I keep thinking of Agnieszka Kurant's liquid crystal paintings. I can't help but wonder if their forms are still changing, their gasoline-rainbow palettes still mutating, or whether they've gone quiet like the rest of us. Kurant's work sits in a central gallery of'Uncanny Valley', the Bay Area's first major exhibition to focus explicitly on how artists today are grappling with technologies that have – for the most part – come out of the region. The show's title is a nod, of course, to nearby Silicon Valley – of which San Francisco has increasingly become an annex – but also reflects the show's intent: to look not broadly at how technology has seeped into art, but at how the definition of what constitutes'humanness' has been blurred by advancements in artificial intelligence and how artists are metabolizing these developments. Kurant's work – which, for me, was the soul of the exhibition – relies heavily on technology that reflects human emotions in real time.

Agnieszka Kurant's lower Manhattan studio stands among a scattering of cultural outposts that represent some of the most recent efforts of the avant guard to grapple with our cultural moment. When I visited in late January, a gallery two doors down was hosting a reproductive rights-themed show with works listed for upwards of $30,000. Across the street, four floors of the windowless New Museum were taken over by a retrospective of artist Hans Haacke, which included a demographic survey, a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a grass-covered mound of dirt. The seventh floor was occupied by a "mixed reality pop-up," sponsored by Ruinart champagne, in which visitors could wander about in augmented reality glasses. Minders politely asked those without reservations to "step away from the experience."

Agnieszka Kurant's lower Manhattan studio stands among a scattering of cultural outposts that represent some of the most recent efforts of the avant guard to grapple with our cultural moment. When I visited in late January, a gallery two doors down was hosting a reproductive rights-themed show with works listed for upwards of $30,000. Across the street, four floors of the windowless New Museum were taken over by a retrospective of artist Hans Haacke, which included a demographic survey, a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a grass-covered mound of dirt. The seventh floor was occupied by a "mixed reality pop-up," sponsored by Ruinart champagne, in which visitors could wander about in augmented reality glasses. Minders politely asked those without reservations to "step away from the experience."