On an overcast Wednesday evening, two lines wrapped around the block, spilling out both ways from the entrance to Gray Area, an arts and event space in the old Grand Theater on Mission Street. Doors opened at 7 p.m., and for 15 minutes straight, hundreds of attendees streamed inside the cavernous room lit dramatically with purple light.
They were there that evening for Playgrounds, the latest event in an increasingly well-attended series called The Intersection of Art and Technology, or TIAT.
On its website, the TIAT project is described as “a place for creative technologists to experiment, exhibit, and expand their practice.” That “place,” so far, is theoretical; in actuality TIAT is a traveling art showcase founded in 2023 by Ash Herr, a multimedia artist who gathers local and visiting artists using technology as a medium.
Herr goes by @empowa on social media, where she has a growing audience. Her 33.4k followers on TikTok and 15.9k on Instagram don’t make her a megainfluencer, but it’s earned her an audience that shows up IRL and is willing to pay $10 a ticket to experience the project in action. Most people I talked to that night had come across TIAT after seeing Herr’s posts online.
On the Playgrounds registration page, 668 people had RSVP’d yes to Wednesday’s gathering. Usually, not everyone who RSVPs “yes” shows up, Herr told me, but that night it was a madhouse.
“This is our first time trying this format,” Leia Chang, one of the hosts, told me from over her shoulder as she scanned tickets at the door. “Usually we do these salons at the — thank you, welcome in! — at the Internet Archive, where, you know, everyone’s seated and the artists do presentations. Tonight will be more interactive, but we aren’t really sure—”
Just then a woman stepped between us, introducing herself to Chang as Rochelle Shen, one of the artists presenting tonight. She explained that she’s the one with “implants in her hands,” flashing her arms as proof, and saying that she’s ready to go. “Excuse me,” Chang nodded at me, and she and Shen scurried away into the crowd.
Inside, the room was bustling with people. Groups of arty twentysomethings wearing dark lipstick and oversized button-downs and stacks of spiky jewelry, older folks in blazers with cocktails in their hands, and a couple little dogs on leashes packed the center of the space. If you wanted to chat, you had to do it loudly: Around the perimeter of the space were nine interactive exhibits, several of which were making music (in the broadest sense of the word) with input from participants’ bodies.
Presiding over the event was Herr, who bounced around the room all night, recognizable to all with her signature bleach-striped hair. She was constantly being approached by admirers who knew her from TikTok, doing logistics with Gray Area curators, and pulled into discussions with her artists as they demoed their work to thick crowds of attendees.
Near the front of the space, an artist-comedian named Jamie Brew had set up a karaoke station called the Weird Algorithm that replaced pop song lyrics with text pulled from random data sets; I walked up as a crowd was scream-singing lines from the 2024 Form 1040 tax document set to the tune of “Pink Pony Club.”
Toward the back, a pen rigged up to a drafting table drew portraits of attendees, as an AI-powered camera looked back and forth at its subject in a strangely humanoid way, tilting its “head” and clocking every subtle movement, creating a sketchy but quite accurate drawing in exactly ten minutes.
Across the room a guy with a line of electrodes stuck to his forehead sat, eyes closed, in the center of a four-part speaker system, apparently controlling the sounds playing with focused brain activity.
“It was hard to control, but I was definitely able to alter where the sounds were coming from,” he told me when his session was over. “When I focused with deep breathing and heard it move behind me I was shocked!”
About 40 minutes into the event, the artists took to the stage and briefly presented their projects, some sharing slides with details on the code behind the artwork. I got the sense that much of that went over the crowd’s heads, and the clicker was having technical difficulties, but the energy remained light and lively throughout.
On the whole, the artists spoke to the audience like peers. Several of them mentioned that their projects were open-source. One artist, Benjamin Bolte, who that evening was showcasing his open-source humanoid robot Stompy, told the crowd that he “used to work for Meta and Tesla, but then decided to do something useful with [his] life.” The room burst into applause.
“It feels very communal,” said Kanika Rao, a 24-year-old UX designer. Rao learned about TIAT from friends who’d heard about it through the grapevine at The Commons, a tech-centered social club in Hayes Valley. “Sometimes I go to art institutions like museums or whatever, and I feel like you’ll just never really be a part of it if you're an outsider. But here, you can get in. I meet people and it’s like, ‘I fuck with you heavy.’ Pardon my French.”
As Herr explained to me during an interview a few weeks before the Grey Area event, one of her goals with TIAT is to create a community, a space where “people can connect, jam, create new things.” That sort of openness reminds her of the early days of the internet, when “people could create tangible spaces that they could really customize and be themselves,” and underpins TIAT’s Web 1.0-inspired aesthetic.
She hopes putting artists at the forefront of the AI movement can help shape how the emerging technology is perceived and used.
The same week Playgrounds debuted, Herr announced that TIAT was partnering with Mozilla to host Creative Future Counterstructures, a 10-week artist residency for technologists to create new art installations or objects that use “design principles for AI that put creativity at the center.”
“I think at large we’re at the edge of a new media art renaissance,” Herr said. “I’m so stoked.”
The artists at Playgrounds were also stoked about Herr’s vision for the future of AI art and her openness to unusual perspectives. “She immediately knew what I was trying to do when I showed her the project,” said Stephen Milborrow, creator of Nonoti, the portrait-drawing bot. “I speak to these old gallerists sometimes and they’re like, ‘What is this?’ Ash gets it.”
Brew, the karaoke artist, was even more effusive. “Ash is some sort of genius,” he said. “Genius at marketing and genius at bringing people together.”
