International Women’s Day is a moment to pause and recognize something that has always been woven into the fabric of the CODAME community.

The women who bring their creativity, generosity, and vision to this shared ecosystem.

CODAME has always been a living network — shaped by the people who participate, share ideas, mentor others, and experiment with new forms of expression at the intersection of art and technology. Over the years, women across our community have played a vital role in helping this culture grow and evolve.

They create new artistic languages.

They explore emerging technologies.

They mentor others and open doors.

They transform gatherings into meaningful collaborations.

Artists such as Amy LaViers, Meltem Şahin, Char Stiles, and many others across the CODAME network continue to expand how we think about robotics, generative systems, creative coding, design, and new digital mediums.

But the impact goes far beyond any individual name.

It lives in the volunteers — like Elif Okut, Saba Soltanshahi, Van Hoang, May Parra, and many others — who help bring events to life.

In the mentors, including Anouk Wipprecht, Chiara Canali, Yosun Chang, and Vanessa Chang, who guide emerging creators.

In the artists who experiment with ideas that might not yet have a name.

And in the spirit of collaboration that defines this community.

CODAME has always believed that the future of technology is not only engineered — it is imagined, designed, and shaped through creativity and human connection. The women of this community are an essential part of that process.

Today we simply want to say thank you.

Thank you for your creativity.
Thank you for your generosity.
Thank you for the perspectives and possibilities you bring to this shared exploration of art and technology.

Happy International Women’s Day.

Photos in alphabetical order: Amy LaViers, Anabella Costa, Anouk Wipprecht, Antoinette Bumatay-Chan, Camila Blanco, Catie Cuan, Char Stiles, Chiara Canali, Elaine Miu Cheung, Hanamaro Chaki, Hen/i, Jiabao Li, Manuela Magni, Meltem Şahin, Monica Mura, Nora, Vanessa Chang, Zeo Zhang — and many more amazing humans across the CODAME community.

Discover more artists from the CODAME network: codame.com/t/artists

Desert X, the hot (quite literally) California biennial set to take place again in the arid Coachella Valley in February 2019, has just had an off-season and off-road surprise: the creature known as Shybot has been located in Palm Springs, near Gene Autry Trail — not exactly alive but fairly well.

In the run-up to its first edition in 2017, Desert X curator Neville Wakefield often mused about the desert as a place where people go to get lost. One participating artist, Norma Jeane, ran with this idea with from and co-created as his project a small six-wheeled desert rover engineered to evade human contact. The escape plan worked: Norma Jeane released the rover, dubbed Shybot, in Palm Springs that February, and she soon disappeared and her GPS tracking device stopped emitting. Her location was listed on the exhibition’s website as “everywhere and nowhere”. Desert X posted a $1,000 missing-bot reward but hopes dwindled — until an email came in this month.

Kyle Gomez, a 31-year old maintenance worker from nearby Cathedral City, spotted Shybot while driving his Jeep off-road. He scanned a QR code on the rover that connected him to Desert X and offered to hand over the bot, tires shredded and body a bit banged up but otherwise intact. (And yes, the organizers plan to give him the reward.)

When asked for his reaction, Wakefield sounded more philosophical than ever: “To me Shybot always represented the idea that there was something out there — the something that, whether in religion or horror, we can’t help but search for. There’s been a lot of speculation as to what happened during the past 16 months — bot-napping, pilgrimages to Mecca etc — but for the faithful she was always there, proof again that we only truly find ourselves in the places that we are least present.”

Staring at some reputed masterpieces of modern art and at some images produced by A.I. systems, many lay people prefer the latter. Many people think that the art produced by the machine is more beautiful than the art made by humans and certified by art historians, galleries and museums (not to mention wealthy collectors). Many people even confess that they feel moved by the art produced by the machine. That is, of course, until someone tells them that the art was made by a machine.

This prompts several questions

• “What is Art?” Is it Art only if it is made by humans? Can animals, rivers and machines also make Art? Who decides what is Art and what is not?

• “Who made the art?” Human beings designed and implemented the A.I. system that produced the art: who should take credit for the art?

• What is fundamentally different between an A.I. system and traditional software? We don’t think of our email system as a system that “writes” emails, but simply as a tool to write emails. At which point does software become a subject rather than an object?

• What is the difference between a conscious mind and a tool that can be as creative as the conscious mind?

