Impact

Between Silicon Valley, San Francisco, and Oakland, the Bay Area is home to 40% of the venture capital investments in tech start-ups in the United States. The concentration of serial founders, top-level engineers, angels, and even “unicorns” is several multitudes greater here than anywhere else on earth. While universities like Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UCSF; and experimental R&D arms of companies like Google X, fill an important local niche for non-commercial ideation around future technologies, there are few opportunities for engineers to come together to iterate in unpredictable ways, outside of traditional institutional frameworks.

This kind of independent, creative experimentation is not only critical for the well-being of any future-thinking society, it is often responsible for it. What set of universal moral principles might the artificial intelligence community lean upon without science fiction writer Isaac Asimov’s 3 laws of robotics? What would the history of bio-tech look like without Gregor Mendel’s monastic garden? An initiative of the Berkeley-based Minerva Foundation, Stochastic Labs operates on an entirely not-for-profit basis, taking zero equity stake in the companies, artworks, and scientific initiatives it incubates. We are 100% passionate about keeping the SF Bay Area’s innovation culture creative, socially responsible, and independent.

Mission

• To support creative freedom for engineers and scientists outside of traditional institutional frameworks
• To thoughtfully enable the creative ventures, inquiries, and expressions that will shape our technology-driven future
• To build an interdisciplinary community of artists, engineers, scientists, and entrepreneurs to collaborate in meaningful and unpredictable ways

History

Since we opened our doors in 2014, Stochastic Labs has helped pioneer exceptional 21st-century creative ventures including Lynn Hershman Leeson and NASA scientist Josiah Zayner’s epic transmedia artwork The Infinity Engine; Aza Raskin’s Earth Species Project and Center for Humane Technology; Lucia Jacob’s Cirque du Squirrel; Joel Simon’s Artbreeder; JD Beltran and Scott Minneman’s Cinema Snowglobe; inaugural OpenAI resident-artist Alexander Reben’s film-making robot BlabDroid; street artist KATSU’s AI Criminals; and Lauren Lee Mccarthy’s interactive performance piece Follower, among others.