[2] Melchor and Hirshberg[3] initially opened Gray Area Gallery in San Francisco's South of Market (SoMa) in 2006, following a conversation about the lack of proper venues for the exhibition of new media and technology-based art works.

When the Art Theatres[7] pornography arcade (that had been there since the 1970s) moved out,[8][9] property owner Jack Sumski decided that "it was time to do something in my old age, to get something going, and give the Tenderloin a future" and invested heavily to prepare the site for Gray Area.

With initial presentations by Jane Metcalfe, Michael Naimark, Golan Levin, Camille Utterback and night events by Shigeto, Alessandro Cortini, and others.

[21] The festival featured Anti-Gone by Theo Triantafyllidis, Amelia Winger-Bearskin, Phazero, LaTurbo Avedon, Lawrence Lek, Morehshin Allahyari and Stephanie Dinkins.

[26] Gray Area partnered with Gaian Systems to produce the Experiential Space Research Lab (2019-2020), with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The selected twelve artists (Bz Zhang, Celeste Martore, Jonathon Keats, Kelly Skye, Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, Orestis Herodotou, Rena Tom, Romie Littrell, Stephanie Andrews, Stephen Standridge, Yulia Pinkusevich) co-created a 2020 exhibition titled The End of You.

Artists work in the disciplines of Visual Media Arts, Creative Code, Virtual & Augmented Reality, Civic Engagement & Digital Activism, Social Entrepreneurship, Data Science, Sound & Audio, and Software & Hardware.