• As machines become more creative, how does our relationship with them change?

Explore this questions with Piero Scaruffi, a cultural historian and a veteran of Artificial Intelligence, moderates a panel with roboticist/artist Alexander Reben, art critic Meredith Tromble, and philosopher John Campbell at this year’s CODAME ART+TECH Festival, codenamed #ARTOBOTS. June 7, Thursday, 1.30pm-2.30pm at The Midway, San Francisco.

Piero Scaruffi

Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being “The Nature of Consciousness” (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest book of poems and meditations is “Synthesis”(2009). As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being “A History of Rock and Dance Music” (2009) and “A History of Jazz Music” (2007). His latest book of history is “A History of Silicon Valley” (2011). The first volume of his free ebook “A Visual History of the Visual Arts” appeared in 2012. His latest book is “Intelligence is not Artificial” (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008 and the Life Art Science Tech (LAST) festival in 2014. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.

Meredith Tromble

Meredith Tromble is an artist and writer who has worked in “in-between” spaces throughout her career: mixing drawing, performance, and installation; writing about her own creative process and the work of others; and engaging crossover points between art and science. She has been artist-in-residence at the Complexity Sciences Center at the University of California, Davis (UCD), since 2011. Her ongoing collaboration with UCD geobiologist Dawn Sumner, the interactive 3-D art installation “Dream Vortex,” has been presented internationally at ISEA2015, Vancouver and Creativity & Cognition, Glasgow School of Art, 2015, and nationally at more than a dozen public lectures at American universities ranging from Stanford University in Palo Alto to Brown University in Providence. A related dance performance “The Vortex,” a collaboration with choreographer Donna Sternberg, will debut at The Odyssey in Los Angeles April 20–21, 2018. Tromble is also the co-editor, with Charissa Terranova, of “The Routledge Companion to Biology in Art & Architecture; editor of “The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson,” from University of California Press; and author of hundreds of short form writings on art including a paper for the Artnodes Journal special issue on Art & Research, Winter, 2018.

Alexander Reben

Alexander Reben is an artist and roboticist, who explores humanity through the lens of art and technology. His work deals with human-machine relationships, synthetic psychology, artificial philosophy, and robot ethics, among other topics. Using “art as experiment,” his work allows for the viewer to experience the future within metaphorical contexts. Reben’s artwork and research have been shown and published internationally, and he consults with major companies, guiding innovation for the social machine future. He has exhibited at venues including The Vitra Design Museum, The Vienna Biennale, ARS Electronica, VOLTA, The Whitney Biennial, TFI Interactive, IDFA, ArtBots, The Tribeca Film Festival, The Camden Film Festival, Doc/Fest, and The Boston Cyberarts Gallery. His work has been covered by NPR, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Washington Post, Fast Company, Filmmaker Magazine, New Scientist, BBC, PBS, Discovery Channel, Cool Hunting and WIRED, among others. He has lectured at TED, SXSW, TTI Vanguard, Google, UC Berkeley, SMFA, CCA, MIT, and other universities. Reben has built robots for NASA, and is a graduate of the MIT Media Lab, where he studied human-robot symbiosis and art. He was a 2016–2017 WIRED innovation fellow, and is the Director of Technology and Research at Stochastic Labs.

John Campbell

John Campbell is currently the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and before that, Wilde Professor of Mental Philosophy at the University of Oxford. His main interests are in the philosophies of psychology and psychiatry, with a developing interest in social robots. He’s written three books, Past, Space and Self (1994), Reference and Consciousness (2002), and (with Quassim Cassam), Berkeley’s Puzzle (2014). He’s held Guggenheim and NEH Fellowships, and was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 2017.

San Francisco Mission resident Dat Phan built a whole body scanner out of a gaming computer, wheel bearing, plywood, and an Xbox Kinect. He scanned his father and then printed a little replica. I spoke with Phan about the whole adventure and what he sees in the future for technologically based art CODAME project ModBod

How did you become interested in whole body scanning?

At a previous CODAME event a group of artists from Paris called Unicorn did 3D scanning. It sounded like an interesting process. Since these guys were from France and can’t easily attend more events, I was asked to collaborate.

We emailed the French artists and got rough instructions on how to do 3D scanning ourselves Our first scanning event was a wedding for the manager at Geekdom.

