ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
transcript of a talk resented on the panel
Siliocn Valley's Creative Edge at the
Creativity Matters Summit
Friday, October 7, 2005
Okay, thank you. My name is Steve Dietz. I am the director of Zero One, San Jose, which is a global festival of art in the edge, which appropriate for the topic of this panel. We actually had a public launch last night, and we had our example of someone working with technology in an interactive way. It was a really great performance by Greg Niemeyer and three singers on his Organum project, so I hope that some of you were able to see that. And I want to stress, I think it's so important that we look at and we experience these kinds of efforts. And so it's really great this is happening in this panel. And to be honest, that's really one of the reasons why this festival, ZeroOne San Jose is happening in August of 2006. How many of you have been to a digital interactive art festival before? Yeah, I went with three of you. Exactly my point. This is Silicon Valley, and we really don't have any way to show or to experience this work. And there's really almost no way of experiencing it except in the flesh. So that's really one of the core reasons for doing the festival.
I'm actually going to talk a little bit more about some of the reasons behind the Festival than the Festival itself. I think you can probably get from Wanda Webb or from Beau Takahara, if you want to just wave your hands, some flyers about the festival, afterwards, and I hope you'll do that.
One of the things I would first say about technology is its presence or its absence effects every single person. And in that sense, it's an important topic that crosses race, that crosses class, that crosses age issues.
The Festival itself has four themes. One is the interactive city and the whole idea that technology is getting out of the box, out of the podium and into the environment. What are we going do about that? We have forty artists who are looking at technology in the environment, from building scale to performances.
The second theme is Community Domain. We know that we're not all terribly primarily interested in technology as technology or art as art. But there are lots of artists who are working with communities using the tools and technology, to enable communities to tell their stories. And that's one of the primary themes of the festival. We can tell stories through song, through performance. We can also tell them using the tools of technology.
The third theme, as was mentioned earlier, we're always looking west/east. We're always looking to Europe for our culture in a lot of ways. That's the history. The third theme is Pacific Rim, understanding that San Jose is on the east coast of the Pacific Rim. We understand we have all these economic relationships. We want to highlight the cultural relationships that we have and that we are looking to form.
The fourth theme we're calling Transvergence, which is really just the idea of the new. What are the new kinds of possibilities that are coming about?
And that's really what I want to talk about in about eight minutes left, on my talk. How many people here are astrophysicists? Okay, that's good, because I can say what I want now.
Roger Molina, who is the director of Leonardo, one of our partners on the festival and is an astrophysicist, gave a really interesting talk at Ars Electronic two years ago. And the talk was in the end about what he calls the soft case and the hard case for art. So I want to talk a little bit about the hard case for art.
Roger started out by saying that only 3% of the composition of the universe is stuff we say that we know what it is. We know that there is a 100% of the universe out there. We only can say we understand - really know what it is - 3% of it. The rest, 25% is dark matter and 70% is dark energy. We don't know what 97% of the universe is. And as he puts it, it's sort of "there go dragons." Like an old map where they didn't know what the world looked like so they drew dragons there, because it's sort of scary.
I think that's one of the things that we have to look at in terms of art on the edge. It's not very familiar. It's a little bit different. It's sort of scary. Our tendency is to ignore it. But I think it's really important to embrace it, and it's not always going to be accessible, totally feel good. It's not even necessarily always going to be good. We have to leave some place for that. I agree it's important to understand art as a driver with and for economics, but there is also another place for art that maybe doesn't have such an obvious kind of place. If we think of Silicon Valley, the difference between applied research and basic research.
Next slide please. This is a really quick one. Two good things about this slide. We are running out of ways to put impressionism in the title of an exhibition. "Vietnamese art: Not the Impressionists." But the other thing about this, just a quick reminder. Manet'sLe dejeuner sur l'herbe, was kicked out of the Academy and was not shown because it was such an outrageous work of art. We now embrace it, Impressionism. It's all feel good. It was a terribly divisive moment when this was presented in the French Academy. And so we have to understand that art can be divisive and that's not necessarily a bad thing. That can be a good thing.
Next slide please. Getting a little bit closer to home, this is Nam June Paik's famous Magnet TV from 1965. And I would say two things about this. One is we talk a lot about how design and technology can come together to create better products to create better possibilities. But one of the things that artists do is misuse technology. As Paik said, "Television has attacked us for a lifetime. Now we can strike back." It's not anti technology. It's not anti doing these things. All of these things are really important but there is another role that happens in and around creative expression, which isn't always instrumental but is always valuable. And we have to be able to make that message or it's not going to work. The other thing about this is it's looking at how do you respond to your environment? The environment in 1965 was television. So you respond by doing stuff with it. Paik did a lot of stuff with it. You always go home and say, "Don't try this at home, kids." But you know, it was a good thing to try out. It was also participatory. He was doing something to the TV and not just letting it do to him. So the new television is technology. It's wireless. It's, you can't get away from it. So we have to understand, we have to respond to that. Sometimes it's going to be a positive response and sometimes it's gonna be a critical response. We have to support both ways.
