Click here to view the San Jose Mercury Slideshow of Zero One San Jose
Electric Pavilion, a Watershed project for Creative Bristol 2005, was selected for presentation at the ISEA2006 symposium in San Jose. As Producer/Project Coordinator, I was invited to present the project on Saturday 12 August as part of a themed discussion looking at the concept of the Interactive City.
I attended the whole week’s proceedings, from 7 - 13 August, and also several events and exhibitions within the ZeroOne San Jose - a new biennial “Global Festival of Art on the Edge” which took place in conjunction with ISEA2006, the 13th International Symposium of Electronic Art.
This report summarises some of themes and issues arising from ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose, and includes reflections on the work I saw and my experiences that week.
With an estimated population of 953,000, San Jose is the third largest city in California after Los Angeles and San Diego, and the tenth most populous city in the United States.
San Jose was the first town in the Spanish colony of Nueva California (later Alta California), founded in 1777. Originally, the city served as a farming community to provide food for nearby military installations. It was the first capital of California when it gained statehood in 1850. After over 150 years as an agricultural centre, increased demand for housing from soldiers and other veterans returning from World War II and starting families, as well as aggressive expansion during the 1950s and 1960s led to San Jose being a bedroom community for Silicon Valley in the 1970s, which attracted more businesses to the city. By the 1990s, San Jose's central location within the booming technology industry in the area earned the city the nickname as the Capital of Silicon Valley.
In the ISEA2006 programme, Joel Slayton, Chair of ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose, comments:
"San Jose is a globalized city shaped by the economic and political complexities of Silicon Valley. For better or worse, San Jose is an environment of discontent informed by constant re-inventions of commerce, power and creativity"
From the perspective of a visitor, San Jose is a difficult city to grasp. It sprawls out in an orderly fashion across Santa Clara County, and has a compact, modern and clean city centre which seems almost devoid of people by day, though a bit livelier by night. San Jose has a good range of cultural attractions - concert halls, theatres, museums, galleries and exhibition centres - but somehow Downtown seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts.
The absence of people during the day, and of the grit and energy they would create, makes the city centre an easy to navigate environment for walking, but somewhat soulless and clinical. On the fringes of the main square, there is one street where addicts and other shady characters hang out, suggesting that all may not be as squeaky clean as it seems. At times, San Jose calls to mind the malls and plazas of J.G. Ballard’s suburban dystopias, where culture and social interaction are sacrificed in favour of consumerism and technological interests.
In throwing up a raft of questions about modern urban identity, globalization and mobility, community and locality, and the responsibilities of corporations, civic and cultural organizations, San Jose seemed a particularly appropriate city to host an international symposium looking at how media art practice is influencing and mediating our experience of the world.
The ISEA symposium is an international conference on electronic art that is held every two years in different locations around the world and attracts attendees from over 50 countries.
ISEA2006’s organisers decided to use the symposium to launch a new global festival ZeroOne San Jose, to be held every two years in the city and featuring a wide range of contemporary art work with a focus on technology-based production and presentation.
Billed as "Seven Days of Art and Interconnectivity", this was an ambitious undertaking for the organisers, and esteemed new media curator Steve Dietz was commissioned to act as overall Director alongside Joel Slayton, working with various organizing committees, juries and selection panels.
Eshewing dry academic presentations (which have characterised ISEA in the past), the focus was on the presentation of work and discussion around it. There were exhibitions, events, public art and other interventions in locations in and around the city centre, as well as the main ISEA2006 symposium which was held in Parkside Hall and the Tech Museum of Innovation. The symposium proceedings were webcast and video streamed to other locations, and a parallel virtual symposium ISEA2006 re:mote was staged to enable presentations from artists and researchers around the world. A unique feature of ISEA2006 was the Rapporteur, who provided live online coverage of the symposium and key matters of debate.
ISEA2006 described itself as ‘an experiment in themes and location’. Four interlocking themes governed both the symposium and ZeroOne San Jose. Artists were also commissioned to make and present site-specific work in and around Downtown San Jose responding to the themes. These were:
"We imagine the city as a place of many layers. Within the streets, architecture, and people of a city you are able to access history, hopes for the future, and even far away places. We find ourselves in communal space, sometimes connected, sometimes alone, and all around us is a city full of both visible and invisible elements".
