Peter d'Agostino

@Silicon_Valley: SJC-MEX is a forum for exploring many of the paradoxes of natural, cultural & virtual identities.

It is a model for interaction & communication across geo-borders & tech platforms by linking people in the former garden cities of San Jose & Mexico City through the web and live video/phone portals in both cities.

The iconic images of pyramid & garage represent physical/virtual times & places spanning North American histories & cultures.

http://www.peterdagostino.net/atSilicon_Valley/

Credits

@ Silicon_Valley © 2006 peter d’Agostino thanks to:
ISEA / ZeroOne joel Slayton steve Dietz todd Blair MACLA anjee Helstrup guillermo Ceballos brita d’Agostino UNAM genevieve Lucet rodrigo Fernandez TEMPLE U Maurice Wright, sandy James melanie Silva bryan Palmer sam Yun OJO dana Ainsworth

Installation at MACLA.

Irene Chien, Ken Goldberg, Jane McGonigal, Greg Niemeyer and Jeff Tang

Bounce is a non-competitive conversation game in which two people separated by at least 20 years of age connect by phone and answer a series of AI-supported questions about life experiences that they have in common, such as, “What is something you BOTH think has changed for the better in the last 20 years?”

George Legrady, Angus Forbes, Zachary Davis, Nicole Starosielski

Former title:  Global Collaborative Visual Mapping Archive (GCVMA)

Cell Tango consists of a dynamically growing archive of cell phone transmitted images with metadata contributed by participants from anywhere within the reach of cellular transmission and reception in the world. The project’s aim is to heighlight individual to community, or local to global participation through cellphone transmission technology. The community of participants create a visual archive of images without spatial-geographical boundaries, submitting contributions from the private space of their living room, to the public space of Times Square, to any wilderness area that may have cellular transmission.

Steve Bull, Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Tim Perkis

Cellphonia: San Jose is a cellphone karaoke opera about Mexican wholesale nursery workers, hotshot Indian coders, Vietnamese dragon boat builders, Silicon Valley desk jockeys, and Filipino airport workers. Visitors or locals can choose which group’s song they want to sing. Cellphonia's libretto is delivered via RSS newsfeeds relevant to the subject. The music is algorithmically generated in ibalon, cancion, Bombay pop, Misery pop, and chiptunes. Every fifteen minutes the opera song cycle restarts. A festival caller hears a fragment of the libretto on his/her cellphone and is cued to repeat it, karaoke-style. At the end of the song, he/she is directed to the festival location of the Cellphonia: San Jose 24/7 streaming opera to hear the entire performance.

Image: "Cellphonia: San Jose turns all callers into divas." Courtesy of Steve Bull 2005

Guillermo Galindo, Gustavo Vazquez

A performance installation featuring computer activated sensors and mechanical devices that will produce a rotation of sounds and images gathered by the artists. The sounds (composed and recorded) and videointerviews will reflect the ethnically and culturally diverse communities in the South Bay. Each of these communities will be asked to articulate their personal vision of a future as individuals and as members of a larger community domain. Eachartist, filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez and composer GuillermoGalindo, will bring their unique vision to the project while working collaboratively to create an impromptu symphony incorporating shared audio and visual material. The project will be presented as a one day performance installation.

Taraneh Hemami, Mohsen Emami-Nouri

Homes project enters the private world of Iranian families living in the Bay Area, creating physical and virtual spaces that narrate stories of their everyday lives through portraits of space, objects, and people. Audiences` interaction with the archives interconnects the stories of these individual homes.

Homes is a project of CrossConnections residency at the Center for Art and Public Life at California College of the Arts

Thanks to The Christensen Fund for their continuous support of CrossConnections project and Litescape Technologies for sponsoring Homes project at the ISEA 2006 festival. With special thanks to Farzad Naimi, Kayvan Alikhani, Ahmad Kiarostami, Amir Borna, Mehdi Mortezai, Nariman Riahi, Zohreh and Ghasem Malekmadani, Navid Ghaem-Maghami, Donna Schumacher and Shadi Yousefian for their contributions to the project.

