Covalent Bonds
Gray Area Festival 2025 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.
Rooted in scientific approaches to understanding life, and often engaged in dialogue with scientists, the works on view in Covalent Bonds interrogate the porous membrane between life and non-life, self and other, individualism and codependence. Across these works, biological systems are positioned not as inert entities to be optimized toward an ideal end-state, but as emergent processes producing new forms of being. 3D bioprinted sculptures make visible life’s capacity to self-assemble; computer simulations explore theories of evolution that encompass both biotic and abiotic systems; biometric inputs transform virtual ecosystems; and movement artists push against corporeal limits in search of other modes of existence.
Covalent Bonds demonstrates the generative field of possibility that emerges through anti-disciplinary experimentation. Biotechnologies and frontier science coupled with contemporary battles over bodily sovereignty are reshaping our understanding of the body’s limits, unsettling fundamental assumptions about corporeal identity. But perhaps the only way out of epistemic anxiety is through it. The works on view during Gray Area Festival 2025 confront the unstable body and present visions for emerging science and technology that promote the flourishing of both human and more-than-human communities.
Exhibition Gallery Hours
Covalent Bonds is open daily during the Festival, before and after conference sessions and during breaks. Audiences are invited to explore the works in between talks and performances.
Artists
Alice Bucknell
Alice Bucknell is a North American artist, writer and educator based in Los Angeles. Their work explores the affective dimensions of video games as interfaces for understanding complex systems, relationships, and forms of knowledge.
Miriam Simun
Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent and humor to create art works in various formats, including video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences.
Zach Blas
Zach Blas (b. Point Pleasant, West Virginia) is an artist, filmmaker, and writer whose practice contends with the philosophies, fantasies, and histories that reside in computational technologies and their influence on Silicon Valley’s visions of the future.
Stephanie Zhang
Stephanie Zhang is an artist, scientist, and researcher whose work explores how order emerges from chaos.
Darren Zhu
Darren Zhu is a synthetic biologist and metascientist based in San Francisco. He explores the epistemic and aesthetic implications of emerging technologies, particularly as they pertain to scientific discovery and creativity.
Connor Cook
Connor Cook is a media artist and researcher from California, now based in Amsterdam.
Martina Menegon
Martina Menegon (she/her, Italy, 1988) is an artist, curator, educator, and researcher working between Vienna and cyberspace.
Miguel Novelo
Miguel Novelo (he/him/el) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher who focuses on emerging media and community organizing—currently working on algorithmic movies ☄️, technoshammanic installations 👻, thermodynamic hypnotism, and friendly computer viruses🫠.
Salomé Chatriot
Salomé Chatriot (1995) is based between Geneva and Paris. Since 2019, Chatriot has been deploying her breath through Fragile Ecosystem, a series of procedural performances hosted in different contexts with which she interacts through a medical machine capturing her breath in real time: a spirometer.
Star Amerasu
Star Amerasu is a critically acclaimed musician, multidisciplinary performance artist, DJ, filmmaker, and storyteller whose work merges club culture with speculative fiction.
OPENING NIGHT
Experience Covalent Bonds on Opening Night of Gray Area Festival 2025 on Thursday, September 11. In addition to the exhibition, performances by Salomé Chatriot and Star Amerasu will use live performance to expand the speculative fictions and body-based practices found throughout the show.
