: Saturday, February 20th. 6:00PM – 11:00PM

Open Hours: Wednesday- Friday: 4pm-8pm

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts is pleased to announce our third exhibition, opening to the public with a FREE reception on Saturday, February 20th. The show will feature the work of artists Aaron Koblin and Robert Hodgin.

Help spread the word by inviting your friends on Facebook!

TRANSPOSE continues Gray Area’s investigation into expansive forms of technology and the painting of landscapes through digital means. Code is a rule for converting a piece of information into another form or representation. Here we present two artists who work visually and creatively with code, shifting data around into different compositions, transposing their received nature into an alternate one through interpolation and algorithms.

Aaron Koblin is an an artist specializing in data visualization. His work takes social and infrastructural data and uses it to depict cultural trends and emergent patterns. Aaron’s work has been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED. He received the National Science foundation’s first place award for science visualization and is part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Currently, Aaron is Technology Lead of Google’s Creative Lab where he helped to launch Chrome Experiments, a website showcasing JavaScript work by designers from around the world.

Robert Hodgin co-founded the Barbarian Group. His work ranges from simple 2D data visualizations to immersive 3D terrain simulations. His primary interests include theoretical physics, astronomy, particle engines, and audio visualizations. He works in Java, Processing, C++, Cinder, OpenGL, and GLSL and has spoken at conferences around the world, including FlashForward, FITC, Flash on the Beach, OFFF, and FlashBelt. He was also a guest lecturer at NYU’s ITP program, UCLA’s DMA program, and SCI-ARC and his work has been shown at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Wing Luke Asian Museum, McLeod Residence Gallery, Wired NextFest, San Francisco Exploratorium, and the San Francisco Independent Film Festival.

PROTOTYPE
Opening January 9th
6PM-Midnite

PROTOTYPE: Open Exhibition Hours
Weekly through February 3rd:
Tuesday: 5pm – 8pm
Wednesday: 5pm – 8pm
Thursday: 12pm – 8pm

ADDITIONAL UPCOMING PROTOTYPE EVENTS:
Resident Artist Symposium (more info)
Thursday, January 28th
7PM – 9PM

Closing Reception
Friday, February 5th
6PM – 10PM

PROTOTYPE Installation Timelapse from GAFFTA on Vimeo.

The Gray Area studios have operated as a laboratory for its five artists in residence, fostering the creation of projects that overlap technology and traditional media. Using this collaborative workspace, the artists have created multi-disciplinary works that include immersive environments, digitally fabricated sculpture, kinetic paintings, audiovisual software/hardware, and other mixed media experiments. PROTOTYPE will be a dynamic group exhibition featuring a collection of individual and collaborative works created by our very first class of Resident Artists.

ARTISTS

Alphonzo Solorzano
Born in San Francisco, Alphonzo Solorzano began to explore creatively as far back as he can recall. Drawing has always been first nature. Early influences would include his older brother’s comic collection, animation, vintage cinema posters. He received his BFA in 2004 from San Francisco State University with an emphasis in painting and printmaking. Working simultaneously in both disciplines as well as a commercial printer, would help to form a mixed media approach to his work. Alphonzo Solorzano currently resides in San Francisco where he continues to work diligently on his art. He has exhibited in various museums, galleries, and alternative art spaces on the west coast, Midwest and over seas.

Gabriel Dunne
Gabriel Dunne’s work spans fine art to design and technology in the mediums of installation, architecture, industrial design, and audio/visual programming. His pursuits insight the exploration of life, music and sound, structure, and systems in the natural world. His projects have been shown internationally at conferences and exhibitions around the world. He is a San Francisco native, and holds a B.A. in Design | Media Arts from UCLA.

Ryan Alexander
Ryan Alexander experiments with generative techniques in animation and design. He spends his time hacking software for live visuals, and exploring what’s possible with all the crazy tools humanity has at its disposal.

Miles Stemper
Classically trained as a painter, Miles Stemper’s work is a way of connecting his interests in digital media, technology, optics and the physical pleasure of painting. His work uses gestural mark-making, geometry and digital reinterpretation as a way of understanding the relevance of painting in an increasingly digitized world. Raised in Seattle, Miles received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, has worked in Germany and has exhibited work on both coasts.

Daniel Massey
Daniel Massey (b. 1982, Mexico) is an artist, designer, and programmer based out of San Francisco, CA. Daniel’s recent work seeks to instigate new modes of collaboration, creation, and transformation by approaching technology as inherently malleable. His projects take on varied forms, from immersive installations and web-based work, to live visuals and sound. Daniel earned his MFA in Digital Arts & New Media from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts is pleased to announce the arrival of Seaquence: an exciting original collaboration from three GAFFTA Resident Artists and the second featured composition in our ongoing Tendorama window gallery series.