Natalie Jeremijenko, Chris Dierks, Jesse Arnold, Robert Twomey

Encyclopedia entries are wiki-based visual essays that document the manufacturing processes, labor conditions and environmental impacts involved in the production of contemporary products. Entries are produced by college and high school students under the guidance of university faculty and teachers who ensure high standards of evidence for student work (appropriate citations, accurate quotations, etc). Students solicit the cooperation of local industry, visit their production facilities and document their labor conditions, non-proprietary manufacturing processes and the environmental effects of these practices.

http://www.howstuffismade.org/ 

Jon Brumit, Lee Montgomery, Michael Trigilio, Linda Arnejo

Just back from an ArtsLink Award project in Eastern Europe, Neighborhood Public Radio wishes to propose to broadcast the entire ISEA 2006 event, including their own live events, symposia, and debates in order to represent the neighborhood within and surrounding the San Jose ISEA event in an exercise of hyper-local media production as an exercise in free speech and creativity and as an alternative to exclusionary commercial mass-media practices.

Ludica

As computer games increasingly include affordances for player creativity, new art forms are beginning to conflate consumption and production, practices that constitute a kind of digital folk art emerging wtihin online game worlds. For ISEA, Ludica has created a virtual art park within the online world Second Life, designed to showcase these new forms of cultural production. Ludica curators,  ChingALing and China Bling (Jacki Morie) and Artemesia Sandgrain (Celia Pearce) solicited proposals for “site-specific” installations, performances and interventions from current Second Life artists and designers, the ISEA and electronic arts community, and international digital arts and game programs at Universities. Within The New West exhibition, fully populated by the curator's selections, was projected on a large screen in a darkened room.  People could visit the space virtually from wherever they were in the world via their Second Life avatar.  Guest avatars were available  on several computers at the ISEA conference itself for attendees to also visit the thirty plus exhibits.   The large screen display projected the visitors exploration and navigation of the virtual exhibition space. Additionally, performances and interactive selection were scheduled throughout the conference week.
Ludica's goal, besides showcasing the amazing range of artworks being created in virtual worlds, is to extend the ISEA electronic arts festival beyond its geographical location, making it accessible to a wider audience beyond those who can physically attend the exhibition in San Jose.

Sharon Daniel

with Michael Dale, Carlos Trilnick, Cecilia Velasquez Traut, El Envion at Villa Tranquilas and Fundacion Crear Vale la Pena in Buenos Aires

An interactive exhibition of videos created in a series of workshops at cultural centers in two impoverished shantytowns in Buenos Aires and in an ISEA “organization-based” workshop in San Jose. Workshop participants use cheap “disposable” digital video cameras to document their daily lives and a custom-built web application that allows them to edit, tag and publish their video online. The workshop focuses on strategies for collective self-representation using software designed to allow participants to discover relationships and make connections between their personal stories. Thus, communities not traditionally thought of a scholarly or academic, produce and interpret knowledge using media and information technology.

Daniel Jolliffe

Beginning March 1st 2006, the web site www.sanjosevoices.net will provide participants with information on the San Jose Voices project, along with a San Jose phone number to call in order toparticipate. This number will be programmed to only accept calls from San Jose’s 408 area code,making it a readymade reflection of the San Jose community. Anonymous callers will be able to leave one-minute messages on any subject, which are then converted into MP3 files. These voicesare then brought to the public soundscape in two ways.

First, calls are archived and made available anonymously on the www.sanjosevoices.net site,individually or as downloadable podcasts. The site acts as both distributor of information about thework and as a listening post for those on the Internet to experience the diverse voices of San Jose.

Second, during the ISEA 2006 festival, calls will be broadcast anonymously in public spacethrough a large sculptural speaker installed in an appropriate public location such as the Plaza Caesar Chavez. These voices are amplified by a solar-powered, horn-like fiberglass sculpture to a volume level sufficient to dominate the immediate soundscape.

