In August 2006, San Jose will host a pair of events that together will form the largest art festival devoted to so called new media arts in the history of North America. ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge and the ISEA2006 Symposium comprise a weeklong festial and symposium with dozens of exhibitions, workshops, tours, installations, commissioned residencies, and performances by hundreds of the world’s leading practitioners and theorists. They present a unique opportunity to investigate in depth, and in real life, a number of issues critical to curatorial and art practice. How do you balance support of the artist with accessibility to a non-specialist public? Does medium any longer have any meaning? Does the ‘new’ any longer have any significance? How do you maintain criticality while dependent on corporate support? What is the role of the experimental in a public art context? How do you stretch a budget?

These and many other issues will be explored by Festival Director Steve Dietz and a weekly speaker, who may be a Festival artist-in-residence, a producer, a sponsor, an urban economist, a participating institution, a vehement critic.

We didn't have to go far into the new millennium before the art world took some major notice of high technology. In February and March of this year, three important exhibitions dealing with the implications of digital technology just may crack paradigmatic prejudices against plugged-in forms and subjects. The shows, Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace which debuted at the San Francisco Art Institute and then travels, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's 010101: Art in Technological Times, and BitStreams at the Whitney Museum of American Art, each employ a very different look at their subjects. But the fact that they appear simultaneously suggests there's some cultural common ground. What follows is an online dialog with three curators involved with these concurrent exhibitions. [ed., SFAI, Feb. 2001]