ZEROONE SAN JOSE
ACTIVATES THE LARGEST INTERACTIVE LANDSCAPE EVER

Background Information

This August, ZeroOne San Jose is launching seven days of art and interconnectivity, featuring nearly 200 of the world’s most innovative contemporary artists. The event promises to be the 2006 must-see platform for distinctive and startling contemporary art and new cyber-digital experiences. ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge will take place August 7-13, 2006 in San Jose, California, in conjunction with the acclaimed 13th International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA2006). The festival will be the largest activation of an interactive city-scape and the premier showcase for artists from 28 international cities and 25 cities in the United States.

These artists are the leading explorers of contemporary art pointing to and beyond the edge of current expression as we know it. Using multiple modes of art-making the artists challenge, and cross, the lines between performed and observed, experienced and contributed to, virtual and actual; provoking a re-invention of the vocabulary and lens through which we reference art. Throughout the festival there is discovery and learning; an artist generates images using cosmic sounds to drive shifting shapes and colors on the dome of city hall; pigeons become data-collectors for a blog; rocking chairs and beaded curtains can become music-makers and paper cups and string can still be very effective telephones. The familiar city-scape will become a new terrain where visitors can carry a balloon with a surveillance camera and become a new map-maker in visual terms, watch nocturnal animals captured by video "traps", and participate in a rolling party – dancing to music transmitted from a blimp flying overhead.

The week-long non-profit event will be seamlessly incorporated into downtown San Jose in conjunction with ISEA2006 Symposium, an international conference on electronic art that is held every two years in different locations around the world, and attracts attendees from over 50 countries.

“Major digital media festivals take place regularly around the globe each year, drawing audiences of all ages and backgrounds, and showing them the most innovative contemporary art,”said ZeroOne San Jose’s Festival Director Steve Dietz. “The United States, by contrast, holds few of these events. The ZeroOne San Jose Festival will transform San Jose into the North American epicenter for the intersection of art and digital culture by showcasing the world's most ground-breaking contemporary artists. Therefore, it is wonderful that we are able to launch our inaugural event while hosting the ISEA2006 Symposium in San Jose.”

Eighteen hundred artists submitted projects to an international jury of experts for ZeroOne, and this month, nearly 200 artists were selected as part of the group of curated, commissioned works exploring the themes of Interactive City, reflecting the surprising ways the city can interconnect with immediately apparent, and not so obvious, artworks embedded throughout the city and the festival; Community Domain, providing direct participation for community members in advance of the festival as well as exploring issues such as the environmental factors and natural demographics affecting communal experience; Pacific Rim revealing the new cultural laboratory of experience coming out of Pacific Asia where the economics, politics, and mobility of the last 25 years are changing art and culture; Transvergence, the category for artists to explore where fields converge and transcend; and finally the category of Edgy Products taking a look into the creations of the future stemming from the new uses of art and technology.

These artists will be exhibited at dozens of locations throughout the city, and on backdrops of all types, creating a new urban topography on multi-dimensional levels. Installations and activities take place almost 24/7, offering break-through, compelling experiences through performance events, art exhibitions, keynote lectures, film screenings, concerts, interactive art, games, performative cinema and a downtown night culture.

Bringing ZeroOne San Jose’s Global Festival of Art on the Edge and ISEA2006 to life in Northern California are eight Silicon Valley-based partners and festival affiliates – ZeroOne: The Art and Technology Network, the City of San Jose, the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose State University/CADRE Laboratory for New Media, the San Jose Convention and Visitors Bureau, the Tech Museum of Innovation, Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley and the Lucas Artist Programs of Montalvo Art Center. The festival and symposium have also drawn major sponsors including Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Inc., Comerica Bank, IDEO, Knight Ridder, The Montgomery Hotel, and Adobe, which was the first major corporate Visionary Sponsor of ZeroOne San Jose and is the benefactor for the event’s Emerging Artist Award.

“It is an honor to be a part of this ground-breaking event for the U.S.,”said Michelle Mann, Senior Group Manager of Corporate Affairs and Community Relations at Adobe Systems, Inc. “ZeroOne and the city of San Jose live and breathe innovation and technology, and this event will help convey the fun and creativity that is found in our work each day.”

Following this inaugural year, the ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge will be a biennial event bringing together a new set of themes at each festival. Like the first one in 2006, each event will allow serious and casual art fans to view and interact with some of the most distinctive and astounding contemporary art in the world.

About ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge

ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge is an innovative, ground-breaking biennial art festival in the Silicon Valley designed to show exhibits, performances, workshops, and events that have been created using the newest developments in contemporary art practice. The festival’s themed projects examine and reflect issues and experiences of everyday life. Artistic and revolutionary digital culture elements are woven throughout. A serious art event, ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge provides academics, artists, and technology enthusiasts an inside look at new territories in creative imagination and inventiveness. However, the event is also designed with facets of learning, play, and virtual technology that make it an enjoyable experience for families, students, teens, underground culture enthusiasts, and explorers of new millennium digital culture alike.

The inaugural ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge takes place in 2006 in conjunction with the ISEA2006 Symposium. With a record number of artistic submissions from around the world, festival and symposium attendees have the opportunity to make live contact with the most distinctive, astonishing and startling contemporary art of the new millennium. The festival will take place through-out downtown San Jose from August 7-13, 2006. For more information, visit http://01SJ.org.

About ZeroOne San Jose and the San Jose Museum of Art

As one of the gateway sites for ZeroOne San Jose, the San Jose Museum of Art will transform its new wing galleries into a showcase for digital art. Nine large-screen projections and interactive works by internationally acclaimed LA artist Jennifer Steinkamp await visitors to the Museum’s first floor galleries. Upstairs, Edge Conditions, an exhibition curated by Steve Dietz will highlight some of the most exciting and challenging contemporary art being created today including the crown jewel of this show and the Museum’s newest acquisition, Listening Post, a dynamic piece consisting of 231 mini-LCD screens that constantly cull live information from the Internet. Created in a unique collaboration between artist Ben Rubin and statistician Mark Hansen, Listening Post has been hailed as a seminal piece of electronic art. The San Jose Museum of Art is also host to the festivals grand central meeting point – the C4F3 Interactive Café. For more information, visit www.sjmusart.org

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