Opening remarks for public launch of
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
Creativy Matters Summit
Thursday, October 6, 2005 N.B. This is a fictional account. Some parts will be true.--sd
I get asked two questions all the time: What is digital art? What will the actual experience of ZeroOne San Jose be like? These are not unreasonable questions, of course. Tomorrow, during Creativity Matters, I will talk about digital art, but right now, I'd like to take about 9 minutes to imagine one scenario for San Jose August 7-13, 2006.
I'm going to pretend that I am a 40-something male, who is pretty eclectic in his interests but by no means a techie or someone who only wears black. Most importantly, however, I live in San Francisco. You know. The kind of person who might drive south of the airport for a business meeting but has seldom or never been out to eat or to see a play or to visit a museum in San Jose. We'll call our fictional character . . . Gavin.
Well it just so happens that some of Gavin's best friends live in Silicon Valley, and they have been talking to him about some fair or something called ZeroOne San Jose, but he he's not sure what it's all about. What do zeros and ones have to do with champ cars?
Even two of Gavin's closest friends - graduate school classmates who now live in Helsinki and Mumbai - are both, for some unfathomable reason, flying into San Jose the week of August 7-13. He decides to check it out.
Heeding our President's call for conservation, Gavin decides to take Cal Train down to San Jose and catch up on some reading.
Over the years, he has learned to block even the most obnoxious cell phone users, but for some reason he can't concentrate today. Some strange noise. He gets up and walks down the aisle and there sitting on one of the window tables is a computer display that appears to be a real time track of the train's progress down the peninsula and coming out the speakers is an aural landscape - something his friends who wear black might say, he realizes - which seems to vary in some barely perceptible way according to the car traffic he can see through the window. It is kind of catchy, like one of those Volkswagon commercials. There is a label that says something ZeroOne San Jose, but he doesn't have time to read it because the train is about to arrive.
At the train station, someone in a biker jacket with flashing LEDs that spell out ZeroOne San Jose directs him across the street to the light rail stop. She must be hot in August, he thinks, but it's a pretty cool jacket. He gets on the light rail - for free - and there is another one of those labels that says ZeroOne San Jose.
This time, it says that an artist named John Klima worked with VTA regulars to record their personal stories about the route he is going on. All he has to do is use his cell phone to hear some homegrown history about San Jose. One woman tells a funny story about the escalators in the old Martin Luther King Jr. Library as the train is passing it, but he is distracted by the new-looking electronic sign in front of the Convention Center.
It looks sort of like decorative news feeds that instead of marching mechanically across the screen are meandering and curling around as if wafted on some kind of hertzian breeze. He can barely make one out: "Sun reports record profits." Something very exciting seems to be going on in Silicon Valley.
Gavin gets off the train outside the Hyatt St. Claire and walks toward the Fairmont, where he has agreed to meet his friends. He sees a bunch of 99 red balloons floating above Cesar Chavez Plaza but doesn't really pay any attention to them. He arrives at the Passeo San Antonio a bit early and looking around he sees an encampment of odd looking structures scattered throughout Cesar Chavez, surround by 9 or 10 standard shipping containers into which hordes of people are wandering in and around. Staring at this scene - it doesn't look anything like the Christmas Village he remembers once seeing - he practically bumps into a white pole with a revolving radar on top - at least that's what it looks like.
What the hell is going on? Finally, Gavin notices on the pole a sign that says call 1 800 ZeroOne and punch 7639# at the prompt. After singing trains, storytelling light rail, decorative news feeds, 99 red balloons, shipping containers that appear to be nowhere near port, and a radar pole in the middle of Passeo San Antonio - not to mention the go car that just zoomed by - Gavin is ready to give it a shot. He calls in.
Welcome to ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge.
The voice is synthetic but plausibly human. It continues.
ZeroOne San Jose is a week long festival of art in the heart of Silicon Valley that is about creative responses to the technologies that are all around us, transforming our cities, our work, and our lives. During the week of ZeroOne San Jose, from August 7-13, over 200 artists will present new work at the intersection of art and technology in 8 exhibitions throughout San Jose. There will be over 50 performances from the bandstand in Cesar Chavez park to the renovated California Theater to the the parking lot behind the Convention Center. The ISEA2006 Symposium, held in conjunction with ZeroOne San Jose, brings 3,000 artists and thinkers from more than 50 countries around the world to present their work and discuss the future.
