by Richard Hart
SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — In San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, social networks are leading to “social artworks.”

In a brand new gallery and workspace, a community of designers is networking artware and software. It is the latest creation in the drive to discover a new art form.

“So, here you see this grid,” said Daniel Massy. “You can sort of fill it in with notes.”

On a 15-foot wall projection, Massey recently composed music using a tool developed with fellow artists Ryan Alexander and Gabriel Dunne. It’s called Seaquence and it is at the intersection of music and images.

With it, you can build a sea creature by creating music or create music by building a creature. Changing the attack, sustain and decay envelope of the music changes the body of your creature.

Seaquence is the latest project of Gray Area, an organization brightening up one corner of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Josette Melchor is its Executive Director.

“Gray Area Foundation for the Arts is a non-profit,” she explains. “We’re dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture.”

Gray Area exhibits interactive works such as Robert Hodgin’s new liquid screen installation and a laser scanner/projector by Aaron Koblin.

The next step is to exploit social networks. For example, two artists are using Gray Area to develop a web app to annotate works of art socially. Seaquence is also destined for the web, Daniel Massey promises.

“The idea is to create this environment in which people could collectively, online, create music and share music with each other in a playful way,” he says. “So, it takes on almost a game feel to it.”

If you can’t buy it the way you’d buy a painting or sculpture, how do you know when this kind of art is a success?

“I guess you could see how many page views you have,” Melchor laughs. “Or YouTube streams!”

In the end, she points out that good art spreads whether networked or not.

“It continues to further the community and further this kind of study, and get the word out so we’re able to get more people involved. It’s spreading. It’s social,” she says.

After all, Tweets are music too.

You can drop by the Gray Area installation to inspect Seaquence before it goes to the web.

+dialog symposium series
presented by RML SF, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, and Phasor~

Friday, March 19, 2010
7-9 PM
Gray Area
55 Taylor St. San Francisco
Suggested Donation $5-10 – No one turned away for lack of funds.

The RML SF +dialog symposium series fosters discussion and interaction between audiences and artists, authors, theorists, educators, and producers of cutting-edge work.

This first edition traces the history of the most important song in computer music through two groundbreaking renditions. Max Mathews, the father of computer music, and new media artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey, will give presentations about their interpretations of the classic song followed by a open discussion moderated by digital arts technologist Barry Threw.

Computer performance of music was born in 1957 when Max Mathews made an IBM 704 at Bell Labs play a 17 second composition on the Music I program.

In 1962 Mathews synthesized the music for the song “Daisy Bell”, originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, as an accompaniment for a vocoder speech synthesizer created by John L. Kelly. Arthur C. Clarke, then visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility, saw this remarkable demonstration and later used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for “2001: A Space Odyssey” as the swan song of the dying computer, HAL9000.

In 2009, the online work Bicycle Built For Two Thousand by artists Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey took this first recording and created a crowd-sourced rendition using a custom tool made in Processing. Comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service, participants were asked to listen to a short sound clip and record themselves imitating what they heard. The result was a reconstructed version of the song as rendered by a distributed system of human voices. Instead of programming a computer, they used a computer program to stitch together a cross section of humanity.

Max Mathews
Max V. Mathews worked in acoustic research at AT&T Bell Laboratories from 1955 to 1987 where he directed the Behavioral and Acoustic Research Center. This laboratory carried out research in speech communication, visual communication, human memory and learning, programmed instruction, analysis of subjective opinions, physical acoustics, and industrial robotics.

From 1974 to 1980 he was the Scientific Advisor to the Institute de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM), Paris, France. In 1987 Mathews joined the Stanford University Music Department in the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) as Professor of Music (Research) where he developed a new pickup for electronic violins and a real-time computer system for music performance called the Conductor and Improv Programs and a 3D MIDI Controller called the Radio Baton.

At Bell Labs in 1957, Mathews demonstrated synthesis of music on a digital computer with his Music I program. Music I was followed by Music II through Music V and GROOVE, all were involved in the composition and performance of music on and with computers. These programs have been influential in the development of computer music. For this pioneering work he has been called the “father of computer music,” and most recently, “the great grandfather of techno!”

Max Mathews has conducted research on computer methods for speech processing, human speech production and auditory masking, and developed techniques for computer drawing of typography. The developer of “Music V” synthesis software and “Groove,” the first computer system for live performance, he is also the inventor of the Radio Baton, a computer-driven device that allows the user to conduct their own orchestral performances from MIDI files stored in the computer. Many multimedia patching languages such as Max/FTS, pd, jMax, and Cycling 74′s MaxMSP was based on Mathews’ ideas for a flexible, user-patchable sound generating system.

Mathews is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Acoustical Society of America, the IEEE, and the Audio Engineering Society.

Aaron Koblin
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.

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 music. Daniel earned his MFA in Digital Arts & New media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. He was part of the Yahoo! Design Innovation Team and is now a resident artist at the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts.

The book is 80 page full color catalog documentation of the exhibition. Stop by Gray Area in person to get a limited edition version of the PROTOTYPE with a free sticker and custom book sleeve. You can also order a copy from Blurb w/out the sleeve (and come by Gray Area in person for your sticker)

Purchase your copy through the Blurb bookstore

PROTOTYPE

Exhibit at Gray Are…

By Gray Area Foundat…

Book Preview

PROTOTYPE Installation Timelapse from GAFFTA on Vimeo.

