The festival, only the second of its kind in the United States, will feature outdoor projection art using San Jose City Hall's dome among other downtown buildings as canvas. The latest innovations in digital and computer-generated art will be on display in storefronts and elsewhere.
"We are going after what's the next, next thing," says Steve Dietz, executive director of ZeroOne, a nonprofit group organizing the festival.
The Boston CyberArts Festival, a biennal affair founded in 1999, drew 21,000 people to its 2005 event that ran April 22 thru May 8, says CyberArts founder George Fifield. While this year's economic impact numbers aren't available, the 2003 festival brought $2.6 million to Boston. About 12 percent of the draw comes from outside the Boston area, Mr. Fifield says.
The San Jose event will be squeezed in between the Taylor Woodward Grand Prix of San Jose and the San Jose Jazz Festival to make for a potentially busy summer, says Daniel Fenton, president and CEO of the San Jose Convention & Visitors Bureau.
The electronic arts festival is part of a larger strategy to get people to travel to San Jose, Mr. Fenton says.
"We are striving to make San Jose a destination city," Mr. Fenton says. "That is all about enticing people to come to San Jose."
San Jose is an idea place to hold an electronic arts festival, Mr. Fifield says.
"There is a strong desire in the (high-tech) profession to see what high-tech can do in an artistic and innovative way," Mr. Fifield says. "You have the audience."
The festival has raised $1.5 million of its estimated $2.2 million budget, including $250,000 from the city of San Jose, Mr. Dietz says.
Sun Microsystems, Intel Corp., the Packard Foundation, Adobe Systems and IDEO have already signed on to sponsor artist works in San Jose. The City of San Jose and San Jose State University's CADRE program are also sponsoring the event.
The 2006 San Jose festival will be tied into the Inter-Society for Electronic Arts convention, which holds an international gathering of new media artists every other year. Past host cities include Helsinki, Paris and Chicago.
ZeroOne, a nonprofit new media arts organization, plans to keep the festival going in San Jose on an every-other-year basis after that with help from city and Silicon Valley business community, Mr. Dietz says.
"This is a way to gain an new image in the community," Mr. Dietz says. "This is a way to say we're is experimental, we're innovative, we are on the cutting edge."
Mineta San Jose Internationl Airport's North Concourse expansion, scheduled to open in 2007, will include $3.8 million in mostly new media artwork. The festival expects to have close ties with the airport art program, which will include many temporary art projects in future years, Mr. Dietz says.
ZeroOne hopes to have up to eight large-scale exhibits, including between three and five night-time events that would incorporate existing buildings or landscapes, probably with some kind of projection art.
"It definitely will have a 'wow' factor," Mr. Dietz says.
While the projection art may be the most notable, there will be many other art principles being used, including digital painting, digital sculpturing, music, even written work displayed on a running screen.
"The whole idea is that it will intersect with so many other disciplines," Mr. Dietz says.
Andrew F. Hamm covers the hospitality industry for the Business Journal. He can be reached at 408-299-1841
