The ZeroOne festival, which wrapped up a few days ago, turned San Jose into the nation’s art and technology capital, says The Mercury News.
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge helped lay the groundwork for “branding” the city as a digital arts mecca, said Dan Keegan, executive director of the San Jose Museum of Art. By the time the smoke had dissipated and the monitors were unplugged, the festival had drawn an estimated 50,000 people and generated attention from around the world.
ZeroOne was paired with the 13th International Symposium of Electronic Art, a biennial gathering of scholars and artists from around the world who present papers on art, science and new technologies.
ZeroOne organizers hope to make the arts festival a biennial event based in San Jose.
Perhaps the biggest hit of the festival was a half-dozen cacophonous, fire-spewing robots from the Survival Research Lab of San Francisco which attracted more than 2,000 to a parking lot next to the McEnery Convention Center.
At the opening festivities Aug. 8, about 500 gathered for a reception; 1,500 attended a meet-and-greet at the museum and another 1,500 watched as Akira Hasegawa’s “Digital Kakejiku” projected an ever-changing array of colors and patterns onto City Hall.
Many free events drew passersby throughout the week. “99 Red Balloons,” a game involving digital camera-equipped weather balloons at the Tech Museum of Innovation, and “Karaoke Ice,” an ice cream truck that turned curious pedestrians into impromptu singers.
“Fête Mobile“, French for “Movable Feast,” was a 400 cubic-foot blimp that floated through the city. A small Fête Mobile crew, decked in blue jumper suits, will follow the blimp around as it records videos, to be uploaded online, of the people and places it runs into.
Wooden cutout “hitchhikers” launched the ZeroOne festival with a project called “Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart’s Delight.” They had instructions their backs, which request people who find them on the street, in the park, in a hotel, or wherever they may be to take the “hitchhikers” for a spin toward their final destination (Silicon Valley).
Each cutout, named and sculpted after a technological pioneer, is five to six feet and weighs about 30 pounds equipped with GPS and batteries to track their progress. There were dozens of events, exhibitions and artworks.
“We’re thrilled that many of our non-symposium attendees were either hanging out by City Hall at midnight, sitting for a half-hour around the SPECFLIC” — an interactive video riff on the future of books — “at San Jose State or attending education programs at the cafe at the museum,” said Steve Dietz, who directed the festival and symposium.
Like anything technical, the festival had its share of bugs. A downtown-wide wireless connection, necessary to interact with some exhibits, was iffy at best. The often temperamental technological components of some pieces took longer than expected to resolve. It was a half-hour before the electronically augmented skateboards of Cobi van Tonder’s “Skatesonic” created a dissonant soundscape as billed. And some bloggers complained that the festival was geared only for new media insiders.
Two-thirds of the festival’s $2 million budget was covered by donations and grants from corporations and foundations, which included $250,000 from Adobe Systems and $250,000 in cash and equipment from Cisco Systems. An additional $250,000 in grants and commissions came from the city of San Jose and another $250,000 was contributed by San Jose State University.
The Networked_Performance Blog and EyeBeam have related web sites.
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