Akira Hasegawa

D-K ( D i g i t a l - K a k e j i k u )

Concept

D-K (Digital Kakejiku), which in English can be translated as " a moving Digital-Hanging Scroll", arises in one's mind, specifically relative to what one views. It is the combination of sensory perception and subconscious awareness. The changing scenery of the sunset, the "space" between haiku lines, the "space" between sounds, and the "space" between times - none are tangible, but all are part of experiencing "the moment". When experiencing D-K, the things that you see and feel all come from you. If they didn't exist in you, you would not be able to perceive them in the first place.

At a glance, D-K seems to consist of the visual elements seen on paintings. However, this is a completely new art form that uses a different communication style from other art forms which utilize the story telling approach. D-K is a sensitizing instrument that is generated by discontinuous data, and that makes us aware of the time, image, and the idea of a "living present".

This live picture is not continuous and has no meaning in itself.

Jenny Marketou, Katie Salen

99 Red Balloons: A game about flying perspectives Inspired by A Midsummer Nights Dream and the 80s pop song 99 Red (Luft)Balloons by the German singer Nena.

Location: Headquarters and lounge of The Tech Museum for Innovation;
Street game played at Cesar Chavez Plaza
Dates: ZeroOne San Jose: A Festival of Art on the Edge
ISEA2006, August 7 through 13, 2006

Play Sessions:

Monday, August 7, 2:00 to 3:00 pm Tuesday, August 8, 5:00 to 6:00 pm Wednesday, August 9, 1:00 to 2:00 pm and 5:00 to 6:00 pm Friday, August 11, 1:00 to 2:00 pm and 4:00 to 5:00 pm Saturday August 12, 1:00 to 2:00 pm, 2:00 to 3:00 pm, and 5:00 to 6:00 pm

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.

Concrescence + Game Machine + (^3)

Douglas Edric Stanley

Through various experiments, installations, and online software, the abstractmachine project asks the question of how we as artists and users can create, manipulate, and ultimately enact digital algorithms. If the specificity of the computer comes not only from it's digital aspect, but even more so from it's algorithmic aspect, how does this hyperprogrammable nature transform the media we manipulate - i.e. the images and sounds we design using these machines? Amongst the many machines available within the abstractmachine project, two creation platforms will be presented to illustrate our response to these questions: one dedicated to the creation and manipulation of algorithmic cinema, the other designed around algorithmic musical composition.

Luther Thie and Eyal Fried

Acclair is a security and neuromarketing service that points to a new form of discrimination: Acclairism, a discrimination based on the individual’s bio-data and membership in an “acclaired” elite. Through Acclair, a company providing brain-testing services as part of an exclusive security clearance for air-travelers, we explore a situation wherein people freely accept a highly invasive, highly authoritative manipulation in return for financial, tangible rewards and an upgraded social status. We illustrate the financial and social benefits of such a system through its Neurocapital and Amnesty programs that offer alternatives to racial profiling.

Interactive installation: 6 cabin window encased LCD monitors mounted on both sides of the container

Altitude Zero (2006) project contemplates current global cultural conditions. The interaction between dominant cultural forms and marginal cultures precipitates the emergence of fragmented pockets of variant cultural forms. Often disparaged and in danger of extinction, these edgy cultures are finding their ways for manifestation and representation.

The installation consists of 6 monitors camouflaged as cabin windows. The video images show ocean waters, drifting materials such as abandoned and polluted objects, symbolizing detachment and alienation from mainstream cultural domains. The objects drift between sea bottom and sea level creating a sense of movement and instability. The drifting materials remind us of the remanents of different cultures and times. Sometimes they clash against the windows, and float away at other times, resonating between the viewers and the objects. Video images are activated according to the audience presence and movement via sensors.

Marc Böhlen

Amy and Klara have similar interests. They both read Cosmopolitan and Salon.com, for example. But they do not get along. Not at all. Maybe Klara's thick German accent bothers Amy. And neither of them particularly likes the color pink. Unfortunately for Amy and Klara, they live on the same block and have pink houses! And when they become agitated they tend to fall into mutual accusations and even rants. Yes, it can get rather nasty at times. Best then just to leave them be and to stay clear of the hissy fits. Else you risk being drawn into the fighting.
 

