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ZeroOne San Jose / ISEA2006 press center
Celebrating art "on the edge" PDF Print E-mail
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Written by Michela Pilo   
Jun 05, 2006 at 02:33 PM
By Jack Fischer
Mercury News

From Aug. 7 through 13, San Jose will play host to the most ambitious effort ever to put the city on the art world map, "ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge."

The festival, which organizers envision as a biennial event, is intended to explore the state of art and technology. The use of technology to make art is still a niche in the larger art world, but it's a fast-growing one, and focusing on it is a logical place for the "Capital of Silicon Valley" to make its mark.

In its inaugural outing, the upstart festival should gain instant street cred with its concurrent hosting of the International Symposium on Electronic Art. ISEA (pronounced "Isaiah") is an established event that draws scholars and artists from around the world to a different city every two years to present academic papers on the topic.

Festival director Steve Dietz, the former curator of new media at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, recently provided this primer on what San Jose can expect when the festival and its artists take over downtown this summer.

(More information about the festival is available at www.01sj.org.)

Who is sponsoring this festival, and how did it come about?

ZeroOne San Jose is being organized by a new group that I run, called ZeroOne, but something like this has been talked about for a long time by a number of prominent institutions in town. Joining us as sponsors are the San Jose Museum of Art, the Tech Museum of Innovation, the city of San Jose, San Jose State University's digital art program and some others.

In addition to Plaza de Cesar Chavez, which will be the center of activities, where else in downtown San Jose will the festival be taking place?

One of the themes of the festival is "The Interactive City," so I like to say the streets of San Jose is where it's happening. But there will be some major nodes. Those include the San Jose Museum of Art and Fairmont Plaza; Parkside Hall behind the Tech Museum; South Hall, which is the big tent structure behind the convention center; City Hall, both in the rotunda and on that plaza, and the old Martin Luther King Library beside the convention center.

How many artists do you expect, and where will they be from?

We had submissions from more than 1,800 artists, and we accepted about 150. They will be coming from all over the world, from New Zealand, from Tokyo, from Singapore, Seoul, Paris, Germany, Rio, Eastern Europe, as well as throughout the United States, North America and including, of course, the Bay Area.

Who are they? Are these well-known artists or emerging artists?

Both. There are lots of major, well-known artists in the digital art world, as well as emerging artists, which are a particular focus for us at this festival.

What about visitors? How many are you expecting?

We think that, conservatively, over the course of the week, 50,000 visitors will look at an exhibition, go to a performance, attend a symposium or wander by at least one of the outdoor exhibits.

When people think about art, they think about painting and sculpture and maybe performance and video. What role does technology have in making art, and is that role growing?

I think it's definitely changing. One of the things I say is that, in a very real way, the pencil is a kind of technology. Technology is anything that enables people to make new kinds of creative expressions. What's changing is that, along with pencils, we now have cell phones, we have PDAs, we have computers, we have video projectors, we have the Internet. So now people are using all of those tools to create new kinds of experiences. That's what's changing.

Can you give us an example or two of how technology is changing the art that gets made?

I think there probably are a few major ways that art is changing because of these new technologies.

One is that it is more participatory. When you look at a painting, you would always participate intellectually with it, but now many artists are making projects where you have to interact with it, do something with it and it responds to you. So in that sense, you are a producer as well a consumer of the artwork.

Another is that the artwork actually responds to you. A painting doesn't normally respond to you. A lot of these artworks will do different things depending on what you do to it.

Finally there is a distance factor because of the network. Things can happen at a great distance from where the viewer is. That's something that doesn't normally happen with sculpture or painting, or even video, for that matter.

You mentioned the theme of "The Interactive City." Are there any other themes to the festival?

The "Interactive City" theme is exciting. It's about technological convergence. As computing becomes more embedded in everyday objects, not just the plain boxes that computers are sold in, as they become more mobile, through networks and cell phones and that sort of thing, and as the network is increasingly available, the artwork can move outside of the gallery.

That's the notion of "The Interactive City." We'll have more than 30 projects on the streets of San Jose that will demonstrate this in some way.

The next theme is "The Pacific Rim." In light of existing economic relations with a lot of these countries, this asks: What are the kinds of cultural relationships we should be looking at and encouraging?

The "Community Domain" theme is about the fact that a lot of artists are using participatory platforms to create ways for people who don't view themselves as artists to make exciting projects. They might be stories about themselves or their communities, or maps that describe how they live -- things that allow them to participate in a direct way even though they are not "artists."

Finally, there is a theme we call "Transvergence." The clearest example of this is the coming together of the biological and the technological to create new possibilities. It's when the human is involved in a direct interaction with computing. So we have people running servers off of their biorhythms and people making their own biological processes that are art projects.

Should visitors to the festival plan to bring any technology of their own, like a laptop or cell phone, to take part in the offerings?

A s technology becomes pervasive, it's something you almost always have with you, like a cell phone. So there are 12 or 15 projects that use the cell phone for you to listen to people's stories about the community you live in, or have a sort of karaoke experience over your cell phone. Other than that, no, you don't need to bring any technology. It's there in the exhibits or we make it available as a checkout for you if you didn't bring along your laptop.

OK, let's do the fun part. Tell us about some of work that will be exhibited.

I'll mention one or two projects at each of the major locations.

The San Jose Museum of Art will have an installation called "Listening Post."It's 200 video screens that "listen" in real time to chat room conversations on the Internet and turn them into a mini-opera of identity. It's mesmerizing. You could look at it as one of the first operas of the 21st century.

Another fun project is called "Pigeon Blog." An artist has put together, on a computer chip, a cell phone, a global positioning device and a pollution sensor. She's putting these chips on the backs of homing pigeons, in special backpacks. And as they fly home, they'll be blogging the level of pollution of the atmosphere in real time and sending it back to a visualization program that maps them geographically at the exhibition space.

In the South Hall exhibition space there will be a project called "Obsession," by a Norwegian artist. It's a four-screen cinema project that responds to people's biological responses to what they are seeing. You sit in a special chair and the movie changes according to your responses to it.

There are lots of little fun projects like "Karaoke Ice," where three artists from New York will be driving around in a step van outfitted as an ice cream and karaoke truck. They'll stop and hand out free ice cream and then ask people to sing their favorite song about ice cream. You know, mixing pop culture and Popsicles.

At City Hall, an artist will be doing a 16-projector projection that lights up the rotunda. He has a database of a million photographs that has a generation program that allows the projectors to segue between different images. You look away, and when you look back, it's all different. I think it will be a real signature piece for the city during the festival. It will be every night from 9:30 to about 1:30 a.m.

We'll also have lots of performances throughout the festival.

ZeroOne San JoseA Global Festival of Art on the Edge

Where: Throughout downtown
When: Aug. 7-13; for a complete schedule, go to http://01sj.org/content/blog section/8/47/
Tickets: A pass to South Hall, the main exhibition hall, is $10; passes for $20 will admit you to South Hall and other venues as well.
Passes are on sale now at http://01 sj.org/content/blogcategory/121/ 130/ and www.artsopolis.com/ zeroone/02.htm. Admission to "Interactive City" projects and certain events, including the opening and closing parties, a gallery crawl and an awards ceremony, will be free.
Last Updated ( Jun 05, 2006 at 04:00 PM )
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