Rubén Ortiz Torres work featured on MetroActive Review of The 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge

01SJ Global Festival of Art of the Edge takes place June 4–8 in downtown San Jose. See www.01sj.org or the program insert in this issue for complete details.The 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge is a convergence of vision, technology and creativity that could really only come from Silicon Valley

By Gary Singh for MetroActive, June 4, 2008

THE 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge—or 01SJ for short—is not one of those harebrained schemes to "put San Jose on the map," or yet another attempt to alleviate San Jose's inferiority complex. The festival isn't taking place in San Jose just because Vancouver, Venice and São Paulo all have world-renowned cultural biennials and we don't. The festival is happening here because, plain and simple, it must happen here. This is San Jose and Silicon Valley's identity, or at least one of its identities. If there exists a definitive North American cultural locale where high-tech engineers collaborate with installation artists, where open-source enthusiasts trade ideas with painters, where graphic designers pool resources with environmental researchers and where PhotoShop geeks mingle with outlaw electronics tinkerers at art receptions—Silicon Valley should be that place. "It's not a question of 'Why here?'" says Steve Dietz, the artistic director for 01SJ. "It's like, 'Yeah. Damn. This makes sense.' "And I hope it works."

In 2006, 01SJ debuted under a slightly different moniker, ZeroOne San Jose, and ran in conjunction with ISEA 2006, the 13th International Symposium on Electronic Arts, a migratory academic conference where scholars, cultural producers, curators and media theorists congregate and yak about the latest ideas and practices involving art, science and emerging technologies. Previous ISEAs have taken place all over the world, and a team of local folks proposed to bring the conference to San Jose as a foundation to launch the first 01SJ Festival.

This year, the major difference is that the ISEA Conference won't be here—it's in Singapore this time—so all the emphasis is on 01SJ itself, meaning more festival visibility, more world premieres, more commissions, more local and global outreach and more projects expanding beyond just the five-day festival.

In addition to all the works that you can physically view and/or participate in, artists are here in residence, collaborating with folks from the high-tech industry. Elementary schoolkids are working with digital-media programs on a global scale. International digital artists are coming here to work with youth in at-risk neighborhoods. And some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including Adobe and Cisco, are sponsoring the events. (Full Disclosure: Metro is one of the media sponsors of the festival.)

"Two years ago, everyone said, 'What the hell is ZeroOne?' There were a lot of [answers] like, 'Well, you just have to come see it,'" says Dietz. "But I swear—and this is true—this year, the only people asking me 'What is it?' are the press. Everyone else is asking me, 'Which is the best day to come?' I think we really had an impact in 2006. ... What happened is exactly what we thought was going to happen—if you come, you will see something that really amazes you and you'll want to come back."

Ground Zero

A key theme running throughout 01SJ is collaboration. Fittingly, 01SJ was not just one person's idea. It was the result of a long intertwined process between several different entities and a logical convergence of many previously separated endeavors. At least as many accounts of how it happened exist as there were people actually involved, and what follows here is only one version. So with all due respect to those I'm leaving out, away we go:

Joel Slayton arrived in San Jose in 1984 for the original CADRE (Computers in Art, Design, Research and Education) conference, held at Mission College and San Jose State University—one of the first nationwide summits in the United States to deal primarily with art and technology. Soon thereafter, SJSU decided to offer classes in digital arts, and it hired Slayton, who then founded the CADRE Institute. A few more similar conferences and symposia took place throughout the rest of the '80s, and CADRE came of age as an internationally renowned academic program well into the '90s.

"It was always part of our mission to do a large internationally, or at least nationally, visible program to bring artists here," Slayton recalled. "But after a while it became a little too much for us."

Meanwhile, fundraising whiz Beau Takahara, who had previously worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tech Museum, teamed up with Andy Cunningham of Creative Communications, who had organized the Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles in 1994 and 1995. Together, in 2000, they incorporated as GroundZero: The Art and Technology Network, with the intention of some day organizing some sort of major festival celebrating the creative intersection of art and technology.

Slayton agreed to join them. "They had this really cool idea about how artists would work with the industry in Silicon Valley to do experimental artwork that would potentially benefit industry in some interesting and strange way," he said. "So I got involved on the board."

After the attacks of 9/11, the phrase "ground zero" became attached to the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, so the group changed its name to ZeroOne instead.

Independently of all this, Peter Giles of the Tech Museum was spearheading his own meetings with several other institutions throughout San Jose about organizing some sort of major citywide cultural event, and all of these machinations at least partly dovetailed with a 1997 strategic plan commissioned by the city and the county called 20/21: "A Regional Cultural Plan for the New Millennium."

"The idea of an international-caliber festival celebrating Silicon Valley–style creativity at the intersection of disciplines was a major recommendation of that cultural plan," explained Kim Walesh of San Jose's Office of Economic Development. "And then when we did the city's economic development strategy at the end of November 2003, the concept of positioning San Jose as the North American epicenter for art and technology was a major recommendation, as was this notion that cultural development and economic development need to be more tightly linked."

After several more meetings, everyone decided it would be advantageous to bring the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA) to San Jose and use it as the academic platform to launch the first 01SJ festival, which would run simultaneously. New-media sage Steve Dietz was brought in to write the proposal, and the whole shooting match was then submitted to ISEA through the San Jose Convention and Visitors Bureau.

"I remember being at a focus group of 50 people in the convention center," Walesh recalled. "There were artists there, there were corporations there. A whole diverse group of people just working the idea. Then the opportunity came to host the ISEA conference, and that was an international bid, and we kind of all looked at each other and said, 'OK, it's do or die; let's put in a proposal. Let's go for it. Let's bring it here.' Then that becomes the line in the sand to do our ZeroOne festival around that, which would then have legs, and identity, and live."

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Original story at MetroActive: http://www.metroactive.com/metro/06.04.08/cover-01-0823.html