Building the New Cathedrals of Art + Technology
Reflections on Cathedrals and the Silicon Soul and CODAME’s role in nurturing creative ecosystems
We highly recommend reading Cathedrals and the Silicon Soul by Barry Threw and Scott Moore, published in Palladium Magazine.
The article is a timely meditation on how art, technology, and shared cultural spaces shape not only innovation, but meaning. Looking back at moments such as 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering and Cybernetic Serendipity, it reminds us that some of the most transformative shifts in technology emerged when artists and technologists worked side by side, supported by environments that valued curiosity, embodiment, and collective imagination.
Rather than celebrating tools alone, the essay calls for the rebuilding of modern “cathedrals”: living cultural ecosystems where experimentation is protected, uncertainty is welcomed, and human values are allowed to evolve alongside machines.
This perspective deeply resonates with us at CODAME.
CODAME’s Contribution: A Living Practice Since 2010
Since our founding in San Francisco in 2010, CODAME has worked — often quietly, always collaboratively — to help sustain exactly the kinds of spaces the article describes.
Through our ART+TECH Festival, creative hackathons, performances, workshops, and installations, CODAME has consistently brought artists and technologists into shared, hands-on environments. These were not conferences or product launches, but temporary cultural commons: places to prototype ideas, relationships, and new creative languages together.
We’ve supported emerging artists in experimenting with code, sensors, sound, AI, and interactive systems — not as novelty, but as material for artistic inquiry. Just as importantly, we’ve emphasized artistic ownership, open exchange of knowledge, and community-driven learning, ensuring that technology serves expression rather than defining it.
Our contribution has never been about scale or spectacle. It has been about continuity — showing up year after year to create conditions where trust, experimentation, and collaboration can take root.
CODAME, Gray Area, and Shared Stewardship
CODAME is proud to be part of the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts, a San Francisco–based nonprofit that continues to have a meaningful and positive impact on the city’s creative and cultural life through initiatives like the Gray Area Theater and its broader art + technology programs.
We are grateful to be in this ecosystem alongside people who actively shape these spaces. Barry Threw, co-author of the article, is the Executive and Artistic Director of Gray Area, and Scott Moore, co-author, serves on Gray Area’s Board of Directors. Together, Gray Area and its community have helped sustain San Francisco as a place where art, technology, and civic imagination remain deeply intertwined.
CODAME’s Perspective: Toward The New Human
Since the beginning, CODAME has believed that art and technology are not separate domains, but co-evolving forces that shape how we sense, think, and relate to one another.
As we move toward CODAME ART+TECH Festival 2026 — The New Human, the ideas in Cathedrals and the Silicon Soul feel especially urgent. The New Human is not a finished figure, but a being in motion — learning to co-create with intelligent systems, navigating hybrid physical and digital realities, and redefining authorship, presence, and agency.
CODAME gatherings function much like the cathedrals described in the article: living systems rather than fixed institutions. They evolve through participation. They privilege process over polish. They create room for bodies, machines, and ideas to encounter one another in real time.
In a moment when efficiency often outpaces reflection, we see this work not as nostalgia, but as preparation — rehearsal spaces for futures that are still being written.
With gratitude to Barry Threw and Scott Moore for articulating this vision so clearly, and to Gray Area for continuing to make it tangible in San Francisco.
Let’s keep building — not just technology, but the cultural spaces where The New Human can emerge.