Gray Area Festival, San Francisco, USA | Website

GRAY AREA FESTIVAL 2025: TO THE MAXX! (September 11 – 14) will explore corporeal practice and perfection in contemporary technoculture through a conference, performances, workshops, and an exhibition.
Early dreams of cyberspace figured the virtual as an escape hatch from the body: on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Yet in 2025, our obsession with the fleshy reality of embodied existence has reached a fever pitch — one which technology only intensifies. Manospherians are looksmaxxing, Bryan Johnson remains undead, biohackers are homebrewing insulin, and your antivax aunt is doing her own research.
For Gray Area Festival’s 11th edition, we’re turning our attention to these emergent practices of bodily maintenance, optimization, and transformation, and the technological hijinx that enable them. Through installations, performances, and critical discourse, Gray Area Festival 2025 will surface cyborgian provocations that promote agency and self-determination and question prevailing narratives about self-improvement, individualism, and progress.
The exhibition Covalent Bonds, on view during Gray Area Festival 2025: TO THE MAXX!, highlights contemporary artists exploring scientific inquiry as a creative medium. Through embodied practice, speculative simulation, and applied research, eight artists present maximalist experiences probing entanglements between natural, human, and technological systems.