THE YEAR 2010 will be a breakout year for the 01SJ Digital Art Biennial, the tech-related art festival that began in 2006 and now erupts every two years in downtown San Jose. The first one kicked off with digital artist Akira Hasegawa’s nightly scroll-like abstract illumination on City Hall. In 2008, Craig Walsh turned the Rotunda into a nighttime display of 3-D psychedelic tentacles. They were only two of many works exhibited during the multidisciplinary, multivenue event of visual and performing arts, the moving image, public art and interactive digital media. Just as the Salzburg Festival uses the backdrop of that city as an integral component in the goings-on, so does 01SJ.
For 2010, the official biennial doesn’t occur until September, but events are already starting to emerge, beginning next week with the inaugural Z-Salon at the ZER01 main headquarters at 152 N. Third St. in downtown San Jose. Every last Wednesday of the month for the rest of the year, salons will take place with artists presenting and discussing their work, as well as encouraging dialogue and discussion. Everyone is invited to attend and join the conversation. People held these types of salons in the Baroque era, so they may as well have them now.
Now, before anyone gets confused, allow me to clear up a few tidbits. ZER01: The Art and Technology Network, or ZER01 for short, is the organization that produces the festival, which is called the 01SJ Biennial. The ones and zeroes reflect the base-2 binary number system that all computers and digital circuitry are based on. Other elements related to the festival are also titled with some sort of play on that theme. For example, the SubZERO Street Fair takes place during off years when the biennial isn’t happening. And during the biennial, that same street fair occurs, but it’s now called AbsoluteZERO. Got it? I know you do.
As of 2010, ZER01 will have a permanent year-round presence in San Jose, one element being the new monthly Z-Salons. Next Wednesday, Jan. 27, from 5:30 to 7:30pm, everything kicks off with the three finalist teams who are competing for a chance to build a gargantuan project: The San Jose Climate Clock. This will be a major public work of landmark art incorporating Silicon Valley’s measurement, data management and communications technologies to gather and display massive amounts of complex climate-change data for the next 100 years. To be installed at the Diridon Station, possibly the future site of high-speed rail and BART connections, the project will unite media artists, climatologists, physicists, statisticians, anthropologists, programmers, network engineers and industrial fabricators—all to help people understand climate change.
Those who show up next week will get to meet the teams that are competing to design this project, as well as see the images and schematics of their preliminary ideas. Again, everyone is invited to join the discussion. The teams will be in town all next week, solely to network with potential collaborators in local academic, cultural and technology sectors to help develop their final proposals, which will be presented during the 01SJ Biennial in September. If you’re an unemployed statistical consultant, you just might get a gig out of this.
The three finalists are: “Wired Wilderness” by Greenmeme (Freya Bardell working with Brent Bucknum); “Organograph” by Chico MacMurtrie working with Geo Homsy, Bill Washabaugh and Gideon Shapiro; and “Huey-Dewey-Louie Clock” (an homage to the film Silent Running by Usman Haque and Robert Davis. An explanation of each one is far outside the scope of this column, so you can view the three preliminary proposals in advance at: http://sj-climateclock.org.
It’s safe to say that the first one includes growing an oak and lichen grove; the second one involves a spectacular clocklike system of interconnecting orbs, liquid flows and mechanical movement; and the third one includes accretion mounds, an autonomous cubic data packer and hermetically sealed samples of genetically identical daffodils. When people use phrases like “the intersection of art, science and technology,” this is precisely what they’re talking about. Even better, the goal is to eventually build these projects all over the world. San Jose’s will simply be the first implementation.
