Barry Threw: Executive & Artistic Director of Gray Area

Oct 4, 2023

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In this episode of RadicalxChange(s), host Matt Prewitt engages in a deep and thoughtful conversation with Barry Threw, Executive & Artistic Director of Gray Area. They explore Barry's diverse career integrating art, technology, and humanities for economic, social, and ecological regeneration, and examine the cultural shifts in the San Francisco Bay Area. Barry and Matt saunter through anecdotes from Burning Man to Joan Didion to the technocratic molding of the Silicon Valley phenomenon — an exciting pathway of cultural importance to walk along.

References:

Bios:

Barry Threw is the Executive and Artistic Director of Gray Area, a San Francisco nonprofit cultural incubator applying art and technology toward social good. He drifts fluidly between roles, collaborating as an executive, curator, technologist, cultural producer, and strategist to cultivate forward-looking, boundary-blurring projects integrating culture and technology. His previous leadership positions have generated innovative & influential platforms, products, teams, and businesses spanning art, music, internet, built environment, and experiential & immersive media: as Software Director with Keith McMillen Instruments, developing advanced technology to bridge traditional string instruments with computers to spark a Western new classical music movement based on the technologies and aesthetics of the 21st century; as Technical Director with Recombinant Media Labs, presenting surround cinema at installations and festivals around the world; as a founding Partner at Fabricatorz, a distributed technology studio for cultural projects with nodes in Hong Kong, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Lisbon; and as Director of Software with Obscura Digital, a San Francisco-based creative technology studio specializing in the design and execution of immersive and interactive experiences worldwide, and the first company to do architectural projection mapping. He organizes the #NEWPALMYRA project, an online community platform focused on the virtual reconstruction and creative reuse of cultural heritage. He played a key role in developing and operating the Vatican Arts and Technology Council, a nondenominational external advisory body for the Vatican, which advanced goals of environmental stewardship, humanitarian compassion, and spreading experiences of spirituality worldwide through an experimental art and technology lab.

Barry’s Social Links:

Connect with Gray Area:

Matt Prewitt (he/him) is a lawyer, technologist, and writer. He is President of the RadicalxChange Foundation.

Matt’s Social Links:

@m_t_prewitt | X
Matt’s Substack: Matt's Writings

Production Credits:

Produced by G. Angela Corpus.
Co-Produced and Audio Engineered by Aaron Benavides.
Executive Produced by G. Angela Corpus and Matt Prewitt.
Intro/Outro music by MagnusMoone, “Wind in the Willows,” is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)

This is a RadicalxChange Production.

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