I started doing research and thinking about how to do full-body scanning in an efficient way. The most basic method is holding the sensor by hand and walking around people, dragging the cords behind. I found some designs on how to build a turntable that a person could stand on. I also adapted a camera slider design to shuttle the Kinect sensor up and down. I also determined what kind of computing power was needed to drive the 3D scanning and model generation.

Is there something special about the computer or its configuration to do this scanning?

It requires a very powerful graphics card to be able to process the scan data. Most of the calculations are done on the graphics card rather than the CPU.

Typically what kind of computer could be used for scanning?

Gaming computers. The same sort of computer that works for gaming does a good job on scanning. Gaming computers are made to churn through a lot of 3D data, the same sort of 3D data that’s involved in 3D scanning.

I saw some of the scans you made at the last CODAME event in particular your dad. What other things have you scanned?

Just people. I really haven’t tried scanning anything else like objects yet. It would be cool to scan a piece of furniture, and then use the scan for 3D modeling. The scanned object could then be modified from the scanned mesh. Then the result could be 3D printed or cut out with a CNC machine.

Have you ever reversed the process? You know placing the scanning track on the turntable and scanning something like a room?

No, but that would be a good way to scan a room. That’s a cool idea I haven’t thought of that. I think it would work pretty well. You would be able to get a pretty good scan of a room. The dimensions would be pretty accurate, well, close enough. I am sure within a couple inches.

Have you formally studied computers?

I studied computer science in undergrad. I took a lot of computer graphics classes then, along with a computer gaming class. When I finished my undergraduate studies I really didn’t get a job in computers.

It wasn’t until recently that I started playing around with computer technology in order to create art. I went to Intel’s and Vice’s Creators Project festival that they had here a few years ago at Ft. Mason. That inspired me to merge computers and art; it was stuff I knew how to do and the results were novel and really profound.

What sort of things did you see that created the biggest impression?

I saw a really great interactive installation that used graphics technology to place the viewer into the art. The piece was Chris Milk’s Treachery of Sanctuary I watched visitors interact with the installation, making it come alive with their presence.

You said you did some graduate work as well. Was that in computer technology as well?

I went to graduate school in kinesiology at San Francisco State. I found that academia was not my thing.

Why were you attracted to Kinesiology?

It is the study of how the body works, sports, and exercise. I really like physical activity and interpreting the physics involved. This morning I went to the rock climbing gym and biked over here. I have always been a very physical person.

Do you think the study of Kinesiology somehow helps your view of 3d modeling?

Not directly, but it does help with how I think about art installations and how people perceive movement. It also helps me understand how people use their bodies to interact with things.

Where do you see the art in technology going?

It will be commonplace just like other forms of art. The art we are doing reflect the technology that is available. People will play with whatever technology is out there. Like the shift from acoustic sounds to more electronic instruments and sounds in music. As more electronic music equipment and software became available, music also changed.. As more technology emerges, people will discover new ways to create novel interesting stuff

Do you see electronic art going places where no previous media could go?

Yes, there are lots of different ways computer technology allows for lots of options for art , which were previously unavailable. For example, you could work on larger projects alone or in a very small team. You are not as limited by physical space. can be created virtually, remotely. Actually, this has been the case for some time now with video games and things like that.

What are the new frontiers that you see technological art approaching?

Virtual reality is a very active space. The technology for it has improved a lot in recent years, making it more friendly and feasible compared to back in the 90s when I first heard about VR. Head mounted displays and input interfaces have changed a lot. I don’t know how widespread it would be with cost, access etc, but I can imagine people creating powerfully immersive experiences in that realm. With the way VR immerses people, I bet there will be some pleasantly disturbing, jarring experiences, akin to roller coasters. In a more practical sense, I think tech art will add to our everyday experiences in more subtle ways.

How would our lives be enriched?

For example, if you are doing a workout rather than just looking at a basic LCD screen with beats per minute you could have a computer voice coach and guide you, relaying your stats in a fun, engaging way. The same info could be shown on a heads up display, such as Google glass, in an attractive animated graph.

What did your dad think when he saw the 3d print of the scan you made?

He was really amazed by it. When I gave him the 3d print of himself he was speechless. I think he was thinking of everything that happened between the scan and a recreation of him on a miniature scale. Then he wanted to know how much a 3d printer would cost.

Are other members of CODAME eager to use what you have developed?

We will be using it on a more frequent basis as the workflow is smoothed out. We did a wedding. Perhaps we will do scanning at corporate events as well.

