By Spencer Young
GAFFTA marquee. All photos by Spencer Young.
I encountered a man lost in a solo dance-trance when I walked into Grey Area Foundation for the Arts on Thursday, Oct. 1. GAFFTA is a newly-opened “nonprofit organization dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture,” and this was their GAFFTAhours Preview Celebration for their inaugural exhibition, “OPEN.” This guy really seemed to be enjoying the event — he hunched and vibrated to a well-worn house track in front of the gallery’s main feature, a video art projection by C.E.B Reas. I halfway understand why he was doing this: Reas’s ornate visual fractals spiral, ebb and flow like magic on the screen. Using the open-source program Processing, he creates morphing crystalline structures that mimic natural processes. Walking around the rest of GAFFTA’s quirky yet beautiful space-turned-temporary-nightclub, I found the rest of Reas’s works: another projection, and a series of prints hanging like traditional art objects. They don’t convey much, but they sure are pretty.
C.E.B. Reas video still
C.E.B. Reas print
A saunter to the cozy nook upstairs revealed Stamen Design‘s heavy display of information graphics that plastered the walls, hung in negative space, and covered the low slab of concrete in the middle of the room apparently used for sitting. Working with crime and cab data and Craigslist rental listings specific to the Tenderloin, Stamen’s largest piece attempts to draw geographical connections between these three phenomena.