Developed on-site by Gray Area Resident Artists Gabriel Dunne, Ryan Alexander and Daniel Massey, Seaquence explores interaction and collaboration through visual, musical and social web technologies.

Seaquence will make its physical debut in the Taylor St. Tendorama window gallery space with a special installation reception and beta testing party at GAFFTA on Saturday, December 5th, 2009 from 7pm-10pm

Help spread the word on Twitter and Facebook.

About Seaquence:

Seaquence is a social music project that allows people to create and consume short musical compositions in a unique interactive online environment. The musical patterns in Seaquence are represented as biologically-inspired life forms which are both heard and seen. Different musical sounds in each composition are visualized as unique character traits in each life-form. In addition to navigating and exploring through this field of micro compositions and sequences, users can also create, publish and share ‘Seaquences’ of their own via the native sequencer and synthesizer tools.

Installation Overview:

The Seaquence installation includes a physical step-sequencer made up of 256 individual buttons and RGB LED’s which are linked to audio and projected visuals. This button array allows people to compose musical patterns through the native Seaquence instruments, which can then be published to the Seaquence world. Audio and video is routed to the exterior of the Tendorama installation space on Taylor St, encouraging the public to hear and see the installation from the outside through the window glass. Window graphics will be designed to prompt the public to enter the gallery space to experience and participate in the project directly.

During and following the physical installation, Seaquence will live online via a dedicated, publicly accessible website.

Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) is pleased to announce its Inaugural Exhibition, OPEN, featuring the works of C.E.B. Reas, Camille Utterback and Stamen Design.  Including new works from three pioneers in the field of digital art, OPEN celebrates GAFFTA’s arrival as San Francisco’s leading digital arts organization and cornerstone of The City’s emerging Tenderloin Arts District.

OPEN commences with a series of fundraising events, public celebrations and workshops October 1st – 4th, with related programming running through November 18th (see full calendar of Grand Opening events below).

The multidisciplinary works in OPEN span a range of formats and techniques: from prints and sculptures to interactive video, generative processes and cartography.  While the styles of each featured artists are unique and diverse, all the works in GAFFTA’s Inaugural Exhibition exemplify the core values of our organization’s creative vision and civic mission: technology, community and openness.

Main Gallery: C.E.B Reas

C.E.B Reas is a principal player in the software art movement and co-creator of the free, open-source programming language Process­ing.  Reas’s vast body of work explores natural processes through the lens of digital media. His software installations, unique prints and relief sculptures are inspired by biology, natural intelligence and the principles of emergence. The possibilities of interaction are outlined in code, where structures evolve through a series of actions and where movements are unique elements within given parameters. Beyond his own body of work is the instrumental foundation he has laid with the creation of Processing for the growth of a new wave of software artists and design­ers.  In addition to a collection of recent works from Reas, three new pieces will be debuted at OPEN: “Network A”, “Network B” and “Surface”.

Tendorama Gallery: Camille Utterback

Camille Utterback’s interactive video piece “Liquid Time” will be the first featured work in the Tendorama Window Gallery Project, a series of rotating bi-monthly installations in the gallery’s prominent 15’ x 8’ front display windows facing Taylor Street. Utterback’s exploration is a series of pieces filmed in the surrounding neighborhood and projected back in the gallery window where the imagery of time, as well as space, is disrupted by the motions of passer-bys. This vibrant, site-specific window installation will feature video filmed in locations throughout the Tenderloin and will be viewable 24 hours a day, 7 days a week by residents and visitors of the Tenderloin.

Mezzanine Gallery: Stamen Design

San Francisco-based Stamen Design will debut a series of interactive and printed pieces that allow visitors to explore the Tenderloin through a series of different maps and mappings. Using data from the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District, public data made available by the City of San Francisco’s datasf.org, and other data sets, the project will provide a unique view on this fascinating neighborhood.

The Tenderloin has many faces: National Register Historic District, entry point to San Francisco’s immigrant population, notoriously vice-ridden streets, home to diverse communities and the city’s largest population of children, seat of some of the city’s oldest architecture, the only largely working-class neighborhood within the downtown area, and birthplace of the sexual liberation movement predating the Stonewall riots. Most recently, a new wave of artistic and cultural activity (including GAFFTA) is changing the face of the neighborhood once again. Using real world geographic, demographic and cartographic data, this exhibition will offer unique perspectives and unexpected insight to this complex and dynamic nexus at the center of San Francisco’s cultural and social fabric.

Grand Opening Events