Angela Main, Caroline McCaw

Exhibition at the Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose:

Monday, August 7th - Friday, August 11th; 10:00 A.M. until 7:00 P.M.
(Please note that Children's Discovery Museum will NOT be participating in the ZeroOne San Jose 'Opening Night Crawl' event on Tuesday, August 8th, but will stay open that evening until 7:00 P.M.)
Saturday, August 12th; 10:00 A.M. until 10:00 P.M. (extended hours)
Sunday, August 13th; 12:00 P.M. until 7:00 P.M.

From Tinguely’s auto-destructive art assemblages to Philip K Dick/Ridley Scott’s (Blade Runner) animal replicants, artists question what is ‘made’. Animals have a place in the history of performance, both tamed and trained, and in their role as placeholders of what it is to be ‘natural’. Donna Haraway positions our cyborg selves as creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. It is in this pantheon of human, animal and machine that animalia positions us.

Michelle Glaser, Victor Gentile, Patrizia Washer, Paul Watt, and Stewart Washer

Apocrypha is a satirical work that posits a colony of prehistorical archaebacteria as an “oracle” able to divine answers to questions posed by “disciples” who contact the archaebacteria by web and on site access. A receipt is issued upon completion of the transaction, providing physical evidence of the deific exchange and a cryptic prophecy for disciples to ponder.

The stimuli of text or voice message from visitors to the exhibition via computer input elicits a chemical response from a colony of archaebacteria. This response is translated into text that the supplicant (or gallery visitor) is able to interpret and apply to everyday life. The archaebacteria response is actually a physical alteration that can be read as one of a series of numbers. These numbers are mapped using code-breaking principles of repetition and predicability onto corresponding lines of an ancient text to create an apparently meaningful response to the problem posed. The text utilised as the source of wisdom is the Apocrypha (an ancient collection of sacred texts excluded from the canonised version of the Bible). Originally, apocryphal writing was considered to be a text of sacred origin, designated to be hidden until the due time of its revelation.

Anna Munster and Andrew Murphie

How do new thoughts form through distributed media? What are the collective dynamics through which these thoughts assemble? This presentation will use a combination of dynamic software from wikis through mapping to vj software to explore the processes through which new concepts emerge transvergently from collective practice. In assembling the texts and visualizations in this presentation, we do not wish to finish the process of collaborative thought production but rather shift it into another phase – to construct open machines that nurture collaborative authoring, technozoosemiotic processes, technozoomorphic forms and transvergent networks.

BABY LOVE is a National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts commission with support from Council for Culture Affairs, Taiwan and Taipei Cultural Center,TECO in New York in collaboration with SQV Design International Tatung University, Mechanical Engineering departmen eLife Techonology Innovation Center Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris.

BABY LOVE is the second installment of Shu Lea Cheang's Locker Baby Project which also includes BABY PLAY (presented at NTT[ICC], Tokyo in 2001) and BABY WORK (to be realized). Referring to Ryu Murakami's noted novel Coin Locker Babies (1980), the updated locker babies are borne out of Tokyo coin lockers by DPT (DollyPolly Transgency) with genes extracted from deep-sea pearls. The biobot locker babies are the clone generation of our sci-fi fantasia reality, entrusted to receive, store, transmit and negotiate human memory and emotions. BABY LOVE situates human and its baby clones in a perpetual spin of fairground teacup ride. Love songs uploaded by public via the web and USB interface are coded as ME (memory and emotion) data for the clone babies. By taking a teacup ride with the babies, the ME data are retrieved, jumbled and eventually crashed.

Shawn Bailey, Oron Catts, Jennifer Willet and Ionat Zurr

BIOTEKNICA: Laboratory Remix (with Teratological Prototypes in Collaboration with Tissue Culture & Art Project) is a complex installation, including functional laboratory equipment, a free standing tent, and a video work, all in support of a single tissue culture sculpture - a Teratological Prototype. Developed with Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, the prototype consists of a P4HP bioabsorbable polymer scaffold sculpted in the form of a teratoma, and seeded with mammalian cells - growing live in the gallery environment. This work mobilizes the notion of remixing the laboratory environment as a critical turn in creating an interface between non-specialists - and ‘real’ and mediated representations of the laboratory.

Exploring Relational Space

Mark Pesce, John Tonkin

Cities are not merely collections of buildings; they are the living, breathing, teeming product of the human bodies who inhabit them. A city razed to the ground may recover, but a city emptied of people is dead. Yet emphasis is always given to the locative nature of a city - the neighborhood you live in, the street, the floor, the unit - an assertion of a Cartesian primacy which ignores the more profound natural relationships of the city: the coming together and parting of human beings living social lives. Cities are their people; souls are the bricks from which a city is constructed.