"Communities can be defined by interest or geography or ethnicity or religion or political affiliation. Many of these self-defined communities are not artists or particularly interested in technology. Yet, many artists are using new technologies in creative ways to enable communities to tell very personal stories, which can become community stories. ZeroOne San Jose and ISEA2006 seek to engage diverse communities -of interest, geography, ethnicity, race, belief. In particular, we seek projects that recognize the hybridity of communities and take transverse routes across communities”.
“Age-old trade routes have established economic relationships between the Bay Area and far-flung cities in the Pacific Rim. The cultural context of these relationships created gaps that still affect how Silicon Valley communities relate to each other. Learn how creativity and technology are combining to bridge not only geographies but cultures”.
"New ideas and possibilities never before considered become evident when diverse disciplines intersect. ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose seek to identify projects that are transdisciplinary in nature and not only produce new projects and experiences but also inflect how a discipline comes to newly understand itself and modify its practices while retaining its core competencies".
From my perspective, the adoption of themes worked as they provided a context in which diverse work could be brought together, and critically analysed using a common frame of reference. The themes were broadly defined, but not open ended, and work was selected for its relevance to the themes.
With 1,800 artist submissions from around the world, and only 70 projects selected, it was a great privilege to be invited to present Electric Pavilion in the Interactive City section of ISEA2006. It also enabled me to look at my project in relation to other creative responses to this theme.
The only downside of combining ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose - and it was a big downside - is that by offering so many parallel events simultaneously in locations across the city centre, there was no natural centre of attention. ISEA2006 in particular suffered as a result. With so much to see and so many remote ways to access the symposium, the numbers attending the main discussions and presentations were very low, including the keynotes and thematic panel discussions where you would have expected the hall to be crowded.
My abiding early memory of ISEA2006 is a vast conference hall full of hundreds of mainly empty swivel chairs (a sponsor’s contribution, we were told) with only a handful of delegates present clustered around small isolated screens. In many ways, it was a fitting metaphor for the electronic art world! The fact that speaker presentations and audience questions were also filmed in close-up and projected on large screens behind the podium only added to the sense of alienation and dislocation.
I don’t want to criticise the organisers too much for this, as they had made every effort to stimulate debate, and encourage access and involvement. Perhaps one solution would have been making ISEA2006 more of a social and recreational hub - a place to meet and discuss things informally, as well as to attend the formal proceedings. There wasn’t a nominated ISEA2006 hotel or bar that would have served this purpose. For ISEA2004, the ice was broken between delegates by the first two days being aboard a cruise ship, forcing people to interact socially. There was no such incentive in San Jose, and I found that I was still running into people I knew late in the week who had been there for days but not crossed my path earlier.
The symposium got off to a particularly good start with Lu Jie’s keynote address. Lu Jie is Curator, Director and Founder of The Long March, an extraordinary project that has evolved over five years in China with exhibitions, performances, symposia and discussions taking place in public sites chosen for their historical, political or cultural significance.
The scope of the project is mind-boggling, and to date over 500 artists have participated in projects and the results have been displayed at exhibitions in Oslo, Lyon, Vancouver, Yokohama, Tapei and Shanghai. The Long March has established its own artists’ space in an industrial building in Beijing and a foundation in New York.
In Lu Jie’s words:
"The Long March: is a metaphor. It is an international cooperation, a campaign, a complex art project entitled "a walking visual display," and a journey. Its participants include curators, artists, theorists, and art activists from China and abroad. It uses the historical Long March (the Red Army's epic trek from 1934-1936) as a geographic and discursive framework, and the curatorial plan parallels the grand narrative of the historical Long March with its romantic ideals of turning failure into success, of taking to the road in search of Utopia, of founding an alternative democratic society through engagement with the masses, leaders, and soldiers, of representing the intellectuals and the people, of holding imported theories and tactics up to the lens of reality in the local context, of generating the new and powerful praxis that ultimately led to the founding of the current Chinese state. Our new Long March looks for a new approach to contemporary art that uses China as a platform".
