Over the past 10 years, technological progress has inarguably transformed our society. Artificial intelligence, decentralized protocols, and quantum computing are just a few of the sea changes radically impacting day-to-day life in our city, San Francisco, and around the world. Operating at the crossroads of culture, technology, and society, we know firsthand that creative thinking is a powerful catalyst for change.

Since 2014 Gray Area Festival has called together those artists and thinkers whose outside-the-box ideas help us understand not only the world that we live in, but also the future that we want to create. For our 10th annual Festival, Gray Area once again presents a conference program, performance line-up, large-scale exhibition, and workshop series exploring the cutting edge of interdisciplinary practice and creative innovation.

To celebrate this anniversary Gray Area has invited pioneers who have defined the expanded field of new media, new contemporaries charting our future, and selected luminaries from past years’ Festivals to present their updates, evolutions, and forecasts. This year’s participants coalesce across a variety of concerns and topic areas, all relating to the impact of technology on our worlds and creative inquiry’s power to make change within them. What do new ideas from the cybernetics movement offer for the age of AI? How can advanced computer simulation help us imagine new worlds? And how should we redesign cultural infrastructure to sustain access and experimentation?

Following the 9th Annual Gray Area Festival highlighting ‘Plural Prototypes’ that seek to actualize equitable futures through anti-disciplinary innovation, Gray Area Festival 10 continues to stake a wide claim for the critical role of arts and technology in the advancement of common good. Held at the Grand Theater in San Francisco’s Mission District, the Festival presents a survey of culture through the lenses of interdisciplinarity, civic engagement, and social practice.

For this year’s Festival Exhibition, Gray Area will present a solo exhibition of work by Gray Area Festival alum Lauren McCarthy. BODILY AUTONOMY, curated by Ceci Moss, presents two major works—Surrogate and Saliva—that examine how an algorithmically determined world impacts human relationships and…