Community Domain, Pacific Rim, Transvergence

I3th International Symposium on Electronic Art Exhibition
South Hall
Themes: Interactive City "City Center," "Call Center," and Checkout, Pacific Rim, Community Domain, Transvergence, Edgy Products, Container Culture, Media Lounge, Global Youth Lounge

South Hall is the main exhibition venue for the 13th Annual International Symposium on Electronic Art and ZeroOne San Jose. It is an impressive outdoor tent structure that encompasses 80,000 sq. ft. of exhibition space, located behind the Convention Center in downtown San Jose. Here the juried exhibitions for the themes of Pacific Rim, Community Domain, Transvergence, and Edgy Products are installed, as well as the Container Culture exhibition, the Global Youth Lounge, the Media Lounge, and the "City Center," "Call Center," and Checkout areas for the Interactive City theme.

The Pacific Rim theme and the related Container Culture exhibition examine the political and economic space of the Pacific Rim and explore the region as a dynamic site for innovation and creativity framed by issues of economic globalization, isolationist nationalism, regional integrations and environmental change. Community Domain artists create platforms for different, self-defining and emergent publics to "tell their stories," both as individuals and as a member of their community, through digital and locative media. Transvergence presents 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. The Interactive City projects take place throughout the streets of San Jose, but many of them have a "home base," in the City Center, Call Center, and Checkout areas. Edgy Products are products that manipulate, hack, subvert, hijack, or reformulate the notion of product.

Except for Container Culture, which was curated by curators in 8 different port cities as part of the Curatorial Working Group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit, the artworks in South Hall were selected by international juries of more than 200 artists, theorists, and researchers who chose from more than 1800 submissions submitted to ISEA2006.

The exhibition space includes two lounge areas. The Global Youth Lounge is the activity hub for Community Youth & Family Media Programs.The Media Lounge is dedicated to network-based artworks and a live feed from the ISEA2006 Symposium and ISEA re:mote. City Center and the Call Center and are two portals where visitors can access specific elements of artworks happening throughout San Jose. There is also a Checkout and information area for some Interactive City projects.Comerica Bank is the lead sponsor of South Hall. Major support is also provided by Cisco Systems and Barco.

Comerica Bank is the lead sponsor of South Hall. Major support is also provided by Cisco Systems and Barco.

Art Ahoy!

Container Culture is an exhibition developed by the Curatorial Working Group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit. Each curator has selected one or more emerging regional artists to present at ZeroOne San Jose / ISEA2006, using a shipping container as its means of transportation and as its exhibition "white cube" — or black box — space.

One of the most significant examples of cross-cultural encounters in contemporary art is the traveling exhibition. The traveling art exhibition has often served to operationalize and exemplify the cross-cultural encounters and exchanges that are deemed "necessary" and "natural" in the globalized art world. However, a range of social, political, economic and art historical differences generally complicate the globally themed traveling exhibition. The artists in traveling exhibitions are rarely able to adequately respond to each new context through their works, which is what these exhibitions are meant to initiate. The traveling exhibition thus converts each new cultural context to, essentially, an empty container for the art works, with little ability to respond to the exhibition site as physical location.

Container Culture is an exhibition of art works that travel from different port cities that rim the Pacific in standardized containers to San Jose to be presented alongside each other; almost like a conference of containers. In an ironic reversal of the tendency of conventional traveling exhibitions to convert every new space into an empty container, this exhibition invites curators and artists from each of these diverse port cities to convert a container into a culturally specific space.

