I happen to be a fan of and support the Gray Area Foundation For The Arts (GAFFTA) and its projects, which generally try to link the art and tech worlds of San Francisco, along with an awareness of the challenges facing urban residents of all incomes and backgrounds. GAFFTA has found a new home (2665 Mission Street, above) after several exhausting short-term moves. Co-founder Peter Hirschberg announced on Facebook:
This Saturday night: come party at Gray Area’s new home in San Francisco. The former Grand Theater, a fabulous 1940s movie house in the Mission, is being reborn as the Gray Area Art and Technology Theater.
We’ll share our plans for the future, and immerse ourselves in DJ sets and generative art.Our new Art and Technology Theater is 10,000 square feet of possibilities. There will be classrooms to learn, a cinema to experience and share, a large open space to meet and collaborate, desks and studios to move forward.
As an organization that was almost priced out of San Francisco, we are passionate about bringing this historic cinema back to the artistic community at a critical time in the city’s history.
Tickets and details here: https://grandpre.splashthat.com
The May 31 benefit dinner is $250 but the after party at 9.30pm is a sliding scale from $10 to $30 and features international artists and DJs.
One of the projects GAFFTA will be installing is a $100,000 experimental 3-D sound theater designed by Naut Humon, a legendary sound artist and founder of San Francisco’s Recombinant Media Labs. I met Naut Humon recently (below, right) and he showed me a version of his experimental sound theater, Cinechamber, which has been installed in Berlin, Moscow, and other places. I’m looking forward to experiencing it at GAFFTA.
Tom Foremski is the Editor and Founder of the popular and top-ranked news site Silicon Valley Watcher, reporting on business and culture of innovation. He is a former journalist at the Financial Times and in 2004, became the first journalist from a leading newspaper to resign and become a full-time journalist blogger.
Tom has been reporting on Silicon Valley and the US tech industry since 1984 and has been named as one of the top 50 (#28) most influential bloggers in Silicon Valley. His current focus is on the convergence of media and technology — the making of a new era for Silicon Valley. He also writes a column at ZDNET.