Osman Khan and Omar Khan

Project Assistants: Cesar Cedano, Alice Ko, Drura Parish, Matt Zinski

 SEEN-Fruits of our Labor deals with projected hopes, the American Dream, (in)visibility and the global marketplace. It addresses the current US debate on immigration which, in our view, is blind to people's actual needs, shortsighted in its solutions and myopic in its framing of what it means to be an American. SEEN expands this debate and reflects on the real impacts of globalization on people's sense of self worth. Our project asks members of three communities that make up San Jose's Labor needs -- Silicon Valley's tech workers, undocumented service workers and outsourced call center workers -- one question: What is the fruit of your labor? Their responses are displayed back to the general public on a 4'x8' infrared LED screen whose content is visible only through digital capture devices (cell phone cameras, digital cameras and DVcams etc.) used by the audience.

Kazuhiro JO, Daisuke ISHIDA, Mizuki NOGUCHI and Ken Furudate

The SINE WAVE ORCHESTRA is a participatory sound project. Under the concept that each participant control a sine wave, the public is invited to produce his or her own sine wave. Each participant can use any device that can produce a sine wave. In the performance, there is no conductor and the line between who is the player and who is the audience is deliberately left blurred. Although the intention to present sound to others is absent, people share the same time and space in order to experience sound. In shared time and space, the sine waves interfere with each other and represent a communication among the participants acting as collaborative performers.

James Morgan, Mike Weisert, Ethan Miller, Aaron Siegel, Johnathan Brilliant

50 - 100 san jose locals will be interviewed to collect points of cultural importance (which will be mapped). These initial interviewees will be selected from 3 primary language speaking groups in San Jose (English, Spanish & Vietnamese or possibly Chinese). These people will be chosen to represent a cross section of their language group (age, gender, origin) and surveyed for locations of cultural importance including home, work, faith and social obligation.

Mark Shepard

The Tactical Sound Garden Toolkit [TSG] is an open source software platform for cultivating public "sound gardens" within contemporary cities. It draws on the culture and ethic of urban community gardening to posit a participatory environment where new spatial practices for social interaction within technologically mediated environments can be explored and evaluated. Addressing the impact of mobile audio devices like the iPod, the project examines new gradations of privacy and publicity within contemporary public space.

 

URLs: 

Project Website with Concept Diagrams and Images
http://www.andinc.org/tsg

Ian Gwilt

Taking the form of a paper based, tick-box survey, (or PDA based software) visitors to a New Media gallery or exhibition complete a simple questionnaire as they enjoy the gallery experience. The questionnaire is based on a visual taxonomy for New Media Art (developed by the artists), which attempts to identify typical configurations for New Media Art pieces including technical set up, media content and user experience. The completed questionnaires are collected by the art establishment as a documentation of the show. Throughout the duration of the show the completed forms may also be displayed in the Untitled Media activity area as an ongoing review to the artworks and an insight to the public perception of the event.

James Rouvelle, Joe Reinsel, Steve Bradley

In a public location a simple kiosk labeled URBANtells will be set up. A participant will provide their cell phone and email address to an attendant. In return, they will receive a handheld device (working title: "digi-diviner")and instructions to walk and explore the neighborhood. A minute after they go outside, they will begin to hear a real time mix of sound art and verbal information triggered by their location from a speaker on the diviner. The content will come from interviews and research we will undertake in the months preceding the conference, as well as input uploaded from actual users. The information will address the complex layers of histories that comprise the urban experience and the degrees to which these histories intersect to inform our concept of location and how these understandings influence our behaviors. The verbal content of the audio stream will be a mix of the languages spoken in the neighborhood. Upon returning to the kiosk, participants will receive an interactive google map of their specific walk via email, containing buttons to play sounds and view images and sounds they may have uploaded during their trip. All data will be logged and made available via website for anyone to explore and mix during and after the close of the conference.

Shawn Micallef, Gabe Sawhney, Ana Serrano

At each location where stories are available, a green [murmur] sign with a telephone number and location code marks where stories are available. By using a mobile phone, pedestrians are able to listen to the story of that place while engaging in the physical experience of being there. Some stories suggest that the listener walk around, following a certain path through a place, while others allow a person to wander with both their feet and their gaze. The stories are told by people who know the stories, in their own voices. English translation are offered when the story is told in a non-english language.