Can Techies Create Art from Code? It’s a Gray Area

Some of the world's most brilliant minds end up in San Francisco. They come because the Bay Area is where the technological future is made - giants like Apple, Google, and Meta have, over the last few decades, remade the world from their Silicon Valley headquarters. 

For some, though, that world, one of sleek lines, polish, and pragmatism, starts to feel like a constraint; they look for places where they can unleash their potential unbounded. They end up in places like SF’s Gray Area. 

Founded in 2004 in the Mission District, the institution has spent two decades carving out space for 'creative technologists' - people who use tech (code, circuitry, AI, 3D printing, biometrics, and more) as a medium for artistic expression. 

"We see ourselves as a release valve for Silicon Valley," said Wade Wallerstein, associate curator at Gray Area, "Most of the artists here work tech jobs by day and then come here as a place where they can release their creativity."

What sets Gray Area apart, though, isn't just what it does; it's how it thinks about what it does. The institution operates on what they call a cultural regeneration model - a cycle in which audiences become students, students become artists, and artists come back as instructors. The model treats culture as something that requires intention, care, and stewardship to thrive. This particular community, Wallerstein believes, acts as a counterweight to the tech industry:

"Artists have this unique capacity to break or turn systems inside out, and through that subvert and question and challenge dominant systems, and dominant technologies," he said.

To explain that role, he drew on the work of media theorist Marshall McLuhan, comparing artists to a Cold War-era defensive system called the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. During the Cold War, this system was implemented all across the north of Canada and other Antarctic regions. If the Soviets launched aerial attacks, the DEW line would alert the U.S. in advance.

"McLuhan talked about artists as having that foresight. Artists have this ability to see things very far in the distance. And kind of be in the future while being in the present, just through the act of creativity and creation."

Artists, like distant early warning systems, alert us to broad patterns and trends that we miss due to a sheer lack of attention. This decade's biggest technological leap forward is undoubtedly the widespread use of large language models. We're regularly promised that these chatbots will one day surpass us on every front. Gray Area’s recent exhibition ‘Soft Systems shines a light on what gets lost in our race toward that technological future.

"All of the works in the show really consider the emotional affectivity and spiritual resonance of technology," said Wallerstein. "It's about how people rewrite technologies to be systems of care."

Curated by staff member Jeff Hawkins, Soft Systems is part of a new series called Local Memory - Local for local artists, and Memory because, as we march steadily into the future, we must remember the lessons offered by the past. In keeping with that mission, Hawkins, along with collaborators Chris Giang and Irish Tee-say, sent out an open call to artists, allowing the first show's theme to emerge from the submitted works themselves.

Tradition, ceremony, and embodiment were one recurring motif. The Ecdysis Oracle by Nele Ponce, for example, generates individualized oracle readings. Participants dip their hands into a bowl of water, which activates a corresponding projection visual, soundscape, and spoken message. Through the oracle, Ponce aims to create a space for people to slow down, sit in their own presence, and reflect on who they've been and who they are becoming.

Another piece starts by imagining a world in which ecosystems are no longer able to sustain themselves; in that future, Shihan Zhang's fictional Department of Species Services uses AI to assign ecological functions to humans most suited to them. Viewers are invited to explore such a possibility through a multimedia, immersive exhibit focused on humans as pollinators.

The piece is a reflection on how humanity's relationship to work and coexistence might change in the face of super-intelligent AI and eco-disaster. It manages to strike a hopeful tone despite that melancholy backdrop - Zhang's future is one where humanity, through environmental stewardship, is more connected to the natural world, not less. The piece will remain available for viewing by appointment through May 9th.

Oblivion: Your Off Facebook Activity by Jordan Metz, on the other hand, examines our relationship to tech at a more immediate and personal level. The piece is Metz's browsing history, engraved on a 12-foot quilt. What's usually lost in a digital cloud is made physical and tangible. A click, a scroll, an online rabbit hole you tumbled down: none of it disappears. It is recorded, collected, and held.

"I expected to look at all of this data and sort of learn something about myself. But I actually felt extremely removed from any essence of myself in this information," said Metz.

Data, she realized, reduces our personhood down to letters and numbers and punctuation. This is unsettling, given that data is the very lens through which tech companies see their loyal customers.

If these artists are truly 'early warning systems', articulating ideas the rest of us have yet to grapple with, we must ask ourselves why Soft Systems emerged as the show's theme. And why now? What, exactly, are the fifteen featured artists picking up on the horizon?

The artists' interest in spiritual resonance points toward its absence in the modern world. Religion was once humanity's path to salvation; over the past few centuries, though, science and technology have increasingly replaced it as such. In the words of world religions scholar Huston Smith, "...technology has effected miracles: skyscrapers that stand; men standing on the moon... No wonder man converted."

No doubt, technology has the capacity to create good; somewhere along the way, though, technological progress became a moral obligation in and of itself. The fifteen featured artists at Soft Systems push back on that drift: if technology is a deity, it's a hollow one. It's meant to serve us, not the other way around.

Gray Area's experiment in cultural regeneration allows the 'warnings' embedded in featured artwork to ripple back out into the city. Whilst some audience members might just passively consume what they have on display and go home, others return.

"They start as spectators. They come as students. They leave as artists," said Wallerstein.

The model recognizes that, for all our talk of faceless tech companies, our world still turns on people. It only takes enough people changing their perspectives for the systems they run to start changing too.