To find out more about any particular aspect of ZeroOne San Jose, just enter a 4 digit code followed by the pound sign. To subscribe to breaking news about the Festival, SMS *01.
This is cool, Gavin thinks. He looks at the ticket dispensing radar pole in front of him and enters 7639#.
DataNature is a project by British artists Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen, resulting from a commissioned residency sponsored by ZeroOne San Jose and the City of San Jose department of Public Art at the Norman Y. Mineta San Jose International Airport.
DataNature is a multi-site electronic artwork that reveals the strange, secret beauty and interconnectedness of seemingly disparate natural and artificial aspects of the airport and the city at large. The public is invited to push a button on the "DataNature" ticket machine to receive a souvenir ticket. Each ticket will be dynamically and uniquely created with data generated by the Airport's day-to-day workings and data from strategically placed sensor interventions throughout the San Jose to create thought-provoking visual juxtapositions.
Just then there is a tap on Gavin's shoulder, and he turns around to see his friends standing there grinning at his obvious fascination.
"Why didn't you tell me what was going on here?" He demands, half-exasperated half laughing.
"We tried, we tried," they say. Guna and Kelly are both very smart, Gavin knows, but they also do stuff in the art world, which he has never really paid much attention to. This could be cool though.
Come on. Let's go get a program. They wander across the street to Chavez Plaza to an information booth near the bandstand, which is built on a mini-mountain of dirt with a sign reading "Free Soil." There they can buy a program for 5 bucks or a day pass for $25.
On their way, they pass what looks like one of those tube hotels in Japan that you read about. Apparently, it is part of an open-air exhibition called Nomadic Architecture. Looking closely at one of the units, Gavin reads a kind of handbill with beautiful typography, which says:
Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, has vows to live in this container hotel until the last $500,000 is raised in support of ZeroOne San Jose, a unique global festival of work one the edges of art, technology, and society, which is only the First Act in an ongoing biennial, and which will be world renowned for its exciting cultural programming in the heart of Silicon Valley in the same way that Edinburgh and Venice are synonymous with world class performance and contemporary art.
Before Gavin and Kelly and Guna can cross the street the Karaoke Ice truck pulls up, and Remedios the Squirrel Cub pops out. According to Cellular Memory, the cell phone docent:
Karaoke Ice is a delicious pop culture mash-up, an ice cream truck turned mobile karaoke unit, deployed to unite people in a collective quest to perform, record, and rate as many new versions of ice cream truck songs as possible. Participants perform for an audience while sitting in the transformed front cab of the vehicle, and use a customized karaoke engine to select, sing, and record a song for later broadcast, as the unit makes it way to a variety of festival locations. Free frozen treats of various size and shape lure prospective performers to participate, distributed by Remedios the Squirrel Cub, who drives the truck and choreographs enigmatic rituals of his own on a periodic basis.
After 20 minutes the group heads again toward the museum, but before they can make it inside the cafe, they are lured into a shipping container sitting in the Circle of Palms. Part of Container Culture, an exhibition of art from port cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, Auckland, Lima, and Vancouver, this particular project one from Mumbai, an installation by the artist Shilpa Gupta.
Finally, entering the cafe space, they see that it is transformed. Everything is sort of the same but different. The lighting color is based on an index of current events; the table they sit at is an interactive aquarium surface, and they are joined virtually by someone in Brazil, who is unable to attend the Festival in person. He asks them about the performance later that week of the California premiere SuperVision, a performance by Builders Association, the Wooster Group of the performance world. And later in the evening - it is already getting dark - there is a commissioned work by Ryoji Ikeda, the sound designer for the internationally acclaimed performance group Dumb Type, folowed by the ceremonial lighting of the new Richard Meier City Hall by Kanazawa-based projection artist Akira Hasegawa.
Guna's and Kelly's day passes give them access to all these events, but Gavin, who didn't think he would be in San Jose for more than an hour or two, has to buy his tickets - which he uses his cell phone to do. In the process, he finds out that the next day, his favorite creative, David Kelley, who just founded the new Stanford Design School is giving a keynote talk at the Commonwealth Club. And they haven't even seen any of hte exhibitions yet at the Tech Museum, the Convention Center, the Flamingo Motel, ICA, Works, MACLA, and throughout the city. Reluctantly, Gavin goes online to book a hotel room and stay another day in San Jose.
After 20 minutes the group heads again toward the museum, but before they can make it inside the cafe, they are lured into a shipping container sitting in the 