Archives

Josette Melchor - Executive Director and Founder, Gray Area

Josette Melchor is the Executive Director and Founder of Gray Area Foundation For The Arts, a leading San Francisco non-profit dedicated to applying digital art and technology to create positive social impact.

As a community organizer, she has developed large-scale festivals of locative media addressing urban community issues such as Urban Prototyping, City Centered, and Creative Currency. She is also credited with producing Summer of Smart, a first-of-its-kind, four-month, city-wide initiative focused on the role of technology in the civic realm.

An early social entrepreneur, she started her first art gallery and studio program at the age of 19 by self-funding creative projects through her work in the technology industry.

As a curator, she led the development and launch of Seaquence, an internationally-acclaimed web-based digital music project and product of Gray Area’s artist-in-research program for creative technologists. She has also worked with notable designers and interdisciplinary research centers including: MIT Senseable City Lab, Institute of Computer Sound and Technology, Stamen Design, Code for America; artists C.E.B Reas, Robert Hodgin, Aaron Koblin, Camille Utterback, and many more.

She has spoken at DLD, PICNIC, TEDx Silicon Valley, Art Center College of Design, and Stanford.

She is also on the board of the SOMArts Cultural Center and on the Advisory Board of the Burning Man Project.

In 2012, Fast Company highlighted Josette Melchor’s work as part of, Change Generation, a series on innovative social entrepreneurs.

Seabrook Gubbins - Production Manager

Sprouted from the woods in Canada, Seabrook Gubbins has overseen the planting of over 5 Million trees over the past 10 years. Through his work in the silviculture industry he has honed his skills in fabrication and production. This conservationist path has led him to travel the world and contribute to several humanitarian and environmental causes. An entrepreneur at heart, he owns and operates a food truck and catering business called Fuki. He believes in the power of community and is helping to activate Gray Area’s new theater in the Mission. Seabrook is the backbone of the Gray Area facility, providing artists and producers a professional experience during any and all of Gray Area’s events.

Karen Gaskill - Creative Director

Karen is an independent contemporary-art and media-art director and curator, with 15 years experience of working in the UK and internationally with creative venues and initiatives, galleries, arts organisations and academic institutions, festivals and commissioning bodies, across the mediums of art, science, technology and innovation.

Until recently, she was also Head of Innovation at the Crafts Council, UK, running a programme she established for the organisation to profile and support cross-platform innovation across the areas of visual arts, science, medicine, technology, architecture, and design. Prior to this she was Head of Exhibitions for the Crafts Council, UK. She was previously external examiner at the University of Plymouth, UK in 3D Design, and external examiner for Liverpool John Moores University, UK, Digital Media International Programme, Malaysia, 2012-2015. Previously she has held academic posts at Sheffield Hallam University, UK, as a Senior Lecturer and Researcher in Photography and Curatorial Studies, and at the University of Huddersfield, UK, as a Lecturer in Fine Art Media.

She was the founder, co-director and curator of Interval from 2005-2009, an arts organisation based in Manchester, UK, which provided a critical forum and exhibition platform for emergent to mid career artists working with technology.

Vance Galloway - Technical Director

Vance Galloway is a media technician and musician based in Seattle, Washington. From running live sound for seminal clubs such as DC's 9:30 Club and New York's Knitting Factory, to enabling Hollywood studios transition to non-linear audio editing, and helping design the world's first DVD authoring system, Galloway has been at the forefront of technological advances in the arts since the early 1990s.

Naut Humon - Founder and Artistic Director, Recombinant Media Labs

Naut Humon has been the Director of International Creative Operations for the RML CineChamber, Asphodel Records and AV curator for select portions of the annual ARS Electronica Festival in Austria where he also acted as the main American coordinator for their Prix Ars Digital Music and Sound Art jury category for a full decade. Recombinant Media Labs (RML) emerged from Humon’s lifetime of performance exploration and cross media cooperations.

By the eighties, Naut Humon and his constituency had built up the warehouse known as the Compound where the experimental group Rhythm and Noise was spawned, initiating many of the core elements that led to forming the globally distributed Asphodel recording label which fostered projects ranging from DVD chamber orchestra renditions of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music (with Lou himself playing with the group Zeitkratzer) and the eminently compelling CDs of Mix Master Mike, Diamanda Galas, Rhythm and Sound, Tipsy, Iannis Xenakis, Christian Marclay, John Cage and Maryanne Amacher amongst many others.

Within this structure, the RML consolidation was substantiated as a culturally coherent enterprise, hosting a vast range of visual artists, musicians, engineers, designers, curators, organizers, technologists, educators and theorists from around the world.

Elsewhere, Anywhere / People are Friends

Egbert Mittlestadt: Visuals, Biosphere: Sound

Opening with the weightless dreamful drift of ”Elsewhere Anywhere", Egbert Mittelstadt reveals a Tokyo subway interior where the passengers are captured in a catatonic still life as their frozen images float quietly around a discerning CineChamber Station. Trapped on a haunted metro train to nowhere are the animated apparitions that emerge out of these photographic figures which for brief moments re-imagine the former preoccupation and lost voices of these restless commuter "ghosts".  The spectral twilight audio commentary from Biosphere's Geir Jenssen suggest that these "People are Friends" - activated spirit’s of a human presence long since suspended.

Christian Fennesz

Using a filtered and treated electric guitar as the starting point for his lush soundscapes, Fennesz has created a personal and groundbreaking discourse throughout his career. Perhaps sculpting the last truly unique vision for the guitar, his luminant compositions are anything but sterile experiments. Fennesz’s world of sound unfolds and resembles sensitive, telescopic recordings of rainforest insect life or natural atmospheric occurrences, an inherent naturalism permeating each piece. In addition to his prolific output as a solo artist, and his ongoing investigation of the limits of noise, automatic composition, field music or contemporary classical, Fennesz is also a frequent collaborator with other luminaries of the scene. These include artists such as Alva Noto, Oren Ambarchi, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Keith Rowe, Peter Rehberg, David Sylvian, and Jim O’Rourke.

http://www.fennesz.com/

Xynaxis

One of Xenakis’s first “polytope” multimedia pieces “Persepolis” was chosen for re-interpretation with customized remixes that the composer was aware was about to be released by Asphodel Records in 2001 when he passed away. The interlacing of the remix pieces by various composers draws largely from the original work, emphasizing its noisy sonorities and overlapping waves of intensity. Naut Humon who curated the customized re-workings applied those remix sources with other outside electronics from Frankenstein Symphony etc. for this dedication tribute remix to the future memory of Iannis Xenakis.

Static Room

The RML Static Room modules are segments from Scott's ongoing series of performance & exhibitions, which with the palpitating chromatic moiré patterns from TV static and flawed connections, omit all representational images and cease to portray a linearly composed narrative event. Clamorous tones and hallucinatory color fields break down into vibrating sheets of interlaced fluttering and tumultuous shredding crackling luminosities that make it possible to hear the buzzing images and see the flickering sounds.