The Long March’s aim is to take both contemporary Chinese and international art to a sector of the Chinese public that is rarely, perhaps never, exposed to such work. In this respect, this is the first such project in China's history. Specifically it brings art to those people who live in communities along the route of Mao Zedong's historic Long March, and in doing so blurs the boundaries between high art and folk art, rural and urban and elitist and populist forms.
The Papercutting project is one example of this. The Long March commissioned researchers to survey 15,000 people living in a remote rural area, photographing them and documenting their age, background and political beliefs. The people interviewed also produced papercuts (an ancient and locally significant artform), a selection of which are subsequently displayed alongside the completed questionnaires and documentary images of the project. This form of exhibition prompted debate about whether ‘papercutting’ is a contemporary or traditional artform, the artist/curator’s relationship with the participants in this collaborative project and whether the questionnaires or the papercuts were the artwork.
Feeling inspired and energized by Lu Jie’s presentation, the Community Domain sessions that followed were thought provoking, but not as engaging.
Mirjam Struppek, curator of the international conference Urban Screens 05 in Amsterdam, spoke on The Urbane Potential for Public Screens for Interaction. She argued that public screens in city centres provide new opportunities for interactivity and public participation, because of the communal context of the space. She cited the big screen presentations of World Cup games in Berlin over the summer, which encouraged both local people and international visitors’ engagement with the global pageant and emotional drama of the tournament. She suggested that artists and urban designers should collaborate to devise new uses of this digital layer of the city.
Valentina Nisi’s presentation about the digital storytelling project in the Liberties area of Dublin prompted a mixed audience reaction. This collaboration between the Department of Computer Science, Trinity College, and MIT, came over as a somewhat romanticised attempt “to capture peoples’ stories of a poor area of Dublin before the Liberties is transformed by development”. Several audience members questioned the motives for doing this, the authenticity of the voices portrayed in the digital stories and the artist’s responsibility towards the community. What changes in the community are there as a result of the artist’s intervention? Are these changes good or bad? Is something inevitably lost in translation? A Montenegran artist stood up and asked a question in his native tongue which noone on the panel felt able to respond to. That intervention seemed to get to the heart of the ethical complexity and contradiction of this kind of work.
Coming from an entirely different standpoint, Kevin Hamilton, a researcher from Illinois University, presented an argument for absence and the use of metaphor to represent community experience. He illustrated his argument by citing Daniel Libeskind’s design of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and The Disintegration Loops soundworks produced by Richard Basinski in response to 9/11. Hamilton feels that there is a dichotomy between noise and harmony, symbolic and literal, when seeking to represent community experience. He comes down on the side of dissonance and ambiguity being a more apt representation of 21st Century life in the developed world.
Finding myself drawn to, but not entirely convinced by this argument, I was nevertheless pleased that Hamilton highlighted the Mojave Phone Booth project
http://www.deuceofclubs.com/moj/mojave.htm
The booth was an accidental telemediated experience - a highly unusual physical and virtual destination for a few years before the Mojave Desert Park Service removed it. A remnant of a once-busy mining community, the phone booth appeared as a dreamlike apparition in a remote desert landscape. Boosted by word of mouth and early Internet exposure, the phone became a busy hub of activity for callers from around the world. Visitors to the booth would take shifts answering anonymous calls by day and night, engaging in random and sometimes bizarre telephone conversations. The mythology that built up around the phone booth prompted more tourists to drive into the desert to try and locate the site and participate in the project.
As an adjunct to the symposium programme, I attended the Bill Viola Public Keynote Lecture that evening at City Hall. The venue was packed to the rafters, and over a hundred people had to be turned away as there were no tickets left.
Bill Viola is a likeable man, and he has been instrumental in establishing video art as a vital form of contemporary art. When I interviewed him in his studio in 2000, he had many interesting things to say about artists and digital media, drawing parallels with the work of Van Eyck and his contemporaries - the first painting to use sophisticated ocular tools and the rules of perspective to create an illusion of reality.