BlueStates: Exploring Relational Space is an attempt to reverse the figure and ground of the city, ignoring its visible nature as a locative, Cartesian space, creating, instead, a view of the city purely as a social space. In this work, the trope of absolute location is abandoned in favor of the idea of relational proximity. BlueStates does not show you where you have been, but rather, it shows you who you have been with - a more perfect metric for the inner life of the city.

Carlos Castellanos

BodyDaemon is a bio-responsive Internet server. Readings taken from a participants physical states, as measured by custom biofeedback sensors, are used to power and configure a fully-functional Internet server. For example, more or fewer socket connections are made available based on heart rate, changes in galvanic skin response (GSR) can abruptly close sockets, and muscle movements (EMG) can send data to the client. Other feature's such as logging can be turned on or off depending on a combination of factors.

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?”

Shosei Oishi, Masayuki Akamatsu, Kazuki Saita, and Katsuhiko Harada

The Breadboard Band is a performing band that uses breadboards made of freely constructed electronic circuits to play music. We produce audio and visual expression through the most minimal, fundamental elements in the form of showing the electronic components of an instrument while directly touching and forming the electronic circuit by hand. The electric signals released from hand-made electronic circuits releases extremely rough and ferocious wave patterns. This performance is based on improvisational interplay, and we pull powerful music into shape through each member's operation, while discovering new sounds by hand.

Ambient Robotany

Jill Coffin and John Taylor

Breeze is an ambient robot inhabiting the body of a willow tree. Unlike us, Breeze can visually sense and react through 360 degrees, allowing her to reach out to you and others wherever you are near.

The C5 Quest for Success is an urban game about testing the analysis, management, and decision skills necessary for success in Silicon Valley. The goal of the game is locate the C5 Corporation Mobile Office through a process of navigating through pre-defined geo-cached sites where location clues are revealed. On each of three evenings the winner has an opportunity to pitch their proposal to an individual who can change their destiny and provide a golden opportunity: an Artist Residency at the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Program at the Montalvo Arts Center

Germaine Koh

In an accessible public place sits a telephone resembling those used to make automatic calls to service centres. Instead of a keypad the phone has an LCD that informs the viewer that when he picks up the receiver he will be connected with a participant. Each time the handset is lifted, the phone randomly dials from its database the telephone number of one of the number of project participants who have agreed to receive calls from and have conversations with strangers at all hours of the day. These volunteer participants, from a wide variety of backgrounds and communities, will have been solicited through a variety of local media and means. The interactions are not recorded or otherwise determined in any way.

Nhan Duc Nguyen

I hope to collect and compare anecdotes of Mrs. Ba from the Vietnamese diaspora in Vancouver and San Jose and transcribe these oral tales to one cohesive history in Vietnamese and English. This record will be a part of the shrines/installations to be installed in Vietnamese noodle restaurants in San Jose.

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

Judith Donath, Karrie G. Karahalios

Chit Chat Club brings the online visitors into the public physical space of the cafe. It does this by both providing them with a view of the cafe and by giving them a physical presence with it.

Douglas Bagnall

To save people time in the search for interesting clouds, a computer watches the sky all day, every day. Viewers can interact with the computer via the Internet. It establishes individual relationships with each person, developing an idea of the kinds of clouds they like. When they return to the site they are shown the clouds that have passed that would have been their favourites. Their reactions help refine the computer's idea of their taste. It will also show the greatest clouds by popular opinion.

The computer and camera will be in Wellington, New Zealand.

Heidi Kumao and Chipp Jansen

CNNplusplus presents a technologically sabotaged newscast through subtle, automated media juxtaposition and replacement. The newscaster (video and audio) stays positioned solidly in the right corner of the screen as always, while our News Enhancement Program selectively replaces the other 2 regions of the screen. Independent news headlines replace weather, sports, stocks, and mainstream headlines on the bottom of the screen, while the upper left image is replaced with the results of a keyword-triggered Google Image Search. With the appearance and sound of a “normal” broadcast, CNNplusplus can entertain and educate the ordinary viewer.

Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen

Produced in residence at Sally and Don Lucas Artists Programs, Montalvo Arts Center.

