{"id":5164,"date":"2020-09-14T22:36:42","date_gmt":"2020-09-15T02:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/?p=5164"},"modified":"2020-09-14T22:37:37","modified_gmt":"2020-09-15T02:37:37","slug":"this-san-francisco-arts-organization-is-not-afraid-to-challenge-its-tech-world-neighbors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/2020\/09\/14\/this-san-francisco-arts-organization-is-not-afraid-to-challenge-its-tech-world-neighbors\/","title":{"rendered":"This San Francisco arts organization is not afraid to challenge its tech-world neighbors"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Fast Company, by Jay Woodruff on Oct 19, 2019. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Josette Melchor\u2019s Gray Area blends art and tech to create social and civic impact.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now occupying the former Grand Theater in the city\u2019s Mission District, Gray Area continues to work at the intersection of art and technology to provide educational opportunities and studio spaces for residents in the increasingly gentrified neighborhoods of San Francisco. For example, Melchor\u2019s organization helped raise $1.5 million for victims of the 2016 Oakland Ghost Ship fire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melchor, who identifies as \u201ca community organizer, curator, entrepreneur, DJ, and queer Mexican woman,\u201d helped launch an artist-in-residence program at Google and partnered with Autodesk to produce the Urban Prototyping Festival.  She also launched the annual Gray Area Festival, which features experimental works from artists such as Thom Yorke, Sophie Kahn, and Taurin Barrera. Last summer, Gray Area hosted the exhibit Inferno, by artists Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn, where attendees donned robotic exoskeletons that made them dance. A few years ago, during the 2015 F.A.T. Gold San Francisco Exhibit (hosted and produced by Gray Area, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, and curated by Lindsay Howard) the poop artist Katsu created a portrait of Eric Schmidt out of feces and called it \u201cEric Shit.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe reason it\u2019s called Gray Area is that there\u2019s really not a better way for us to describe artists using technology as a medium,\u201d Melchor says. \u201cThere is a really big dichotomy between the two industries, and so Gray Area plays this role of cultural development and cross-sector collaboration and innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She says that she aims to use challenging art \u201cto start conversations between artists and technologists criticizing the tech industry,\u201d citing another part of the Gold San Francisco Exhibit, where F.A.T. Lab artists put up digital images of Facebook\u2019s CEO outside the theater, emblazoned with the phrase \u201cRest in peace, Mark Zuckerberg.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cPeople walking by thought we were throwing a Facebook event,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Melchor relishes being at the vanguard of community art and technology. As she notes, \u201cThere are not a lot of organizations that are set up to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fast Company, by Jay Woodruff on Oct 19, 2019. Josette Melchor\u2019s Gray Area blends art and tech to create social and civic impact. Now occupying the former Grand Theater in the city\u2019s Mission District, Gray Area continues to work at the intersection of art and technology to provide educational opportunities and studio spaces for residents […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":5168,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5164","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science-tech"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5164","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5164"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5164\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5170,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5164\/revisions\/5170"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/desis.osu.edu\/seniorthesis\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}