Join us for the closing reception of ISM Hexadome with a live performance by Pierce Warnecke on Saturday August 3, 10pm.

Endless Growth (Data Decay v3) is an audiovisual performance by Pierce Warnecke using data to illustrate dynamic ecosystems. Generated from data on population growth, pollution emissions, resource extraction, and global GDPs, this work questions how unbounded growth of humanity is incompatible with our finite planet—it may ultimately result in saturation and irreversible damage. Data Decay is an ongoing series of abstract sonification and visualization works, generated from datasets to convey interconnecting relationships through an audiovisual language.

For one night only, experience an exclusive live set to celebrate the closing of the pioneering ISM Hexadome environment.

For Gray Area Festival 2019, the ISM Hexadome will be presented at Pier 70 in San Francisco in two parts. Each evening we will present the full Exhibition in two distinct Segments, featuring the exhibiting artists as listed below.

Segment 1
René Löwe & Pfadfinderei
CAO & Michael Tan
Lara Sarkissian & Jemma Woolmore
Thom Yorke & Tarik Barri
Segment 1 Runtime: 93:50 minutes

Segment 2
Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst
Frank Bretschneider & Pierce Warnecke
Peter Van Hoesen & Heleen Blanken
Ben Frost & MFO
Suzanne Ciani & AudeRrose
Segment 2 Runtime: 98:29 minutes

8/3 Saturday
7:30pm: Segment 1
10pm: Pierce Warnecke Live with Segment 2
World Premiere of Endless Growth (Data Decay v3)

7/25 Thursday – 8/3 Saturday
7:30pm Doors / 8:30pm Show: Segment 1
10pm Doors / 10:30pm Shows: Segment 2

7/26 Friday
7:30pm: Suzanne Ciani Live [SOLD OUT]
World Premiere Performance of Under The Electric Sea

Location: Pier 70, 555 20th Street, San Francisco

In partnership with the Institute for Sound & Music Berlin, Gray Area Festival is proud to present the ISM Hexadome, a 360° audiovisual experience. The ISM Hexadome will showcase the work of world-renowned artists through spatialized sound and projected visuals in an enveloping, architectural space.

World-class artists have been curated to create original works exclusively designed for the ISM Hexadome's unique 360° environment. Gray Area Festival will showcase these unique collaborations in North America for the first time, exhibiting artists including Thom Yorke & Tarik Barri, Ben Frost & MFO, Holly Herndon & Mathew Dryhurst, Frank Bretschneider & Pierce Warnecke, CAO & Michael Tan, Lara Sarkissian & Jemma Woolmore, Peter Van Hoesen & Heleen Blanken, René Löwe & Pfadfinderei, Suzanne Ciani & AudeRrose.

See this one-of-a-kind immersive experience in San Francisco, for a short run from July 25 through August 3.

In partnership with Institute for Sound & Music, Gray Area is proud to present the world premiere of Suzanne Ciani’s Under the Electric Sea at the ISM Hexadome.

This audiovisual collaboration was commissioned and created in Berlin for the ISM Hexadome by Suzanne Ciani together with French visual artist AudeRrose,
which the artists will perform live in San Francisco for the first time at Pier 70.

Suzanne is a five-time Grammy award nominated composer, electronic music pioneer, and neo-classical recording artist whose work has been featured in countless commercials, video games, and feature films. Over the course of her 40+ year career, she's released 16 solo albums, including "Seven Waves," "The Velocity of Love," and most recently, her comeback quadraphonic Buchla modular synth performance recording “LIVE Quadraphonic.” She's been recognized as Keyboard Magazine's "New Age Keyboardist of the Year," provided the voice and sounds for Bally's groundbreaking "Xenon" pinball machine, created Coca-Cola’s pop-and-pour sound, designed Atari’s sound logo, played concerts all over the globe, and carved out a niche as one of the most creatively successful female composers in the world. A Life in Waves, a documentary about Ciani’s life and work, debuted at SXSW and is available to watch on all digital platforms.

AudeRrose is multi-disciplinary artist working with performance, photography, sound and projection. In the past years she produced a collection of photographic prints using alternative technics like photograms, chemigram, cyanotype and lumen prints. The result of her work are series of organic motives declined in a serial collection, exploring the expanded possibilities of printing with paper, sun, chemical reactions, revisiting the avant-garde technics of the pioneers of experimental photography.

Spatialized deconstructions of material from the 2016 "The Centre Cannot Hold" recording sessions form the backbone of Frost’s work for Hexadome. The piece is a document of an event, of a room, and of the composer within it. It is music that is not fully controlled and appears to be anxiously, often violently competing against its creator.