City-dwellers would never be able to get rid of their fellow urban inhabitants even if they wanted to, as anyone who has ever seen weeds push up through a crack in the tarmac will know.
--Herbert Girardet, The Gaia Atlas of Cities. New directions for sustainable urban living

Airports are awe-inspiring places: concentrated, tangible examples of the wider notion of "technology," the application of scientific knowledge for practical purpose; to travel from point A to point B. But while we are in awe of them, dumbstruck at the noise and spectacle of a jetliner taking off or the dizzying complexity of an air traffic radar screen, scratch beneath the surface of these massive man-made structures and you start to find a much more intimate, human-scale landscape. A family of burrowing owls, for instance, that live between parallel runways, unfazed by landing aircraft, or the weekly baggage handlers' barbeque--the grill positioned just out of sight of the trapped, air-conditioned passengers waiting in the departure lounges.

DataNature is a multi-site electronic artwork that reveals and celebrates the strange, secret beauty and interconnectedness of seemingly disparate natural and man-made aspects of Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport and its environs.

MarkDavid Hosale and John Thompson

The DEFENDEX-ESPGX is an interactive art object that combines real-time audio and video synthesis processing with physical interaction. The DEFENDEX-ESPGX is designed to simulate the look and feel of 1950’s technology. The content draws on nostalgic reference to bring about implied comparisons between the fearful culture of the Cold War and the culture of fear associated with the current War on Terror.

Noam Toran

Desire Management is a collection of five short films about the use of objects as vehicles for dissident behaviour. In the film, the domestic space is defined as the last private frontier, a place where bespoke appliances provide unorthodox experiences for alienated people: An airline hostess with a unique relationship to turbulence, an elderly man who enjoys being vacuumed, a couple who engage in baseball driven fantasies, a man who is forced by his partner to cry into a strange device. Based on real testimonials, the film presents the inherent need for self-expression in the face of socially imposed conformity.

Slide projection and one large pile of shredded photographs scattered on the floor
Part of Container Culture (Beijing)
Curated by Zhang Ga

Xing DanWen seeks to sketch a visual representation of modernity in the 21st century. She carefully chooses direct and intimate moments to portray the objects that she finds. Since the summer of 2002, she has traveled several times to South China's Guangdong Province, one of the most developed areas in the country. Along the coast, more than 100,000 people from Guangdong and migrant workers from Western China make their living by recycling piles of computer and electronic trash, operating in rough environment and social conditions. This huge amount of e-trash is shipped from industrialized countries - Japan, South Korea and mostly from the United States, and dumped here.

We are in an information and communication era, and rely extensively on these high-tech facilities for our modern life. These machines become deeply rooted in our daily activities, replacing the old ways of doing things. Millions of newly purchased products follow on millions of trashed ones. Confronted with vast piles of dead and deconstructed machines, the overwhelming number of cords, wires, chips and parts, with the clear indication of the company logos, model numbers and even individual employees, This deeply shocked Xing Danwen

Modernization and globalization shape urban development. In China, she has experienced and witnessed the changes that have taken place under the influence of Western modernity. These changes have contributed to a strong and powerful push for development in China, but at the same time they have led to major environmental problems and social inequality in remote corners of China.

Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Katherine Moriwaki

DIY Urban Challenge is a workshop in which participants "hack" the streets of San Jose, creating objects which interject themselves into the urban fabric, to stimulate new experiences of the city. During a two day workshop participants will traverse San Jose detailing points of intersection and friction, and will use recycled and cast-off materials as well as wireless technologies to develop objects which can be installed within the cityscape. Some of the questions we will ask with this workshop, will center on urban awareness and possible alternative "services" which could result in increased interactions between people in the city.

URLs

http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com
Sign up for DIY Urban Challenge Workshop at ISEA2006

Interactive installation, 5 glass bottles, mp3 players/recorders, speakers and microphones, processors, batteries
Part of the exhibition Container Culture (Beijing)
Curated by Zhang Ga

In the middle ages, drift bottles were one of the few means for sailors to communicate with others in the open seas. Notes / messages sealed in the bottles often carried important information or heartfelt blessings. It would be a great surprise for a mediaeval sailor to find a drift bottle likely from some unknown destinations. Mysterious, incidental, and expectant, drift bottle can be seen as a symbol of maritime cross-culture exchange.

Today, cell phone, internet and television are rapidly changing our way of communication. Anyone could easily connect with others by simply punching some buttons. High technology is a double-edged sword not only facilitating our daily communication but also eliminating the joy of intimacy and surprise once enjoyed by many.

