PDAs, cell phones, GPS, wireless networks and embedded computers are dramatically changing the face of city life. Use your cell phone to play Pong with the office lights of a multi-story building. Interact with a grass roots surveillance system using 99 red balloons. Capture nocturnal urban wildlife through video traps.

We imagine the city as a place of many layers. Within the streets, architecture, and people of a city you are able to access history, hopes for the future, and even far away places. We find ourselves in communal space, sometimes connected, sometimes alone, and all around us is a city full of both visible and invisible elements. The ZeroOne San Jose Festival brings these ideas home with cell-phone based story-telling, found art objects and sculptures, chances to make instant films about downtown and the things you encounter, rolling parties under a blimp, even night surveillance of nocturnal animals.

More about Interactive City.

Communities can be defined by interest or geography or ethnicity or religion or political affiliation. Many of these self-defined communities are not artists or particularly interested in technology. Yet, many artists are using new technologies in creative ways to enable communities to tell very personal stories, which can become community stories. Digital storytelling and participatory mapping are two examples.

ZeroOne San Jose and ISEA2006 seek to engage diverse communities— of interest, geography, ethnicity, race, belief. In particular, we seek projects that recognize the hybridity of communities and take transverse routes across communities.

Come and immerse yourself in the culture of a new community.

More about Community Domain.

Ages-old trade routes have established economic relationships between the Bay Area and far-flung cities in the Pacific Rim. The cultural context of thse relationships created gaps that still affect how Silicon Valley communities relate to each other. Learn how creativity and technology are combining to bridge not only geographies but cultures.

ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose seek broad participation from around the world. In particular, as a city on the east coast of the Pacific Rim, we will highlight projects from and about and challening the Pacific Rim region.

More about Pacific Rim

New ideas and possibilities never before considered become evident when diverse disciplines intersect. Witness the unexpected creativity that is sparked when architects work with game designers, engineers collaborate with biologists, and psychologists jam with hot air balloon pilots and musicologists.

ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose seek to identify projects that are transdisciplinary in nature and not only produce new projects and experiences but also inflect how a discipline comes to newly understand itself and modify its practices while retaining its core competencies.

More about Transvergence.

While they are not Festival themes, there are a number of exhibitions with a special focus.

Edgy Products is a juried exhibition of work by artists and designers who are manipulating, hacking, subverting, queering, hijacking, recombining, or reformulating the notion of product. We are looking for projects large and small, for gallery installation or public intervention, for showing, selling, or gifting.

C4F3 is the "third place" for the ISEA2006/ZeroOne San Jose Festival, neither symposium, nor a gallery space, but having elements of both. It is the intersection between the San Jose Museum of Art and the outside world. It's the place for visitors to relax, talk, eat, read and contemplate, and experience art without leaving the festival. It's a space where people feel comfortable spending several minutes gathering a group, or several hours discussing what they saw. It's an intersection and a destination.