Join us, this Friday, February 5th, as we share our last farewell with Gray Area’s first resident artists and residents release curated documentation of their process and works within with a first edition PROTOTYPE book, available exclusively during the Prototype closing reception, featuring the works by: Alphonzo Solorzano, Miles Stemper, Daniel Massey, Gabriel Dunne, Ryan Alexander. Future editions available through gaffta.org shortly

PROTOTYPE: Closing Reception & Book Release
Gray Area Foundation For the Arts
55 Taylor
Friday, February 5th
6PM – 10PM

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.

Recent mixed media works and wall installation titled The Future was Now uses iconography from early 1900′s auto ads. Vintage images, typoghrapghy, and slogans are used to create an alternate history to explore and challenge our interpretation of time and progress.

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.

Light Speak is an installation that transmits images through the medium of light. Images are captured outside throughout the day, and relayed as morse code pulses through a series of distributed models. Pixel by pixel, the images are reconstructed.

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.

Monad uses custom displays and original software to explore micro and macro systems of nature, technology, and perception.

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.

Miles uses the digitization of brushstrokes to create a series of abstracted icon paintings. Geometry forms the structure of these works because it is dictated by the same criteria of function communication as technology: geometry is efficiency of form, an articulate representation of space

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.
Ryan’s work is a combination of ideas and systems created within the last two years. Laser fabrication and projection mapping are used to create a glowing gourd.

PROTOTYPE: Open Exhibition Hours
Weekly through February 3rd:

Tuesday: 5pm – 8pm
Wednesday: 5pm – 8pm
Thursday: 12pm – 8pm

ADDITIONAL UPCOMING PROTOTYPE EVENTS:

Resident Artist Symposium
Thursday, January 28th
7PM – 9PM

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

Join us, this Thursday, January 28th, at 7PM, for our Resident Artist Symposium, where Gray Area’s first resident artists will share processes and concepts behind both personal and collaborative works. The evening will begin with individual artist presentations, followed by a short Q&A.

Gray Area Foundation For the Arts
55 Taylor
Thursday, January 28th
7PM – 9PM

ARTISTS:

Alphonzo Solorzano:
Recent mixed media works and wall installation titled The Future was Now uses iconography from early 1900′s auto ads. Vintage images, typoghrapghy, and slogans are used to create an alternate history to explore and challenge our interpretation of time and progress.

Daniel Massey:
Light Speak is an installation that transmits images through the medium of light. Images are captured outside throughout the day, and relayed as morse code pulses through a series of distributed models. Pixel by pixel, the images are reconstructed.

Gabriel Dunne:
Created with custom displays and original software, Gabriel’s works explore micro and macro systems of nature, technology, and perception.

Miles Stemper:
Miles uses the digitization of brushstrokes to create a series of abstracted icon paintings. Geometry forms the structure of these works because it is dictated by the same criteria of function communication as technology: geometry is efficiency of form, an articulate representation of space

Ryan Alexander:
Ryan’s work is a combination of ideas and systems created in the last two years. Laser fabrication and projection mapping are used to create a glowing gourd.

PROTOTYPE Installation Timelapse from GAFFTA on Vimeo.

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.

Artist Aaron Koblin will be giving a speech titled “A Vision for Digital Art in San Francisco: the Launch of Gray Area Foundation for the Arts”, addressing trends in digital culture and debuting Gray Area Foundation for the Arts to the tech community at the Web 2.0 conference. Aaron Koblin is a Gray Area featured artist, designer and reseracher who is focused on creating and visualizing human systems. Currently part of Google’s Creative Lab in San Francisco, California, Aaron creates software and architectures to transform social and infrastructural data into rich digital expression. Koblin’s work has been shown internationally and is part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Wednesday, October 21 – O’Reilly Web 2.0 Summit
When: 5:00pm
Where: Metropolitan Ballroom, Westin St Francis Hotel

For details see here.

Concurrently, Gray Area Foundation for the Arts will have a kiosk on display at the Web 2.0 conference debuting “Seaquence”, a project developed by Gray Area resident artists Ryan Alexander, Gabriel Dunne and Daniel Massey. Seaquence is an online social music experiment that allows users to create step-sequencer micro-compositions. Short musical patterns are represented as biology-inspired life forms which are heard as you navigate through their universe. Different sounds and timbres are visualized as unique character traits in each life-form. Users can navigate through the field of submissions, creating a unique musical and visual experience. Here is a preview video:

Seaquence Demo from Ryan Alexander on Vimeo.

GAFFTA is incredibly proud to announce that the collaborative project “Bicycle Built For Two Thousand” by our co-conspirators Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey has been nominated for this prestigious award!

Bicycle Built For Two Thousand (2009)  is comprised of over 2,000 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were asked to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard. The result was a reconstructed version of the song ‘Daisy Bell’ – the first song to implement musical speech synthesis in 1962 – as rendered by a distributed system of human voices.

www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com

From the Transmediale announcement:

“Every year transmediale and CTM invite submissions to the transmediale Award. The transmediale award seeks to honor outstanding experimental artworks that embrace, question and enrich our understanding and relationship to our immersed media and technologically driven society.

Out of more than 1,500 submissions nine art projects have made their way onto the list of transmediale Award 2010 nominees. On 6 February 2010 the award winner(s) will be announced.”

Congratulations to Aaron & Dan, and all the 2010 nominees! For more info on the other nominees and the Transmediale award visit: http://www.transmediale.de/en/award/all