D. Jean Hester, Brian House, Kanarinka, Sarah Pace, Savic Rasovic, Christina Ray, Morgan Schwartz, Lee Walton

The Drift Relay is a collaborative psychogeographic experience in the form of a 24 hour relay-style exploration of San Jose. Participants ["Drifters"] will drift through new and familiar city spaces with a Glowlab coach and a mobile kit of recording tools, contributing to a collective journey of endurance and discovery. Project headquarters at ISEA will continually broadcast the remote group's location and status. Data and artifacts will be returned to the headquarters for processing and display throughout the duration of the Drift Relay. Taking the phrase "the city that never sleeps" to heart, together we'll locate the joys and difficulties of documenting ephemeral urban experience.

Osman Khan and John Houck

enCODe is a projection of virtual fish on the café’s table tops. Using machine vision algorithms the fish avoid objects on the table (including hands and arms). The fish “swim” between projections via a network of networked computers. Each fish s also able to carry a message which is uploaded by visitors from a website and is released into the virtual pond when fish are trapped. Thus the project becomes both a fun interaction that takes advantage of natural activity over tabletops and a communal bulletin board recording thoughts and reflections occurring during the event.

Zita Joyce

Ethermapping explores the electromagnetic dimensions of the landscape - the flow of radio waves forming the ‘radio atmosphere’ within which we live. As human and economic life concentrates in cities, so do radio waves, intensifying in areas of economic activity.

Natalie Jeremijenko

Feral robotics is an open source robotics project designed to enable distributed and co-located teams of lay participants to 'upgrade' low-end commercially available toys with chemical sensing equipment, additional microprocessor hardware to enable environmental data collection and coordinated flock (or pack) behavior. The adapted robots 'sniff out' environmental toxins, that is, they follow concentration gradients of toxins sensed by their dog's noses. Not dissimilar to popular robot wars events, this project instead involves the release of 'packs' of feral robotic dogs that are designed and modified for release on sites of community interest, including public parks, school grounds and industrial sites. This creates mediagenic events, coverage, and discussion on contaminants in the local environments.

Marc Tuters, Luke Moloney, Adrian Sinclair

A collaboration between Luke Moloney, Marc Tuters and Adrian Sinclair, Fête Mobile is an experimental autonomous media platform that centers around a robotic blimp equipped with video-capture and wireless capabilities for remote sensing the landscape from above and interacting with the public below. Carried by a twenty foot blimp, Fête Mobile is an autonomously controlled vehicle that, nevertheless, offers its audience limited access to influence its trajectory as well as its optics through an online interface. As Fête Mobile flies through the streets it also creates a wireless bubble of social activity accessible to those within its immediate proximity. The audience are invited to connect to the blimp's on-board wireless micro-computer through their laptop computers in order to exchange files with the blimp's mobile archive. This allows Fête Mobile to function as a kind of autonomous "sneaker network", physically out of reach of the authorities.

Douglas Bagnall

The eyes of the robot collect up snippets of video and transmit them to the body when the buses they are on come within range of an appropriate wifi node.

The body sits in an art gallery. On the wall is a projection of its stream-of-consciousness editing, and on a separate screen are finished films which it completes nightly. Video received from the eyes is split into individual frames, which are analysed and stored. The output of the robot is made from arrangements frames and false memories that the robot forms from its favourite images.

Tiffany Sum and Jonathan Minard

A video character is projected on the bright white wall in an isolated room. Holding a “finger-gun”, she is staring at the audience. Through visual computerization, her finger-gun will follow the motion of the audience in response to their spatial occupation inside the room. The size of the video character will change in relations to the proximity between the audience and the character: the closer the distance between them, the bigger the video character. If the audience stays completely still for more than 7 seconds, she will “shoot” at them, as well as herself in the virtual space. Nobody is hurt in the end but herself. The magic of montage becomes a tragic representation through visual and audio effects.

Diego Diaz and Clara Boj Tovar

with Liu Wei, Duy Nguyen and Adrian Cheok (IERC, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore)

Free Network Visible Network is an urban intervention project that uses the possibilities of the new technologies to create new landscapes in the public space by means of the visualization of the data that flow between digital networks. It changes our perception of the world with the “invisible meanings” that are around us.

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.