Where do most of the CODAME members live?

Most of them live in San Francisco. Pretty much all over the city. Some also live in the east bay and along the peninsula. Bruno Fonzi and Jordan Gray started it. They were producing electronic dance after parties during programming conventions. They decided to make it a repeatable production. Later they expanded to other areas of technology, including 3d printing, fashion, video games and dancing. A lot of the events combine dancing with digital projection art. There are about 10 regularly active members of the group who help coordinate events. There are many more artists who solely contribute art.

Where is the hotbed for technical art? Is there any particular place where more is happening?

I really don’t know enough to say internationally but in the U.S. the San Francisco Bay Area seems to be the most active… Of course there is a lot going on with computer graphics on the academic side and in-house at private companies.

Support ART+TECH

Bring ModBod for your events!

The Dutch fashion tech designer Anouk Wipprecht became world famous with her bizarre robot dresses. The main themes in her work are connections between people and between people and technology. Interfacing she calls it. We talk to Anouk about the slow evolution of fashion technology.

Originally published at ideas.bright.nl by Miranda Hoogervoost

My first encounter with Anouk last summer in Berlin at the event Fashion Tech. It’s still difficult to catch her; her phone number is unreachable. Later when we were in a low-noise plastic talking bubble she admitted she threw away her phone. “It is an experiment because I am sometimes tired. When I open my phone and see two hundred unread emails I get a heart attack! We have the technology to make our lives easier, but it causes stress because it is not consistent with how we feel. It would be great if your phone knows that you are too busy for an interview and saves the incoming call for a later time. “

Hep Svedja Wipprecht and her Spider Dress

Spider Dress

Anouk Wipprecht studied fashion and interaction design and has been experimenting with technology because they wanted to give her clothes more features than warmth and comfort. “My idea of fashion has always been that clothes should be able to respond to our needs and moods. Spider Dress for example, is about fear and social issues. When people come into your personal space than the dress reacts to protect you. I find it very interesting to design from those basic human emotions.”

The Spider Dress was developed in cooperation with the Austrian hacker Daniel Schatzmayr and the first version appeared in 2012. During the Consumer Electronics Show early last year launched Anouk version 2.0. The dress has spider legs — ok, there are six instead of eight, but that’s creative freedom — and is based on a proximity principle by Edward T. Hall. The dress has 12 states or behavior: from friendly and encouraging to avoiding and aggressive. All parts are 3D printed and she uses chips from Intel, a partner she’s worked closely with for years.

Her 2012 Smoke Dress also responds to changes in personal space. Anouk made ​​the dress with Aduen Darriba, with whom she studied. Sensors trigger a mechanism that can create a smokescreen so that the wearer can “hide”. The inspiration for this dress came from how the squid protects itself.

Unfriending

In late February, Anouk was a guest at the two-day design event FITC Amsterdam. On the first day, we met her informally in the back of the room at English illustrator Mr. Bingo’s presentation. We talked about the clash between College Tour and Daan Roosegaarde and the head-above-the-ground-climate in the Netherlands. She responded diplomatically but crisply: “Here there’s a lot of stiffness you might say. If you do something good, you can just be taken down again. This really played into in my decision to go to the US — I left the Netherlands in 2009. [In America] there are interesting opportunities for me, of course. There’s not very much room for challenging projects in the Netherlands, and I think America is really forward-thinking. That’s why tomorrow I’ll announce big news.”

Our official interview was scheduled for the following day, so I had to wait for the news. While we watched more of the hilarious “Hate Mail” clip of Mr. Bingo, in came an American lady from a New York fashion tech consultancy. She was struck by Anouk and asked if she was available for a day of brainstorming in New York: “Mail me your price and quickly please because I need it to know 16:00 this afternoon.” Anouk: “Jeez, what should I ask for?” They make the deal around with an amount where I should write articles for ten Bright-and I note in Evernote: “course programming search.”

Ralf Ruehmeier Wipprecht speaking at an event in Berlin.

