ZeroOne San Jose/ ISEA 2006

Elite '08

33

285

Candice L.

San Francisco, CA

ZeroOne is billed as "A Global Festival of Art on the Edge & the Thirteenth International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA2006)," and it has received a lot of media attention. The NY Times and various newspapers and magazines have had articles on it for the last month building up a lot of hype. Perhaps I misunderstood, but they claimed that the downtown area was going to be transformed into "The North American epicenter for the intersection of art and digital culture by showcasing the world's most innovative contemporary artists." Now if you're making claims like that, you better bring it or there are going to be a lot of let down, maybe even angry people, after dragging their asses to SJ and being disappointed.

As we emerged from the parking garage, we were very appreciative of the balmy night. Although it was difficult to break the habit of carrying a jacket with me, I went out into the evening in short sleeves. As we walked around downtown SJ. we sort of chuckled to each other and said, "This is it? Is this a joke? Is this just San Jose's secret ploy to get us down here to spend money when there's actually not much to see?" We ambled over to the SJ MoA and stopped by the info table.

There was a pigeon blog release going on but the crowd (we asked some random folk) seemed underwhelmed and said they only saw maybe one or two birds over the roof. Hmm.

So off we went to find the Karaoke Ice Cream Truck deal which had all the right Burning Man elements to be interesting and entertaining. I was expecting people doing karaoke, you know, since that was in the name. Anyway, it was a revamped ice cream truck playing some new wave tunes ice cream truck style (no vocals) and there was someone inside dressed as a mouse handing out free otter pops. Like the festival itself, I thought the concept was cool, but the fact that there were only 20 odd people standing around including volunteers and a bored cop, made it seem like less of an event.

We went inside the city hall to check out the Baby Love exhibit which is pretty cool. There are tea cups akin to those at Disneyland and you sit in them and try to steer them while a baby clone plays you random mp3s that change if you bump into another tea cup. The steering itself is random and doesn't necessarily correspond to your directions the way you think it would. The volunteers were really anxious when our tea cup kept going toward the barrier ropes and didn't respond to directions. They rebooted our cup and I wanted to try it again, but they indicated that we should go. Honestly, it wasn't our fault, but it was highly entertaining. http://babylove.biz

We then went back over to the south end of downtown to the exhibit barn that had been constructed on a parking lot. A lot of the exhibits were interactive and reflected a change in your response. The coolest one in my opinion was Obsession, a new genre of interactive cinema. As you sit in a chair and watch a very strange film, the chair monitors your heart rate and physiological responses and edits the film accordingly. For instances, if you freak out when you see a snake on the screen, they will add in more snakes throughout the film. There are four screens and four chairs, each screen is playing a slightly different aspect of the film. This was made entirely more interesting by the fact that I was not clued in to the responsive element of the exhibit. I had walked in the back and sat down and watch for a while and then when I left through the front, the guy explained everything to me sat me down in a demo chair to show how it reacted to my responses. Super cool. http://crucible.lume.f...

Overall, I felt like the artists had very innovative visions and novel concepts, but that perhaps the festival should have had more activities and installations in closer proximity to each other. I expected to see the common areas and outdoor plazas filled with people, maybe even music, food and booze vendors, and outdoor art exhibits. Instead, most common areas and the downtown area in general, felt rather empty and devoid of bustle.

Cool concept though. I would recommend checking out the exhibit barn first, as we walked around for a good while before finding anything. Their web site is really buggy, has a lot of problems, and is slow. I found this kind of odd as the fest itself is focused on technology, you'd think that they would have put more time into having map and schedule pdfs that were easier to print and functional links.

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