Gray Area Festival 2023

Today we face technologies that benefit narrow bands of society, polarize culture, and prohibit the cooperation needed to engage complex global challenges. To comprehensively address issues such as climate change, the unknown consequences of "artificial intelligence," or extractive capitalism demands new social relations, and new tools. In response, our gambits are radical arts-driven digital interventions we're calling Plural Prototypes — reimagining infrastructure that facilitates deep and meaningful collaboration among diverse social groups.

Plural Prototypes apply artistic inquiry and antidisciplinary practice in pursuit of holistic approaches toward an equitable and inclusive society. We allow cultural producers the agency to align our technological future with pluralistic values — open access and participation, interdependence, decentralization, mutual learning, shared responsibility, and care — ensuring we build systems that enhance the common good.

Marking Gray Area's 15th anniversary, this Festival highlights in-progress cultural experiments from our Creative Research and Development Labs, Cultural Incubator, and Education programs in collaboration with community and industry partners. The projects pose urgent questions about organization and governance, digital democracy, data sovereignty, and the future of work. Using emerging technologies such as immersive environments, generative AI, simulation, and the decentralized web, these projects demonstrate how artistic engagement can surface critical perspectives, and open up vital new pathways for collective imagination.

Gray Area Festival: Plural Prototypes is part of this year's programming focused on Access.