Anouk is world-famous in the fashion tech world. She travels the globe for lectures, exhibitions and collaborations. Additionally, she curates avant-garde events where she invites geniuses from the world of technology, design and fashion shows to collaborate with her. Yet we see her surprisingly little in the Dutch media. “They approach me often but usually without seriousness. [They just want] purely audience ratings and sensationalism — I don’t want to be a part of that. I’ve worked with Humberto Tan, because he was really interested in my research. I joined him on the RTL Late Night show in the Spider Dress. I also think that’s why I like Ivo Niehe. This area deserves a lot more respect than is currently portrayed in the Dutch media. It’s important to keep pushing fashion tech.“

Brain Scan

The next day at FITC Anouk rapidly (and energetically) presented her famous dresses. They also showed a sneak preview of her latest work for the Audi A4 Collection — her fifth dress series. “We have this dress for this series of motors, and there’s something else but I can’t remember right now” The new Audi dress will come in the second half of this year.

Also impressive is the Unicord brain scanner used in children’s neurological research (see the photo at the beginning of the article). It’s a playful place of terrifying head sets that the children now get on their head: “The children now get to wear these terrifying headsets playfully”

A New Collaboration Between the Netherlands and Silicon Valley

After the presentation we met up in the media space. We ask directly to the big news that she has forgotten to tell. Laughing: “Yes, sorry, the presentation went quite differently than we planned it. Anyways, yes, the important news! I’m in cooperation with CODAME from San Francisco to organize a large tech design event from 5–8 October at Fort Mason. The theme is INTERFACE, so it’s wider than just fashion. I also invited many designers and engineers from the Netherlands and linked to designers, engineers and Silicon Valley companies. We want to try to create the next generation wearables.”

“I want to build a bridge between Netherlands and San Francisco because I think there are many more cool ideas in the Netherlands than what we see now. I also think that the Netherlands can learn from these initiatives and hope that this event will lead to more innovative entrepreneurship between the two places.”

In the next few weeks Anouk will be working with CODAME founder Bruno Fonzi

to curate the artists and technology companies, who will then go to work in the lab on new projects. In October, all the projects created will be displayed.

The lack of collaboration between fashion companies and technology companies is currently the bottleneck in the fashion tech industry. “The tech sector really does its best to get things off the ground, but the fashion industry does not show much interest,” Anouk observes, “even though it’s clear we need good conversations around washability, power, maintaining electronics as well as designs for bandwidth and networking of the wearer.”

“There is a big communication problem. The average fashion designer finds it difficult to work with a classical engineer, because fashion is focused on tactile and visual experiences instead programming and mathematics is rather abstract matter. Not all developers are very open to the extravagant ideas of fashion designers. I often hear developers looking down at design technologies. Technology in their eyes much more value than what something looks like. While there should be a perfect balance, a symbiosis.”

The Fashion Industry Needs to be Overhauled

The biggest problem is perhaps the fear of the fashion industry to change. When fashion is ready to support the demands of fashion tech, then we’ll have the important pillars in place to allow the fashion industry to change. Like a scaffold. A dress with sensors requires interaction with the public; no static front row catwalk. “The fashion system is based on what’s hot and what’s not, and it’s always presenting new designs. The next generation of tech fashion designers will work with digital updates and upgrades. Moreover, the conventional fashion industry is highly polluting; the cotton processing alone is extremely harmful. Fashion Tech clothing is certainly not disposable fashion; it lives and changes with the carrier. You would not just discard it.”

An influential fashion institute that could generate a lot of attention to fashion tech is the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. The Met gala on May 2 in New York — sponsored by Apple — has been a major media event and is also the start of the new exhibition Manus X Machina, or “Hands Versus Machines”. There you can see the work of Iris van Herpen and Anouk has also been approached by the museum.

“They asked if they could borrow something from me for the exhibition, but I’d rather make something new in their theme. Never do something twice is my motto. It’s nice if I can do something for them, but I do wonder what it now is really tech fashion. It seems they are mainly concerned with the creative process and not the wearables, e-textiles and other technology-infused ideas. That would be unfortunate, but we’ll see.”