I was interested to hear what Viola had to say about the subject six years on, and to see work-in-progress on his new project The Night Journey. I had been disappointed by his recent works The Passions and Going Forth by Day, because to my eyes it was bombastic and overblown - and suggested that higher production values, high definition video and large plasma screens don’t necessarily make for better artwork.
Viola’s lecture was articulate, and the audience seemed enraptured, but his words were too peppered with references to eastern mysticism and the sublime for my taste. He showed an extract from The Night Journey video game, developed with the Game Interaction Lab of the Interactive Media Division of the USC School of Cinema-Television, which ‘takes the player on a journey towards enlightenment’, passing through several virtual landscapes where challenges have to be overcome and riddles deciphered. It seemed to me that The Night Journey was not Viola’s finest hour as an artist, and perhaps video gaming was the wrong format for this kind of project.
I later attended the Artist Poster session back in the main symposium hall. This involved the presentation of 20 artist projects in the form of large scale laminated posters, with the artists standing alongside their poster to informally discuss their work. Maria Mencia’s work caught my eye, with image and text transplanted from neon signs and billboards, as did Kooj Chuhan’s From a Handful of Seeds, a multi-screen installation that addressed issues relating to deportation and migration.
The poster session inspired me to attend more of the artist presentations in the Tech Museum. Mare Tralla’s Friendship of All Nations explores old Soviet propaganda in the contemporary world by creating a network of friends worldwide who contribute to the project by offering a song that they consider to be characteristic of their country of origin. Mare then sings and records each of the songs in their original language, presenting them as sound installations and on a project website. It came over as a cross between a multicultural karaoke and the Eurovision Song Contest.
Atteqa Malik’s project Diary of a Pakastani Vegetable Cart focuses on an individual vegetable cart and its owner on the streets of Karachi. The project combinies digital storytelling, animation of her child’s drawings, and presentation of the work on the Internet, giving us a window on a life lived on the other side of the world.
The SoundCulture Panel, featuring Australians Shawn Decker, Ed Osborn and Helyer, focused on the use of sound and interactivity in public artworks and installation design and on the relationship of sound to the plastic arts.
Joline Blais’ presentation Indigenous Domain: Pilgrims, Permaculture and Perl drew heavily on Native American practices and beliefs arguing that the politicised use of copyright protection measures and the hierarchical demarcation of cyberspace is another form of colonial practice akin to creating ‘reservations’. She highlighted the principles of permaculture and ‘commons’ as an alternative paradigm.
My own session on the Interactive City included an interesting presentation by Mathias Fuchs, Programme Leader MA Creative Technology at the University of Salford. He told us that Bradford had been voted ‘the ugliest city in Britain’ in a national poll, and the City Council called in the architect Will Allsop and asked him to recommend changes to the city’s design to address that. Allsop suggested that the Council should pull down several buildings in the city centre, create a new lake and waterway system and re-brand Bradford as a kind of Venice of the North. This was seen by the Council to be too radical a proposition, and a public consultation exercise needed to be undertaken. Towards this end, Mathias Fuchs and his team developed Plasticity, an interactive computer game that enables players to blow up unsightly buildings in a virtual Bradford and replace them with alternatives – for example, a new mosque, cathedral, shopping centre or block of flats. The game can be played at various public sites and is apparently proving a very popular way of engaging local residents in urban planning and architectural design.
It was good to present Electric Pavilion alongside this project, showing how in another part of the UK artists and local contributors were also engaged in re-imagining their city and exploring local identity, meaning and urban representation. However, some of the Americans in the audience were somewhat intrigued by the digital story I showed from Barton Hill, being unfamiliar with such terms as ‘high rise living, chavs and regeneration blues’.
A personal selection from the artists’ work on display in ZeroOne San Jose
There was so much interesting artists’ work to view that it is impossible to do justice to it in this report.
