Gray Area is pleased to host Portal Refractions, a special physical activation of New Art City’s virtual environment in Gray Area’s Grand Theater. This event takes place on the occasion of the second annual New Art City Festivals. A number of interactive virtual experiences from the NAC Festival program will be installed immersively around the theater, followed by performances from R0$@ /\/\3nkm@n, Andrew Blanton, and an artist conversation moderated by Output Field’s Vivian Qiu.

The portal is a gateway to another world; but when you cross the threshold everything changes, it becomes refracted. This special event, featuring mixed-reality and sound performances, offers a look at the looking glass itself.

About the Performances:
Andrew Blanton is an Associate Professor in the CADRE Media Labs at San Jose State University and a PhD student in music composition at the University of California Berkeley working closely with the Center for New Music and Audio Technology (CNMAT). His current work focuses on the emergent potential between cross-disciplinary arts and technology in the context of Music Composition, New Media Art, and building sound + visual environments through software development.

etoi.li
Built as an exploration of distributed real-time performance in virtual space, etoi.li (working title) is a weaving of decentralized presence with multiple windows/perspectives into a live virtual composition for dance, percussion, electronics, and spoken poem. By exploring both poetically and technically the shifting topology of the Internet and the emergence of decentralized platforms, etoi.li, as a real-time audiovisual composition, is an exploration of presences, distributed identity, and real-time virtual performance.

R0$@ /\/\3nkm@n is a Dutch artist and researcher. Her work focuses on noise artifacts that result from accidents in both analogue and digital media. According to /\/\3nkm@n, these artifacts can offer precious insights into the otherwise obscure alchemy of standardisation and resolution setting. As a compendium to this research, /\/\3nkm@n published the Glitch Moment/um (inc, 2011), a little book on the exploitation and popularization of glitch artifacts.

/\/\3nkm@n developed and highlighted the politics of resolution setting further in a second book titled Beyond Resolution (i.R.D., 2020). In this book, she describes how the standardization of resolutions is a process that generally promotes efficiency, order and functionality in our technologies. But how as a side effect, the setting of resolutions also compromises and obfuscates alternative possibilities.

In 2019 /\/\3nkm@n won the Collide, Arts at CERN Barcelona award, which came with a 3 month residency that inspired her recent research into im/possible images. In this new research /\/\3nkm@n aims to find new ways to understand, use and perceive through and with our technologies.

About the Moderator
Vivian Qiu is a professional generalist based in the Bay Area, co-parented by Chinese immigrants and the internet. They work at micro and macro scales, shifting¹ between object and theory, aesthetic and systemic. They are a zealot for the experimental, the weird, the speculative, the absurd. With ties to industrial design, research, curation, & creative direction, they have made a home in concept as their core medium. Founder of Output Field, they dedicate all parts of their practice to redistributing clout.

Output Field is a placeless coalition of experimental artists, curators, and spaces. They are conspiring to breach the canon by linking across disciplines and time zones. Their mission is to redistribute clout.

They are creating an organically curated database of underrepresented voices in the arts: a Curatorial Corrective. Behind that database is a mutually respectful creative ecosystem outputting events, talks, exhibitions. Output Field grows disruptively and explosively, impelling art institutions to embody "artist-first" philosophy. This positions Output Field against curation as naval-gazing monologue, hierarchies of taste, exploitative contracts, and the erasure of Othered voices in exhibition or archival. If you believe in their mission, please consider donating to fund their project here.

About New Art City
New Art City is a virtual exhibition toolkit for new media art with a focus on copresence and experiencing digital art together. Shows are real-time multiplayer and accessed using a web browser on computer or mobile device, with no need to register, install extra software or enter any personal information. Using built-in tools to manage artworks and space layouts, curators and organizers can create a show and hold a virtual exhibition online. Participants can attend virtual openings together, chat and see each other moving around the space while experiencing digital art in its original format.