Auckland Container: Rachael Rakena curated by Deborah Lawler-Dormer
Beijing Container: Hu Jie Ming, Huang Shi, Jing Jiangbo, Xing Danwen, and Xu Bing curated by Zhang Ga
Hong Kong Container: Annie On Ni Wan Curated by Ellen Pau
Mumbai Container: Shilpa Gupta curated by Johan Pijnappel
Seoul Container: Taeyoon Choi, Tellef Tellefson and Cheon Pyo Lee and Love Virus curated by Soh Yeong Roh
Singapore Container: Margaret Tan + Shirley Soh Curated by Gunalan Nadarajan
Tokyo Container: Norimichi Hirakawa curated by Yukiko Shikata
Vancouver Container: Kate Armstrong, Bobbi Kozinuk, Simon Levin, Laurie Long, Leonard Paul, Manuel Piña, and Jean Routhier curated by Alice Ming Wai Jim

Make your own city

Interactive City
Major venues: Fairmont Plaza/Circle of Palms, Passeo San Antonio, Cesar Chavez Plaza, City Hall Rotunda, Martin Luther King Jr. Public Library, The Tech Museum of Innovation, Parkside Hall, Almaden Plaza, San Jose State University, VTA Light Rail System, South Hall and the San Jose McEnery Convention Center

"Pigeon bloggers. Skateboard orchestras. Swarms of light. In August, the weeklong ZeroOne festival will transform Silicon Valley's San Jose into an interactive art project. A square mile of downtown will be blanketed with a high-speed wireless network that dozens of artists from all over the world will use to let festival-goers sing, skate, and play their way through the event. Oh, and good news for locals: The Wi-Fi stays behind when the installations leave town."—Wired magazine, August 2006

The city has always been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations, even of civilizations. The city is a place of many layers. We find ourselves in communal space, sometimes connected, sometimes alone, and all around us is a city full of both visible and invisible elements. The Interactive City theme seeks urban-scale projects for which the city is not merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their formation. Interactive City artworks instantiate this with cell phone-based storytelling, found art objects and sculptures, chances to make instant films about downtown, interactive soundscapes, rolling parties under a blimp and in parking spaces, the city as game board, even night surveillance of nocturnal animals. Projects for the Interactive City theme transform the "new" technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous networks, and locative media into experiences that matter.

As you wander the streets of San Jose, many of the Interactive City and Community Domain projects are part of the "Cellular Memory" project. You can call the toll free number 888.411.0106 and listen to the artist talk about the artwork. A map of the primary venues can be glimpsed here, and more information about individual artworks is listed on the exhibits page. Enjoy.

Media Mash-up

The San Jose Museum of Art is hosting three exhibitions during the ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge.

C4F3 -- The Café for the Interactive City
The C4F3 is a working café of augmented everyday objects. It is an art gallery, a restaurant, a chill space, and much more. In the C4F3, ideas explored throughout the ZeroOne San Jose Festival and the ISEA2006 Symposium make the familiar space of the café both comfortable and thought provoking. Neither a gallery nor a traditional café, the C4F3 encourages an intimate, experience of art and technology. This café integrates art into everyday contexts -- on the couch, at the bar or around a table.

Jennifer Steinkamp
Jennifer Steinkamp's colorful digital projections envelop museum visitors in a three-dimensional sensory experience. Steinkamp, a Los Angeles-based installation artist, works with 3-D animation in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and phenomenological perception. This exhibition offers a comprehensive view of this important artist's work beginning in 1993.

Edge Conditions
Cutting edge. Bleeding edge. Leading edge. These are all familiar catch-phrases, which suggest we are glimpsing the future of contemporary art, today. Edge Conditions, however, is most emphatically not about the "next new thing." It presents works of art in a different context, at the intersection of creativity, choice, and what might be called "technology" but what is arguably the world we live in. Whether it is devices such as pencils and chisels, or ubiquitous aspects of modern life such as electricity, phones, or computers and the Internet, technology is simply a set of tools that are more or less familiar at any given time.

An edge is a boundary--a divide between this or that--but an "edge condition" is an intersection, not only of art and technology, but of physical and virtual, conceptual and actual, the future and the present, the familiar and the experimental, the real and imagined. It can be discomfiting and disorienting. "Are you human or are you machine?" "Is this place real?" An edge condition is like an estuary where the river meets the ocean--not quite either but teaming with evolved adaptations.

This emergent reality is in some sense the transformative condition we currently live in. The artworks in Edge Conditions explore and exploit this intersectional territory.

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