ISEA2006 Symposium + ZeroOne San Jose

The ISEA2006 Symposium on Electronic Art and the ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge will take place August 7–13. The ISEA Symposium is a prestigious international art and technology conference that is sponsored biennially by the Netherlands-based Inter-Society for Electronic Art (ISEA). Every other year, cities around the world bid to host the symposium and this year it will be held in San Jose. ZeroOne is a milestone festival that will be held biennially in San Jose, making the work of the most innovative contemporary artists in the world accessible to an audience from around the world.

Once more UC Santa Cruz’s DANM Program benefits from having San Jose and Silicon Valley as our near neighbors. DANM faculty and graduate students take significant roles in this digital arts extravaganza

1. Elliot Anderson
2. Sharon Daniel
3. Daniel Massey
4. Margaret Morse
5. Ed Osborn
6. Michella Rivera-Gravage

1. Elliot Anderson

Poster Session
“Unnatural Selection”

Reception
Wednesday, August 9 Parkside Hall—W. San Carlos St.

“Unnatural Selection” is an umbrella for a series of projects that examine human and cultural understanding of and relationship to the natural environment. The project is a collaboration between Elliot Anderson and DANM graduate students: Tyler Freeman, Adam Jerugim, James Khazar, Nichole Smith, Synthia Payne, no.e sunflowrfish, and Alan Tollefson. The designation “Unnatural Selection” was chosen to comment on and question human manipulation of the natural world.

The work in the series reflects on current perceptions of biology, nature, and the environment from the point of view of environmental aesthetics, genetics and human desire, the sublime and genetic technologies, and the necessity of creative involvement in generating ethical and technologically less destructive interaction with the natural world.

Bio
DANM faculty member and Assistant Professor of Art, Elliot Anderson is currently exploring biological models in computing and artmaking with an emphasis on environmentalism and landscape. His work encompasses interactive installation, computer-mediated performance, electromechanical sculpture and digital photography.

2. Sharon Daniel

Exhibition and Youth & Family Media Productions
“Palabras”

Exhibition
August 7–13
South Hall

Artist presentation
Tuesday, August 8, 4pm South Hall

Meet artist Sharon Daniel as she discusses her artwork. “Palabras” is an interactive exhibition of videos created in a series of workshops at cultural centers in two impoverished shantytowns in Buenos Aires and in a workshop in San Jose. The workshop focused on strategies for collective self-representation using software designed to allow participants to discover relationships and make connections between their personal stories. Thus, communities not traditionally thought of a scholarly or academic, produce and interpret knowledge using media and information technology.

Paper
“Public Secrets: information and social knowledge”
Saturday, August 12, 10am–12pm
Parkside Hall

Secrets are the opposite of information. There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are "public secrets" - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself - like, "don't ask, don't tell." Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. The injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are "public secrets". This paper will discuss the phenomenon of the "public secret" in the context information culture and present strategies for using information technologies to unmask such secrets. The presentation will reference an online audio database of statements by incarcerated women and injection drug users, which reveal the secret injustices of the war on drugs, the Criminal Justice System and the Prison Industrial Complex.

Bio
DANM faculty member and Professor of Film & Digital Media, Sharon Daniel does research that focuses on the use and development of information and communications technologies for social inclusion. Her role as an artist is that of “content provider”—working with communities, collecting their stories, soliciting their opinions on politics and social justice, and building the online archives and interfaces that make this data available across social, cultural, and economic boundaries.

3. Daniel Massey

Exhibition
“Autoturista”

NextNew
August 8–September 16
Receptions: Tuesday August 8 and Saturday August 12, 6pm-12midnight
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, 560 S. First Street

The border souvenir is unique in lacking a grounding sense of place. Rather, it evidences varied cultural, socioeconomic, dangerous, and mundane circulations. “Autoturista” is an attempted reconstruction of this impossible grounding sense of place. Made of visual, tangible, and sonic artifacts from the Mexicali/Calexico border crossing, “Autoturista” takes form as an endlessly recursive traversal in which origin and destination fuse.

Bio
Daniel Alfonso Massey was born in Mexicali, B.C. Mexico in 1982, and now resides in San Francisco. He is a recent graduate from the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz. Daniel works in the mediums of sound, video, installation, and performance. His projects reflect an interest in the way our sense of interiority is constructed and negotiated in relation to public structures of interaction and traversal. While Daniel's works range from site specific musings to the acutely cerebral, they tend towards a transformation of space whereby interiority may be diffused.

4. Margaret Morse

Member, ISEA2006 Symposium +
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge
Interational Program Committee

Bio
DANM chair and Professor of Film and Digital Media, Margaret Morse has published work on fundamental concepts such interactivity, immersion and telematics, many essays on specific work by artists as well as critiques on contemporary culinary, body and other cultures. Her books are Virtualities: Television, Media Art and Cyberculture (Indiana UP 1998) and Software, Hardware, Artware (ZKM and Cantz Verlag 1997). See the Medien Kunst Netz/Media Art Network online for critical introductions to numerous artists as well as essays, including "Sunshine and Shroud" under Cyborg Bodies : www.medienkunstnetz.de (2005).

5. Ed Osborn

Exhibition
“Wandering Eye”

NextNew
August 8–September 16
Receptions: Tuesday August 8 and Saturday August 12, 6pm-12midnight
San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, 560 S. First Street

“Wandering Eye” is an interactive video installation that produces images and sounds from video input gathered by an array of lenses in motion: motorized surveillance and chip cameras deployed in and around the installation space. Intended to be both subtle and intuitively engaging, “Wandering Eye” presents a visitor with a slippery interactive environment—one that appears both inviting and unsettling and rewards extended participation. A special version of the piece is shown at the ICA that is configured for nighttime projection onto the front windows of the building.

Panel
SoundCulture
Saturday, August 12 10am
South Hall

SoundCulture—Shawn Decker, Ed Osborn, Nigel Helyer a.k.a. Dr. Sonique—is an international collective doing sound-related work that explores artistic and cultural contexts for this work outside of the traditional modes of presentation of music. SoundCulture artists will discuss this aspect of their current practices in particular, and how working from a background in sound informs these other activities.

Bio
DANM faculty member and Assistant Professor of Art, Ed Osborn is a media artist who has performed, exhibited, lectured, and held residencies internationally. His artworks take many forms including installation, video, sculpture, and performance. They demonstrate a visceral sense of space, aurality, and motion combined with a precise economy of materials. Ranging from rumbling fans and sounding train sets to squirming music boxes and delicate feedback networks, Osborn's pieces function as living systems that are by turns playful and oblique, engaging and enigmatic. He is represented by the Catharine Clark Gallery (San Francisco) and Galerie Rachel Haferkamp (Cologne).

6. Michella Rivera-Gravage

Associate Producer, ISEA2006 Symposium +
ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on the Edge

Michella Rivera-Gravage is a recent graduate from the Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz. Her most recent work, “TrainTracks,” is a perpetually unfolding collection of downloadable audio programs sewn together to poetically convey the intricacies of sociality in the confined spaces of public transport on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART).