Introducing the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts

What liquor stores have to do with the advancement of the digital arts.

Last week, we saw artist-explorer Jonathan Harris’ profound reflection on the current state of the digital world. But as digital culture grows on, we need more explicit, concentrated efforts to make sense of it all and its ever-evolving relationship with the arts. Enter GAFFTA, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts — a visionary Bay Area nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture, based on the principles of openness, collaboration, and resource sharing. (Principles validated all the more strongly as Firefox, the quintessential epitome of this movement, turns 5 today.)

GAFFTA‘s programs explore the creative intersection of art, design, sound, and technology — a celebration of the interdisciplinary cross-pollination of ideas we’re so fond of around here.

The world is experiencing an explosion of technological development that presents us with inspiring opportunities and challenges. While the ability to rapidly produce and consume information has fueled quantum leaps in innovation, its abundance can also disrupt our focus and fragment our consciousness. By funding and curating projects that offer insightful perspective on the information of our age, using the technologies of our time, GAFFTA provides a means to decode and humanize the evolving global database.

GAFFTA was born out of the realization that, beyond a limited number of mainstream museums, there is no cohesive public space for exhibiting and fostering dialogue around experimental digital art. Eventually, Gray Area took over 7 storefronts in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, previously used as a porn arcade, liquor store and bar, and transformed them into a Media Arts Center populated by galleries, studios and office spaces.

It’s no coincidence that the ever-amazing Aaron Koblin is on the GAFFTA team, populated by equally incredible creative visionaries and artist-technologists.

GAFFTA‘s inaugural exhibition, OPEN, opened last month and runs through November 18, highlighting work from several digital art pioneers spanning a multitude of formats and techniques. And while such events and workshops are no doubt a fantastic leap forward for digital art, we’d love to see GAFFTA’s mission extended to the broader digital community in a portal or social network that transcends geography and allows for the wider cross-pollination of ideas.

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Cassette From My Ex: The Book

Time travel, puppy love and the universal relatability of musical self-expression.

We’ve been longtime fans of Cassette From My Ex — a lovely, lovely mixtape revivalist project that brings back musical gems from the past, along with the charming personal stories behind them, through hundreds of digitized, streamable soundtracks to first loves.

So imagine our excitement over Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves — the marvelous new book based on the blog. (Beginning to see a wonderful trend here with favorite blogs getting book deals…)

And while the iPod era may have its many pocketable advantages, there’s still something to be said for the lost charm of crafting these sonic love messages, blending the art of musicology curation — always a winner around here — with the intimacy of a letter. Speaking of curation, that’s perhaps what makes the book most impressive — book culls such intimate stories of mixtape masterpieces from 60 noted writers and musicians, including The Magnetic Fields’ Claudia Gonson, This American Life’s Starlee Kine, Improv Everywhere’s Charlie Todd, and even Rob Sheffied, the godfather of the mixtape genre.

I was an Asian guy with long hair who was into Heavy Metal; she was a Latvian dancer who liked to chain-smoke Camels.” ~ FJ

Long ago, in a city I will not name, I loved a woman, and she punished me for it.” ~ BG

Extraordinarily relatable, Cassette From My Ex: Stories and Soundtracks of Lost Loves will move, inspire and delight literally everyone. Because we all have our stories of being young and in love and desperately trying to capture in music that intangible butterflies-in-the-stomach feeling. These stories shaped much of our relationship with music as a tool of emotion and self-expression — and this book is fascinating anthology of such stories, a beautiful intersection of musicology, anthropology and pure human experience.

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Dan Witz’s Dark Doings

What hookers and tigers have to do with reclaiming your awareness.

Brooklyn-based artist Dan Witz has been one of the defining forces in contemporary street art.

It was Dan Witz who, back in 2003, first showed us how powerful street art could be. Each summer Dan’s projects take street art to new levels by adding elements of “surprise and delight” into the city landscape. For us, Dan Witz is the consummate street artist. He’s provocative. He’s dedicated. And most of all — he has absolutely wicked skills.” ~ Marc and Sara Schiller, Wooster Collective

Witz spent this past summer working on his latest project, Dark Doings, which opens as a solo exhibition tonight at the Carmichael Gallery of Contemporary Art in LA.

Inspired by a recent visit to the Red Light District of Amsterdam, Dark Doings explores the tragic obliviousness we’ve developed to our surroundings through subtle, haunting images of human and animal faces trapped behind dirty glass windows.

I’m trying to exploit our collective tendency towards sleepwalking by inserting outrageous things right out there in plain view that are also practically invisible. My goal is to make obvious in your face art that ninety-nine percent of the people who walk by won’t notice. Eventually when they stumble upon one or find out about it I’m hoping they’ll start wondering what else they’ve been missing.”

The project embodies the true purpose and power of street art — to challenge, to compel, to jolt us out of our self-constructed comfort zones and stagnant defaults. Dark Doings is a remarkable reminder of, to quote the theme from TEDGlobal, the substance of things not seen.

See more of the installations from the series, and remember to look a little closer — in the street, and in life at large.

Editor’s Note: On a related note, I’ve explored the importance of mystery in street art in my first article for the wonderful GOOD Magazine, investigating the greatest guerrilla art mystery never solved.

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