Whether at the gala or not, Anouk will generate a lot of international media attention for fashion tech with CODAME Labs: its participants list includes impressive names in design, fashion and other creative disciplines. The Dutch names she already has told us: Local Androids, Maartje Dijkstra, Aduen Darriba, V2 Labs and Ricardo O’Nascimento. Make sure to put the @CODAME ART+TECH Festival in your calendar this year, stay tuned for more more announcements coming up…

Main Photo: Marije Dijkema // by Marije

Originally published at ideas.bright.nl by Miranda Hoogervoost

Over the past year, San Francisco and the Bay Area have come to be defined in the national sphere by the think piece. In the constant stream of articles about gentrification, the Ellis Act evictions, artist displacement, and arts non profits closing left and right in response to the city’s rising population and booming tech industry, it might be surprising to note that a number of tech companies are investing increasingly in artist residency programs. In fact, two of the biggest tech companies in the region — Facebook and Autodesk — maintain active residency programs. For companies without the infrastructure for such endeavors, local art and technology non-profit CODAME offers to pair tech companies with artists for individual projects through their “Adopt An Artist” program. While there is a lot of conversation (and concern) in the Bay Area regarding the tech industry’s lack of support and philanthropy for the arts, the questions seem skewed towards trying to figure out how to cater to tech wealth, rather than thinking through art’s role in the tech industry itself. This text surveys corporate residency programs in the Bay Area which exemplify how artists engage with this industry, and begins to sketch out possible implications — or potential — for the art infrastructure and its relationship with tech creativity.

Autodesk’s Pier 9 Artist-in-Residence program is housed in the corporation’s immense facility in Pier 9 along the waterfront in downtown San Francisco. Artists apply for four-month residencies at the space, which provides access to their workshop, a stipend, and the ability to work directly with the company’s engineers on their projects. The program maintains a diverse pool of applicants who range from fashion designers to chefs, architects, and technologists as well as fine artists, who have access to Autodesk’s high-end equipment, materials, and software, plus training and skillshare programs. Although it is not an explicit part of the program, the focus on “makers” over “fine artists” benefits Autodesk as well. The company launched Autodesk 123D in 2009 as free 3D modeling software designed for the general consumer, and they acquired the DIY info sharing website Instructables in 2011. The AIR program began at Instructables before their purchase by Autodesk, who developed it into a much larger initiative. All AIR residents are required to post their projects to the website, so there is a direct tie into the site’s content. Envisioning how people create with their tools, or their competitor’s tools, in a variety of scenarios is clearly a valuable asset to the company, especially as the mainstream culture moves into a maker culture.

Autodesk Pier 9 Workshop.

Autodesk’s Pier 9 AIR Program Manager Vanessa Sigurdson describes the environment at Autodesk as an “office full of artists, not an office with artists” and they aim to have active interchange between the resident artists and engineers. Former resident artists Joseph DeLappe and Adrien Segal felt that the environment was very supportive and encouraging for visiting artists, with an “anything goes” atmosphere. DeLappe created rubber stamps for In Drones We Trust, while Segal used water consumption statistics to build a canyon-like bench. Both mentioned that the workshop helped to foster the company’s culture of bustling, creative energy. Sigurdson referenced the Xerox PARC artist-in-residence (PAIR) program as an important inspiration for the residency, a project that similarly brought artists and technologists together in collaboration.

Like Autodesk’s Pier 9 AIR Program, Facebook’s artist-in-residence program is a recent and growing initiative. Originally launched by Drew Bennett for their Menlo Park campus almost three years ago, their AIR program grew out of the Analog Research Lab, a printmaking studio within Facebook’s Graphic Design department. The posters created in the Analog Research Lab by Facebook employees, the Graphic Design department, and AIR residents can be found strewn all over the walls of Facebook’s immense campus. Some posters are art projects initiated by residents or staff graphic designers, others promote events (like Gay Pride) or display slogans. The posters yield a colorful, collegiate, cafe vibe to Facebook’s many corridors.

Jeff Canham installation at Facebook headquarters. (Photo: Drew Bennett).

Alongside the posters, one of the primary outcomes from the Facebook AIR are site-specific installations, which pop up throughout the facility. Adrien Segal was a resident at Facebook directly after her time at Autodesk, and she noted that the Facebook program was much smaller in scope, with only two artists in the residency at any given time. Like Autodesk, artists are given free reign on their projects, and can decide the locations and space for their work. Bennett and his team then help the artist with fabrication and production, much of which does occur onsite at the Analog Research Lab’s shop. The projects range widely, from floral graffiti murals by Jet Martinez to delicate hanging paper sculptures by Val Britton. Residents are required to do a social event for Facebook employees related to their project, whether it be an artist’s talk, workshop, or skillshare.