Next slide. So I want to show a really brief clip of an artist named Jim Campbell, who many of you know. And Jim was a hardware, and in fact, is still a hardware chip designer. And so what he is doing, I was going to say two very different things. One is he's using the technology to enable a new form of expression, a new kind of technology. But that technology in a sense has nothing at all to do with the artwork. It doesn't matter. It enables it but it's not about the technology in any way. But the experience itself is what matters. Another important thing to keep in mind when looking at this kind of work. So for those of you who have seen some of his very large LED screens that have a kind of filter in front of it. And it allows you to see, you can see how the figures are more and less clear as they pass across the screen. So you know, you get a more and less clear sense of what this information, or what this scene is of. And in some ways, It's a metaphor for information. As you get closer or farther away, you are able to see it better and less well. And there's actually sort of a conundrum going on here. In this case, the further away you get, the better you're able to see it. Because the pixels are very large. So in some ways it's a simple point, but in fact, a very powerful piece. But my point is the technology is being used in a sort of traditional way, to enable a new project that's not about the technology.
The next piece, if we can show the next movie, the screen movie please. We have a section in the Festival called "Edgy Product". There are a lot of artists out there who are thinking about Nam June Paik. How do we misuse the technology so we can understand better what it's doing to us and what we might want it to do for us. So Kelly Dobson can tell her own story.
Hi, I'm Kelly, and this is my scream body. Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you really have to scream but you can't because you're at work or you're in the classroom or you're watching your children or you're in any number situation that where it's just not permitted. Well, scream body is a portable space for screaming. When a user screams into scream body, they're scream is silenced. It is also recorded for later release. Where and when and how we use and choose this." (inaudible) . . . . . [laughter] . . .
Next is the great chart from this morning and the review. I would posit that you know, beyond this sort of culture, design is important and you know, creativity is important in a generalized way. And I'm not trying to bring this down at all. I'm just trying to say there's other stuff that's not as obviously useful. And that stuff we might call fine art, but art can be a bad word. Because it creates all sorts of intentions. When I was growing up, art was exactly what I wanted to fight against. Art was sort of what the museums did and it was really a horrible thing. So I have a different slightly different attitude now. But I think the point is there's lots of associations with the term "art". So we think of it as dark matter. This sort of exploration of the universe of emotions, of ideas, of experiences that we really don't right now understand. That's what we're looking at and presenting in the festival.
We can go to the next slide. And so one of the really interesting things about the field that I specialize in, which is sort of interactive art, is that it's inherently, a lot of it is inherently participatory. You had to do something. You have to make something. You have to do something with it to make it happen. Otherwise it just sits there. And I think in that sense, it's a really interesting possibility to think about how high art, about art that's dark matter, art that doesn't have a specific purpose, comes back into this huge middle section of our culture, which is a participatory culture. San Jose in particular, Silicon Valley in particular is a participatory culture. And this, the things, the kinds of work that we're bringing to the festival actually feed into that, even though there's no obvious purpose into this participatory culture.
And then it's sort of my side bar footnote to John Kreidler's presentation this morning, the great media theorist, Henry Jenkins, at MIT, who started a comparative media program. You've heard of comparative literature; he's started a comparative media program which I think is so brilliant. His point really is how do we learn how to understand newspapers? We write essays in school. How do we learn how to listen to things? We read a lot and we talk a lot. So one of the way's we're going to understand our media environment is by making media. We start making things as a way to understand how the world is working.
And if we could go to the next slide please. Or actually it's the next movie, the Star Wars Movie. This is an area called "machinima". I don't know if you all know what machinima is, but it is a way of making movies making game engines. I actually did an machinima exhibition at the Walker Art Center, one of the sort of paragons of high art. But there are also lots of people who are doing it as a very grassroots kind of thing. And as an example of how these two things can meet in the middle. This clip is several years old at this point and it's based on there's a huge industry of fan films around Star Wars. Machinima was a strange beast when I showed it at the Walker, at the art center. We didn't really understand it as art. And it's a strange beast when we understand it as a way of making and understanding how to become media literate people. This is exactly the kind of dark matter that the ZeroOne San Jose Festival in 2006 plans to bring from artists from over 50 countries, and I hope you're come in August 2006. Thank you.