The Edge Conditions show at San Jose Museum of Art featured the work of a dozen artists who blur the boundaries between art and technology, between the physical and virtual and what is known and the experimental. From this show, my highlight would be The Listening Post by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen. This was an exquisite installation comprising an aluminium lattice hung with 231 miniature lcd screens that cull in real time fragments of text from various internet forums, blogs and chatrooms worldwide, and splice them together in a form of free association. You can get up close to read the rolling text on individual screens, or stand back and enjoy the continuous waves of random data.
I was also very taken by the Container Culture exhibition in South Hall, which used the metaphor of travelling cargo to evoke cross-cultural exchanges and encounters in the globalised art world. The exhibition was curated by the Curatorial Working Group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit. Each curator selected one or more emerging regional artists to present at ZeroOne San Jose. The Beijing selection (curated by Zhang Ga) was particularly strong, with five artists whose work in different ways addressed an ancient city’s transformation into a globalised modern city.
Another significant work from South East Asia was Japanese artist Akira Hasegawa’s Digital-Kakejiku San Jose. This richly textured artwork, with constantly shifting shapes and colours, was projected at night by 15 high powered video projectors onto the outside of the City Hall Rotunda. Hundreds of locals came down every evening to marvel at the illuminations and to enjoy the communal experience of ‘being there’ to see it in their home city.
I also went to a performance of 16 ( R )evolutions by New York-based dance company Troika Ranch, developed through an international residency with Essex Dance funded by Arts Council England East. The work used motion capture technology to integrate dance movements, sound and real-time video projections. Although the performance had some moments when these elements combined seamlessly and to great visual effect, overall I felt I would have liked to have seen more physical dance and less reliance on technology.
A great delight of ZeroOne San Jose was the high number of artist interventions in public spaces. Karoake Ice was an ice cream van/mobile karaoke unit with MC Remedios the Squirrel Cub inviting members of the public to sing along to classic songs played in an ice cream van jingle jangle fashion. In a similar vein, Canadian artist Jessica Thompson’s Soundbike used motion–based generators mounted on an ordinary bicycle which members of the public could borrow. The sound of canned laughter is broadcast when the bike is pedaled through the city, audible to people standing on the street. At night you could also encounter Polish artist Karolina Sobecka’s Wildlife, which featured images of roaming wild animals projected from a moving car onto city walls. Depending on whether the car speeds up or slows down, the animal’s behaviour becomes more or less aggressive.
DataNature, a commissioned piece by British artists Ben Hooker and Shona Kitchen, comprised a freestanding ‘ticket machine’ on the street which at the press of a button would take your picture and dispense a unique free souvenir ticket. This has the superficial look of a flight ticket/boarding card, but on closer inspection you realize that it features live and pre-collected data, images and stories from San Jose International Airport and its environs.
One of the more controversial works was Pigeonblog 2006, a German/US collaboration. The project equipped live urban homing pigeons with GPS enabled air pollution sensors which sent real time location based air pollution and image data to an online mapping/blogging environment. Perhaps because of the rather exaggerated cartoon representation of the pigeons on ZeroOne San Jose’s publicity, the project drew a lot of adverse criticism from environmentalists. The New Scientist and San Jose Mercury published letters complaining about the use of live animals for artistic experimentation, and clearly some people could neither see the funny side of the project nor appreciate the more serious points about air pollution that the artists were making.
An unexpected surprise was a live performance by The Beat in the Plaza de Cesar Chavez on a balmy Thursday evening as part of the Music in the Park series of free concerts. Appearing as “The English Beat”, and supplemented by Linval and Horace from The Specials, they played sterling performances of Message to Rudy, Mirror in the Bathroom and Rankin Full Stop. It was refreshing to see a mixed crowd of Mexicans, Dot Com workers and representatives of San Jose’s youth punching the air, moshing and dancing energetically ina ska/two tone stylee.
Some reflections on ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose
Attending ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose was a worthwhile experience, not least for the opportunity it gave me to view a range of interesting work from around the world and to engage with critical debate around media practice and electronic art.
As mentioned earlier, staging ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose together did have the disadvantage of dividing audience attention and dispersing the delegates and artists around the city, to the detriment of the symposium. However, in comparison with other digital media events I have attended, the following stood out as positive aspects of this particular event:
David Drake
20 September 2006
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