There are also places to chill out, like under the polyhedric dome. There, you’ll see a piece called Terminal Blurring. For it, artist Orestis Herodotou fed macro images of biological lifeforms and satellite images of rivers and mountain ranges into a neural network. He then let the trained machine take its best shot at generating its own images of natural formations. The results are then projected on the dome’s panels, where they blend and morph together in an ever-changing blur.
Meanwhile, the most fun part of the show is Stephanie Andrews’ massive installation at the back of the room called An Immersive Game of Life. True to its name, it’s a 60-foot-wide grid projected onto the floor, where each square serves as a cell in a large-scale edition of Conway’s Game of Life. As you walk around on the grid, life springs up around each of your footfalls. If your patch of life (represented delightfully by dancing mushrooms and waving sea kelp) grows enough to reach the edge of the board, then it continues up onto the 20-foot-tall video screen that wraps around the room. It’s silly fun—and yes, I posted a video of it on Instagram.
An animated digital projection by Stephen Standridge called Uncanny Forest.
Photograph: Naveed Ahmad/Gray Area
Oh yeah, about that. When it’s not busy posing existential questions, The End of You, which runs through March 1, also serves as one of a growing number of experiential art shows, like the Museum of Ice Cream, that are practically made for Instagram. The difference with End of You, though, is that it’s more conceptually challenging than sparkly backdrops and rooms stuffed with pink ping-pong balls. The show takes up Gray Area’s entire space, and, like many of the organization’s events, its ties to the Bay Area freak scene are evident. Gray Area might be in Instagram’s backyard—an old movie house in San Francisco’s buzzy Mission district—and the show might be ideal for sharing on social media, but its environmental and underground themes are also juxtaposed to the industries changing that landscape. To that end, some of the exhibits in The End of You are quite sobering, like Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye’s sculptural illustration of the public health effects caused by the radioactive contamination in Hunters Point, a former naval shipyard that’s home to one of the regions’s most marginalized and disadvantaged communities.
There’s even more cause for self-reflection in The Archive of Human Nature, by artists Celeste Martore and Jonathon Keats. (Keats is a frequent WIRED contributor.) Exhibited there are various material examples of human consumerism, all labeled and arranged on shelves like some ersatz Target store. Ice cube trays, an iPod 30-pin cable, paint swatches, curling irons, Tamagotchi, a six-pack of Fort Point beer, a Crock-Pot, a pair of rubber dildos. It’s supposed to give you a sense of how an alien race visiting our long-deserted planet would attempt to understand humanity centuries from now, but it can just as easily leave you feeling queasy about all of the unnecessary crap people produce, sell, collect, and throw away.