Given that the residency program grew out of the Graphic Design department and the Analog Research Lab, it’s no surprise that much of the work by Facebook resident artists is graphic in nature, for example in the cases of Jeff Canham, Tucker Nichols, and Jane Kim. There’s also a heavy regional focus, with a vast number of artists coming from the Bay Area. When asked what he seeks in the artists he selects for the residency, Bennett said he brought in artists that “help to reinforce our values…whose work is in dialogue with the high level ideas of the company…The message, the story being told through this art is all about the utility of art as a creative force and an inspirational force. It doesn’t need to be framed or pedestaled, it’s uninhibited inspiration and curiosity- which can run up a stairwell or around a lightwell or spill out onto the floor — it could happen anywhere.”

Jane Kim Installation at Facebook headquarters. (Photo Credits: Kelly Hsiao + Richard Morgenstein).

The five year old non-profit arts organization CODAME is better known for their art and technology events in San Francisco, which in the past have featured live music, presentations, interactive installations, and hack-a-thons. More recently, they launched an “Adopt an Artist” program that pairs artists with tech companies, who support specific projects, residencies, performances and talks. CODAME functions as an intermediary, helping to solicit companies in support of artists within their roster. Rackspace, Organic, Shopify, Geekdom and Box are a few of the companies who have participated in the “Adopt an Artist” program. The collaborative coworking space Geekdom is currently hosting the artist ANI in residence, who is building out her iPad instrument sBASSdrum and developing an iOS app for CODAME. When I spoke with ANI, she said she was initially drawn to the “organic atmosphere” and “inspirational, experiential art” found at CODAME’s events.

I attended CODAME’s “Art + Tech: Virtual Reality” at Mozilla and it felt like a networking event for creative technologists — part trade show, part rave. The presentations by Eddie Lee on his game Collider (which he described as “DMT for Oculus Rift”) and John Carpenter, a UX designer at Mozilla building an Oculus Rift-enabled web browser called mozVR, were a reminder of the truly wild things being developed in the Bay Area. CODAME professes to “embrace innovation through creativity, play, and collaboration between artists and technologists” — a statement that resonated with the motivation behind the other two residencies, who also cite innovation, creativity, and play as primary drivers. The Xerox Parc PAIR program came up in many of my conversations as a cultural touchstone indicative of the values and goals of these residency programs. Resonant with the unfettered utopianism of the Californian Ideology, Xerox Parc brought artists, scientists and technologists together in order to ferment a cross-disciplinary “knowledge ecology” and create “new ways of looking at the world.”

Reflecting on this new generation of artist-in-residence programs at technology corporations, I wonder, what happens when art becomes just a vehicle for innovation? Is there room in these artist-in-residence programs for artists to act as critical voices?

To think about the impetus behind these corporate artist-in-residence programs, it’s worthwhile to compare them with corporate private art collections. For better or for worse, the finance industry is a major pillar of support for the art system, and it has helped shape it. As an example, UBS, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase, and Bank of America all possess major art collections. In the most basic terms possible, the bottom line for finance is investment, assets which accrue value over time. For the tech industry, the bottom line is in solutions—tools and services for people to use. This requires investing in design, which demands process. If the art object on display in the corporate lobby is a symbol of accumulated wealth and financial stability, the artist-in-residence studio or workshop in the tech company becomes a showroom of ingenuity and creativity. (Think of the silkscreened and letterpressed posters across Facebook’s campus, or the steady stream of tours through Autodesk’s workshop to their clients, colleagues, etc.) The process, not the object, is placed on view.

Analog research lab at Facebook headquarters. (Photo: Drew Bennett.)

Over the past year, anxieties have been expressed about design and popular culture’s appropriation of contemporary art. I think of Hal Foster’s worrisome declaration about the establishment of “total design” collapsing the aesthetic and utilitarian realms as much as Ed Halter and Lauren Cornell’s Mass Effect conversation about popular culture’s absorption of contemporary art. If tech is the Bay Area’s main industry and export, with its emphasis on making, creating, and, above all, innovative design, then how can (or should) that translate into the art infrastructure here, and elsewhere? As Mat Dryhurst and Brian Rogers put it in their Re-Engineering interviews for Art Practical, the Bay Area has a rich, radical history in both art and technology, offering “a perfect place to stage a new paradigm of collaboration and antagonism between arts and tech.” I fully agree. It seems there’s a real opportunity to nurture art that can work in and against technology, in and against design, beginning with the imperfect corporate residency frameworks described. There should be more models, platforms and mutations for this kind of work.