Inspired by ancient Moche iconography and cosmology, the work explores the dualities of life/death, generation/destruction, and cohesion/dispersion cycles and how they appear as two planes constantly transposed onto one another. The Moche cosmology envisioned certain gates that render the intersections of both planes as a space for events. One of these might be considered the ceremonial or ritual space, a realm in which the distance and division between both worlds would blur.

The work aims to explore the ceremonial object both in its native context and as an “unearthed object,” expressing its connection with both ancient narratives and the transience and decay that operate in the natural world. This object, usually presented as a recipient, acts as a gate or a threshold, a geometrical key, and signifies generative space and the readiness preparatory to a transfer between worlds (living/dead, vision/blindness, sacred/profane, etc.).

Approximate Accuracy is a hybrid audio-visual installation/performance especially designed for the ISM Hexadome that borrows from modular sound and visual synthesis techniques, adapting them with contemporary analog and digital tools.

The audio uses modular synthesizer patches manipulated live: A matrix of oscillators interact with each other to produce a variety of sounds, from delicate, subtle sequences to rough walls of noise. The imagery is based on digital emulations of modular video synthesis. Simple lines and noise-based textures combine to form dynamic patterns and complex synesthetic moirés. Combining algorithmic generation and audio-driven interaction, vertical bar-based elements overlap to create dense and abstract fields that encourage viewers to explore the real and perceived sense of synchronization between sound and image.

Sound artist Lara Sarkissian and video artist Jemma Woolmore approach the ISM Hexadome installation as a transsensorial space for storytelling on topics of territory, recognition, and memory.

Lara Sarkissian’s work is an ambient electronic landscape referencing Armenian music, field recordings, and churches (both in their sonic and physical form). The musical score collages elements of voices, literature, hymns, and instruments, holding a space for modern-day Armenian narratives tied to displacement, both past and present.

Jemma Woolmore's visuals explore the fragile boundary between utopia and dystopia. The Hexadome screens become a landscape to be navigated and divided, creating symbolic borders that are enforced, blurred, or dissolved throughout the work.

As histories and regions are constantly rewritten or destroyed there is an urgency to produce counternarratives and highlight cultural voices often left out. This installation is a celebration of resilience and space for these stories.

Spawn is an artificial neural network that has been initially trained to recognize and reproduce the sounds of her parents' voices and the voices of others. Spawn is a fast learner, and once she has constructed a concept of a sound, she can improvise and create abstract compositions based on what she understands that sound to be, and what she anticipates it might do next.

This work challenges us to ask ourselves, are we the parents or the children in this new epoch? Are we training our own systems to enact our ideals, or are we rather being retrained to serve the opaque purposes of others?

This work focuses on the cause and effect of resonance. It deals with the friction between two elements, searching for the observable space in between. The visual part of this work will be created in close collaboration with the Institute for Geosciences at the Utrecht University.

Want to hit the ceiling, to change the perspective, then float in wide spheres and rushing wind, turning on my own axis in free fall, pictures like parachutes, the bass a compass, off the beaten paths through time and space, das Labland, as far as the eye can see, the legs are dangling in space, point A becomes B, cpatch, 3Dub…..just a frame on the big timeline. Click Render and always play.

Tarik Barri presents a composition created in collaboration with Thom Yorke. Inside the virtual 3D universe of Barri's self-programmed "Versum" software, all that is heard can be seen, and all that is seen may be heard. Looped and distorted video fragments of Yorke's singing are scattered all around, forming, moving, and changing patterns. Twitching and pulsating, they fill the space with unfamiliar sounds and sights.

The audience is taken on a flight exploring this universe in audiovisual surround, as their path determines the melodies and atmospheres they will encounter. The experience combines elements of music and cinema, but at its core is a different entity altogether.

The ISM Hexadome has been selected to travel to San Francisco as part of the “Wunderbar Together” initiative, celebrating a year of German - American friendship. Wunderbar Together is funded by the German Federal Foreign Office, implemented by the Goethe-Institut and supported by the Federation of German Industries.

Says Mr. Andreas Goergen, Head of the Culture and Communications department at the German Federal Foreign Office: “Projects like the ISM Hexadome are important Ambassadors for the Wunderbar Together Initiative. They show us how international cultural co-production boosts creativity, diversity and innovation.” The ISM Hexadome is the first step in the Institute for Sound & Music's initiative to build a museum in recognition of sound, immersive arts, and electronic music culture.