ISEA2006 Overview

• City of San Jose Office of Economic Development
• CADRE Laboratory & San Jose State University (Symposium Host)
• Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley
• San Jose Convention & Visitors Bureau
• San Jose Museum of Art
• Tech Museum of Innovation
• ZeroOne

1. To feature international artists, researchers and media theorists from around the world who are working at the intersections of multiple disciplines.
2. Explore the convergence of creative community, economic development and urbanology.
3. To engage diverse communities¥communities of interest, communities of ethnicity / geography, and communities of belief.
4. Focus on the complex relations and diversity of the Pacific Rim regions including geo-political and economic networks.
5. Enable conversation, discourse and peer to peer engagement across Symposium and Festival initiatives.
6. Address and inclusion programs for San Jose Diaspora.

The city has always been a site of transformation: of lives, of populations, even of civilizations. With the rise of the mega city, however; with the advent of 24 x 7 rush hours; with the inexorable conversion of public space into commercial space; with the rise of surveillance; with the computer-assisted precision of redlining; with the viral advance of the xenophobic, the contemporary city is weighted down. We dream of something more. Not some something planned and canned, like another confectionary spectacle. Something that can respond to our dreams. Something that will transform with us, not just perform change on us, like an operation.

The Interactive City theme seeks urban-scale projects and discourses through which the city is not merely a palimpsest of our desires but an active participant in their formation. From dynamic architectural skins to composite sky portraits to walking in someone else¥s shoes to geocaches of urban lore to cybrid games with a global audience, projects for Interactive City should transform the "new" technologies of mobile and pervasive computing, ubiquitous networks, and locative media into experiences that matter.

The political and economic space of the Pacific Rim represents a dynamic context for innovation and creativity. Convergent and divergent practices involving art, science, architecture and urban planning, engineering, industrial and interior design, communications, literature and performance are being manifested in new forms of cultural production and social experiences.

The complex relations and diversity of Pacific Rim nations is exemplified throughout the hybridized communities that comprise Silicon Valley including local indigenous peoples. As the 10th largest city in the United States, San Jose is an important portal on the eastern edge of the Pacific region, which shares deep historical and cultural connections that range from Latin America and the South Pacific to Southeast Asia and Asia. ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose Festival are highlighting the Pacific Rim defined in the broadest possible sense to include not only those states and nations that border the Pacific Ocean but also the geo-political, economic, social and historical frameworks of which they are part. ISEA2006 seeks discourses and projects that address, but are not limited to radical and alternative responses to contemporary cultural conditions throughout the Pacific Rim.

The Community Domain theme stands in relation to contemporary debate about "Public Domain 2.0" (Kluitenberg, 2003), but emphasizes the idea of domain from a grass roots perspective and the idea of community starting with the individual rather than the demographic. ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose seek to engage diverse communities¥ of interest, geography, ethnicity, race, belief. In particular, we seek projects and discourses that recognize the hybridity of communities and take transverse routes across communities.

Many of the members of these communities have no specific interest in art or technology or their intersection. Yet they have stories to tell and images of the city to map. ISEA2006 and ZeroOnen San Jose are looking for projects that actively engage these audiences and help build bridges between them in ways that may utilize digital technologies, but which are not about those technologies. In other words, the goal is not to train people to become artists but to use digital and networked technologies to allow people to participate in the creation of their own stories - to become producers rather than only consumers.

Transvergence goes beyond the disciplinary. And while not unique, artists, academics, advocates, and entrepreneurs of Northern California have been exemplary instigators of a remarkable twinning of parallel and divergent histories, from the steps of the Free Speech Movement to the garage doors of Silicon Valley; from open source inspired systems such as the Internet and Unix to the home of non-disclosure agreements and "vulture capitalism"; from one of the most globally diverse populations in the United States to one of the most economically stratified; from the apotheosis of lifestyle to the netherworld of the edge city; from communitarian to libertarian politics; from hacker to entrepreneur. Yet even if it is binary- encoded programming that has fueled much of this explosion, there is a growing realization that the binaries of culture - us / them, good / bad, free / market - are not solutions. At least not sustainable ones. To what extent can we think of transvergence as a vector away from these divides, modeling practices across the domains of culture, creativity, academia, and entrepreneurship to dream up a responsible future?

More specifically, ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose seek to identify projects and discourses 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.

More specifically, ISEA2006 and ZeroOne San Jose seek to identify projects and discourses 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.