Brief description courtesy Jack Toolin, C5 Research Theorist

C5 Quest for Success was a performance/competition in which 15 artists competed to get a 6-12 week residency at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga. They competed by being passengers in those little GPS enabled cars - they navigated by listening to audio queues coming over the car's speakers which were triggered by GPS coordinates. They had an hour to find some of the 15 destinations about town that we selected for their historical/sociological intrigue. We wrote short, humorous stories about the locations that participants got to listen to. After an hour, contestants were told where the "C5 Limousine" was and they raced off to find it. Once there, they had the opportunity to give a project pitch about what they would do during the residency to 5 curators inside the limo: they had 5 minutes for their pitch if they found five of our locations, 7 minutes if they found 7 locations and so on.

We had three semi-final competitions (Wed, Thur, Fri), and the final on Saturday in which the three semi-finalists had 5 minutes to give their pitch on stage on South 1st St. before a large crowd. After their pitches, the curators had a few minutes to choose the winner. The semi-finalists were Joseph Delappe, Julian Bleeker, and Liz Rossof. Liz was the winner.

So the project was a multi-layered use of business marketing, game showmanship, curatorial networking, GPS suburban gaming, and pop art.