Rania Ho

Ho Fatso is an interactive installation consisting of inflatable fat suits and a wrestling ring controlled by motion sensors. Made of rip-stop nylon, powerful leaf blowers and motion detectors, audience members are encouraged to don the fat suits, enter the ring and wrestle each other. Any action in the vicinity of the installation initiates the inflation of the suits and the wrestling ring. If there is no one in the ring, the blowers stop and the installation slowly deflates. Each of the suits are linked to the blowers through and intricate umbilical cord-like system. 

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/ 

Christiane Robbins

I-5_Passing Project, ©Robbins, Jetztzeit Studios, 2001-08.

We live in the beginning of a “new” century in which the public sphere in California has shrunk, been compressed, and themed to the point of annihilation of any fixed point of authenticity. The current institutionalized regional development of the I-5 Freeway - the connective tissue between Los Angeles and San Francisco - is narrowing the bandwidth of cultural programming, social interaction and environmental concerns to that of lifestyle, market dynamics and branding. The next paradigm of social space, just now emerging, is a broadened spectrum ranging from the banal to the ecstatic – from contested visions of suburban utopia to suburban dystopia.

We find ourselves now living in a “flat-space” where 20th century notions of living have taken on wholly different and contested meanings. Whereas “flat space” once evinced a topographical description of the central valley, it now references an intensified agglomeration of big box stores, highway infrastructure and parking lots in which space is corporate, Tyvek wrapped and hyperefficient.

Ian Clothier

The Leistavian FBI will create an online survey form which allows for the input of multiple cultural identifications. Those that register one main cultural identity will become a control group, while those that register two or more cultural identifications, in particular those with at least one affiliation to a Pacific Rim nation, will be the target group. The form also collects information on attitudes to cultural identification issues. The data will be presented online as statistical summaries, in the installation area as large scale vinyl imagery (non-rectangular, adhered directly to wall, where image component size registers survey responses), and as a projected animation which registers change in survey responses.

Artists

Kate Armstrong, Bobbi Kozinuk, M. Simon Levin, Laurie Long, Leonard Paul, Manual Pina, Jean Routhier

Curator

Alice Ming Wai Jim.

IN[ ]EX, an interactive, city-wide collaborative media art project involving a shipping container and thousand of smaller modules. IN[ ]EX is a distributed audio sculpture in which thousands of wooden blocks with embedded technology are released into the city to engage the public as active agents. IN[ ]EX invites audience activity, movement and interaction, as well as engages with the larger urban context as the blocks are dispersed throughout the city and culture in general.

Nancy Nowacek, Katie Salen, Marina Zurkow

Karaoke Ice is a commissioned residency project by ZeroOne San Jose, San Jose State University, and the The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Programs at the Montalvo Arts Center.

Karaoke Ice is a delicious pop culture mash-up, an ice cream truck-turned-mobilekaraoke-unit, deployed to unite people in a collective quest to transform the streets of San Jose into a space of community interaction. Participants karaoke for an audience while sitting in the transformed front cab of the vehicle, and use a customized karaoke engine to select, sing, and record a song for later broadcast, as the truck makes it way to a variety of festival locations. Free frozen treats lure prospective performers to participate, distributed by Remedios the Squirrel Cub, who drives the truck and choreographs enigmatic rituals of his own to the tunes emanating from the citizen performers. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Superstition. Heart of Glass. The streets of San Jose transformed through flavor and song.

Olga Kisseleva

Artist comes to San-Jose with her assistant-scientist her assistant-graffer. They study the density and the quality of electromagnetic fields. They meet local graffers and they explain them the landstream project. Together the team realizes an in-city fresco with the real time field’s capturing.

Ami Wolf, Jin-Yo Mok

The Light Bead Curtain is a visceral interactive installation. Taking the form of a beaded curtain, each bead, upon being touched, illuminates and adds a unique sound to an evolving soundscape. Simply by touching the beads the installation aims to affect the senses; to touch a person playful sense and amuse their sense of wonder.

Thomson & Craighead

Light from Tomorrow centres on an expedition to The Kingdom of Tonga, where tomorrow’s outdoor light-readings are broadcast in close to real time through The International Dateline to today; specifically to a lightbox installed in the San Jose Museum of Art in California as part of the group exhibition Edge Conditions. The lightbox in San Jose responds to fluctuations and broader changes in outdoor light conditions in Nuku'alofa offering a tangible connection to the future, a window quite literally onto tomorrow.

