Late one afternoon along San Francisco’s Mission Street, I walked into a sublime panic. The Gray Area Cultural Incubator cohort was setting up its culminating exhibition, premiering in the Grand Theater just hours after my visit. Mostly I crept around in awe of the artistic fervor, installations going up in every corner of the theater, giant interactive video screens and vintage tech CRTs.
Clearly in charge of the whirl, Hannah Scott described the space as an open-ended ecosystem that supports artists in cultivating “anti-disciplinary collaboration.” The program is an intentional counter to the silos that might try to contain fashion or video game design. That cross pollination of disciplines excites the innovation instinct in the teams, and the findings of these artistic experiments present ways of sustaining “art’s influence in technology, science and the humanities.”
All around the busy room, I scanned the projects as Scott bounded off with a polite yet firm, “Excuse me.” In between groovy Fry’s Electronics-esque bead curtains sparkling over a retro living room interface and a horror-adjacent interactive sculpted trash heap, the visual aspects of installations belied a great variation in approaches to the common themes of the Cultural Incubator. It’s a six-to-eight-month program that emphasizes the intersection of art and technology, and in particular the critique of current deployments of technology that might limit our imagining of what we can do with tech, and who gets the benefits of it.
Gray area, on Mission
Scott is the research manager of Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, the nonprofit that runs the venue that is the Grand Theater, as well as the Cultural Incubator and many more programs. In all the iterations this flexible arts institution has morphed through in its nearly 25 years, the focus has always been on putting the creative exploration of technology into practice in community.
Public events in the theater draw people to the neighborhood for “experimental sound performances and audio visual performances [as well as] talks by scholars and artists.” Chief among the activities in service of the nonprofit’s mission is the Cultural Incubator, which brings cohorts of intersectional artists together to critique today’s unchecked creep of technology into the artist’s domain.
The Incubator program is about “showcasing how artists are engaging with technology and sort of changing the ways in which we look at technology and its impact on society,” said Scott, and exploring “the opportunities that new technologies offer to creative expression.”
“[We] started with the recognition that there was a lack of artist-residency type programs specifically for creative technologists,” she continued, referencing contemporary artists especially in need of access to technology, the resources and mentorship, and the chance to work. “[At Gray Area] they bring their projects to the next level.”
The current climate can be difficult for arts all throughout the Bay, so the showcase at the end of the Incubator program guarantees the artists an opportunity to show their work in an institutional setting. Said Scott, “To move from being a hobbyist into confidently calling yourself an artist and having an opportunity to showcase that work” supports their artistic growth.
Standout projects: Heaps
“Before the Incubator, I didn’t see my many streams of work as a unified artistic practice,” said 2025 cohort member M Elio. “Participating in critique sessions, having access to mentors, and presenting my work at the showcase helped me to feel like my work is legitimate and valuable.”
Elio, a neurodivergent artist and entrepreneur, was “frustrated with the limitations of neurotypical data processing tools.” The solution was Heaps, “a sandbox game that creates 3D worlds” from just about anything a person is studying. Just feeding the bot words results in algorithmically generated worlds for users to explore.
“Heaps kills the cloud-based chatbot and replaces it with an open source, locally run, completely private LLM. Plus, our interface uses structured data, which protects vulnerable users from AI-induced psychosis,” says the company’s site. It feels like a you-need-to see-it-to-believe-it situation, but what’s clever is that these are artists making a company—crucially, one that thinks outside the Big Tech box, like housing the AI on one’s local system to protect it from the influence of other actors.
South of Hell
Mya Exum is the co-creator of a digitally immersive fashion label called South of Hell. She was impressed by the commitment of the team when she joined the Incubator.
They did a great job of “just promoting us, motivating us, showing what we can [do], just get the concept across so we can start talking to the world about what we’ve been trying to do,” Exum said when asked about the experience of the Incubator. “It’s been cool.”
Real life became difficult at times during the process, but “the gallery’s been really great. They were super flexible,” Exum said. She added, “Hannah, the one we were just talking to,” pointing out Scott winding between towering installations of every conceivable technical requirement, “has been so helpful.”
Turntable
Turntable is an online music community and curation space. “I felt like music discovery and culture was disjointed and dissatisfying, so I created an online space where people can talk and learn about music,” said platform creator Amaya Lim. “It’s part social media, part personal library curation mechanism and part discovery tool.”
Lim called it a “hyper-personalized, passive listening paradigm” with which she “seeks to recontextualize listeners’ relationships with music and technology, especially with recommendation algorithms.” Whew. Society needs that.
“I built Turntable because I felt streaming services were limiting my music discovery horizons and changing my taste even as an engaged listener,” Lim said, adding that she “always wanted to connect with friends and fans online on a platform that was driven by community and curation.”
Where we echo
Engineer Bryce Matsumori described his project as “a meditative screensaver and interactive art piece about fishing for meaning.” Users can “catch echoes of others’ lives left behind by past visitors” in a projected pool of water and digital artifacts. The anonymous interactions offer “moments of connection and hope” so users “feel a little less alone.”
Sign up for the open call
By the end of this month Gray Area will be looking for the next group of artists to come through to level up. The Incubator is calling for creatives all around the Bay to come work together with local and international artists. To learn more and sign up for the announcement, go to the venue’s website, grayarea.org.
Gray Area Cultural Incubator Cohort applications will be announced soon. Gray Area/Grand Theater, 2665 Mission St., San Francisco. Contact Gray Area at in**@******ea.org or 415.843.1423.
