Gray Area Festival 2021 – Worlding Protocol

Join us for our annual survey of culture through the lens of creative practice with artist presentations, conversations, workshops, and an exhibition — now freely accessible online around the world.
How do we negotiate the balance between our individual freedom and communal dependencies; and what practical reality can we build together?

 Worlding: a mode of interdependent, interspecies, planetary perception

 Protocol: computational infrastructures that organize our mediated experience

As we take stock from within a still uncontained global pandemic, it is clear that the entangled web of ecological, economic, and social crises we face demands planetary scale cooperation. Even with the promise of new technologies enabling real-time simulation, distributed financial systems, and geoengineering, exclusionary and extractive power structures persist — rendering purely technical solutions ineffective. Anything is possible, yet nothing seems to change.

For our 7th edition, Gray Area Festival presents Worlding Protocol — a survey of interdisciplinary creators drawing upon indigenous knowledge, transhumanist philosophies, regenerative ecologies, and autonomous organizations to imagine new relational ontologies beyond utopian and fatalist worldviews.