Jeff Mann and Michelle Teran

LiveForm:Telekinetics creates experiences in transgeographic temporary performance zones, centred around wireless Internet access points that are now ubiquitous in the urban landscape. No longer tied to a terminal screen and keyboard, nomadic groups pack mobile feasts of sensors, antennas, robotics, food, and music, and head out on the town. Networked telepresence picnic parties unfold in vacant lots, roadsides, cafés, alleyways, bars, and hotel lobbies - wherever bandwidth is plentiful and security guards scarce. The events are not meant as entertainment for an audience, but as experimental and collaborative acts of creativity, research and development of new social forms, and interventions in public space.

Drew Hemment, Mika Raento, John Evans, Theo Humphries

Loca: Set To Discoverable is an artist-led interdisciplinary project on mobile media and surveillance.

A person walking through the city centre hears a beep on their phone and glances at the screen. Instead of an SMS alert they see a message reading:

"We are currently experiencing difficulties monitoring your position: please wave you network device in the air."

Loca: Set To Discoverable sets out to expose the disconnect between people and the trail of digital identities they leave behind. Loca opens up a conversation with passers by, responding to urban semantics, the social meanings of particular places:

"You walked past a flower shop and spent 30 minutes in the park, are you in love?"

etoy.ZAI, etoy.GRAMAZIO, etoy.MONOROM, etoy.HAEFLIGER, etoy.MARCOS, etoy.KUBLI, etoy.NEWTRON, etoy.VINCENT, etoy.SILVAN, etoy.MIR, etoy.STAMBERGER, etoy.ROCK, etoy.ROCKET, etoy.THOMMY, etoy.ZAK, etoy.MAX

MISSION ETERNITY is an information technology driven cult of the dead.

etoy digitally sends TEST PILOTS across the ultimate boundary to investigate the afterlife, the most virtual of all worlds. The short-term plan (2006-2016) is to install an interactive city of the living and the dead that reconfigures the way information society deals with memory (conservation/loss), time (future/presence/past) and death.

Moveable Types and Instant Spaces

Artists: Taeyoon Choi, Tellef Tellefson and Cheon Pyo Lee

Moveable Types and Instant Spaces explores how temporary types of architecture can define an experience, and alternatively how social or personal actions and objects can change the perception of a space Lightweight materials are used, suggesting to the viewer that architecture is a concept rather than a reality and that it has less importance than that which it contains. “Pod types” are lightweight architectures that play off of existing sites. They human in scale and can be placed temporarily within the landscape. Working off the idea of wearable architecture, these small types strive to create personal space in the public realm. Each pod type derives its function and a minimum of form from the objects it contains, and in exchange the function of the objects is altered by the architecture.

Crispin Jones

Mr Jones Watches is a series of seven wristwatches which seek to question the social currency of the watch and also propose some alternatives to the conventional representation of time. They were all produced as one-off working timepieces.

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.

Rikayo Horimizu, Kenneth Haller, Kentaro Okuda, Michael Schneider

"Rock My Chair" is an interactive installation consisting of two sets of four rocking chairs. The chairs emit different parts of a melody according to their being rocked. People sitting near each other are able to create different harmonies and rhythms encouraging communication and play.

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.

Colin Ives

Nocturne is an interactive media installation focusing on animals such as opossums, gophers and the endangered kit fox that have found successful niches within the urban and suburban landscape. Footage of these animals is captured using video live traps and surveillance equipment. In the gallery, each captured video plays on a LCD screen or projection scaled to the creature's actual size. The video responds to the presence and actions of the human viewers visiting the gallery, becoming a mediated exchange between co-inhabitants of urban spaces. The project's intention is not only to acknowledge the individual lives of the animals represented, but also to forward the idea that they have an important presence in our contemporary city space—a presence that insists that the boundary between man-made and natural remains permeable.

Pia Tikka, Rasmus Vuori, Joonas Juutilainen

Obsession is an attempt to describe, how the traumatic acts of violence not only affect the individual, but how her family and life-environment are also violated. The narrative level of Obsession discusses subject matter of "sex and violence" in our representational culture. Inside the four walls of a self-service launderette, young Emmi and an entrant stranger, Henrik, measure embodied distance. From their interaction, a loaded emotional situation emerges. The computational core of Obsession is a narrative engine, based on content metadata. Inspired by the Russian film theorist Sergei Eisenstein, the”montage-machine” of Obsession maps spectators’ psycho-physiological states to cinematic elements.

Antoni Muntadas

Produced in residence at Sally and Don Lucas Artists Programs, Montalvo Arts Center.