ISEA2006 Art Event Overview

Invisible Dynamics, a new Exploratorium project, examines the contemporary world as a series of expanding information systems, engaging artists and scientists to explore the world at a detail and at scales never accomplished before. The focus is far beyond the walls of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco, harnessing the web and cutting edge tracking and imaging technology, to uncover, map, research and investigate the urban and natural systems and behaviors that give the San Francisco Bay Area its special character. The purpose of the work of each artist/scientist team is to reveal and layer systems – the constant and ephemeral, the unseen and idiosyncratic multi-phenomena – which are often hidden, but otherwise interlaced in our experience of the places where we live and work. Invisible Dynamics is also building a global view by comparing the ways in which the SF Bay region is a microcosm of the Pacific Rim.

The project links the domains of art, design, cultural geography, cartography, information design, sociology, archaeology, hydrology, ecology, marine sciences, and history.

Container Culture is an exhibition developed by the Curatorial Working Group of the Pacific Rim New Media Summit. Each curator has selected one or more emerging regional artists to present at ISEA2006/ZeroOne San Jose, using a shipping container as its means of transportation and as its exhibition “white cube” — or black box — space.

One of the most significant examples of cross-cultural encounters in contemporary art is the traveling exhibition. The traveling art exhibition has often served to operationalize and exemplify the cross-cultural encounters and exchanges that are deemed “necessary” and “natural” in the globalized art world. However, a range of social, political, economic and art historical differences generally complicate the globally themed traveling exhibition. The artists in traveling exhibitions are rarely able to adequately respond to each new context through their works, which is what these exhibitions are meant to initiate. The traveling exhibition thus converts each new cultural context to, essentially, an empty container for the art works, with little ability to respond to the exhibition site as physical location.

Container Culture is an exhibition of art works that travel from different port cities that rim the Pacific in standardized containers to San Jose to be presented alongside each other; almost like a conference of containers. In an ironic reversal of the tendency of conventional traveling exhibitions to convert every new space into an empty container, this exhibition invites curators and artists from each of these diverse port cities to convert a container into a culturally specific space.

1. Auckland Container: Rachael Rakena, curated by Deborah Lawler-Dormer
2. Beijing Container: Hu Jie Ming, Huang Shi, Jing Jiangbo, Xing Danwen & Xu Bing, curated by Zhang Ga
3. Hong Kong Container: Annie On Ni Wan, Curated by Ellen Pau
4. Mumbai Container: Shilpa Gupta, curated by Johan Pijnappel
5. Seoul Container: Taeyoon Choi, Tellef Tellefson, Cheon Pyo Lee & Love Virus, curated by Soh Yeong Roh
6. Singapore Container: Margaret Tan & Shirley Soh, Curated by Gunalan Nadarajan
7. Tokyo Container: Norimichi Hirakawa, curated by Yukiko Shikata
8. Vancouver Container: Kate Armstrong, Bobbi Kozinuk, Simon Levin, Laurie Long, Leonard Paul, Manuel Piña & Jean Routhier, curated by Alice Ming Wai Jim

An evening of Sound Art at Anno Domini: Matt Davignon, Rick Walker and special guest.

Matt Davignon has developed a unique form of improvisation over the last 10 years, focusing on textures, arrhythmic patterns and musical imperfections. Combining acoustic and electronic elements, he attempts to create dynamic, biological music from seemingly limited source material.
Rick Walker’s Loop.pooL is a fascinating and creative one-man journey through the world of sound and rhythm. Using digital live looping technology and a lot of audience interactive participation, Rick is able to play a completely different set of instruments on every single song in this early twenty first century version of a “one person’s band.”

SoFA Lounge presents an evening Sound Art featuring Drum-Fi interactive sound installation, and special guests at SoFA Lounge.

Drum-Fi — A wireless laptop driven interactive sound installation, using the California urban drum circle as the musical and social networking model. You are invited to bring your wifi – enabled laptop, enter the scene, download the software, connect to the network, be the performer and audience, and make ‘beautiful’ music together. Come and engage in a large dynamic musical exchange and see/hear what happens. So bring your WiFi laptops and charge your batteries! The Drum-Fi group: Steve Dude, John Bruneau, Chris Head, Michael Araya, Rita Hunjun, Veronica Ramirez, Rob Riddle.

An evening of Sound Art at Anno Domini: featuring YOUR DRUGS MY MONEY and special guests.

Anno Domini in partnership with Montalvo Arts Center presents a taste of the Bleeding Edge Festival stage, outdoors beneath the murals at Anno Domini.

Performative cinema can be described as a hybrid connection between art, film and the Internet; a cinema of processes that express the ever-changing continuum of the space we live in.

A series of live international audiovisual performances, 3.5 hours each night, location Club Glo

What happens when you take cinema out of the confines of the movie theater, wrench the film reel off the projector, and start editing the images and sound live, in front of the audience? Live cinema!

Recent developments in media processing software tools have facilitated a new generation of electronic artists across the world in creating real-time video performances. The practice of combining music and images live started in club culture and carries on the visual music tradition of abstract filmmakers such as Oskar Fischinger and the Whitney brothers. The form also resurrects the expanded cinema experiments of the 1970s, in which artists started to craft an immersive synaesthetic or expanded cinema, one that would create a new kind of vision, a new kind of consciousness.

On August 8, 9 and 10, during ISEA2006, Club Glo in downtown San Jose will host some of the most avant-garde live video artists from the Bay Area and around the world in a three-night program of sound and moving image fusing electronica with live experimental video. Each evening’s program will feature a series of live performances and screenings by artists from the U.S., but also from Finland, France, the Netherlands, Colombia, Israel, Mexico, Belgium, Switzerland, Turkey, and Spain – many of which have never seen before in the U.S. The stellar line-up offers viewers an unparalleled introduction to one of the most vibrant emerging artforms in contemporary culture.

The program is curated in collaboration with Pixelache (Helsinki), Sonic Acts (Amsterdam) and Club Transmediale (Berlin) :

1. Acclaimed duo Sue Costabile & Laetitia Sonami will present their newest project I.C. You, which features a live cinema stage built around a suitcase and a live foley stage built around another suitcase, employing dry ice and sensors.
2. Joshua Kit Clayton, electronic musician and inventor of jitter, will perform an underwater piece called Aquavision, with live camera, sand and an aquarium.
3. Finnish experimental filmmaker O Samuli A will be showing his mechanical furry piece Silmukka.
4. Jarryd Lowder from New York City, best known for his custom-built harp-like audiovisual interface, will play a video requiem for those killed in Iraq, showing found images of improvised explosive devices through an obsolete video security system.
5. Barcelona-based cultural agitator Solu, on her way to Banff, will do a solo video improvisation called taxi, take-off and landing.
6. Media artist Ran Slavin from Tel-Aviv will reveal his experimental narrative piece Cinema Cycles 07.3, which reuses some footage from his film Insomniac City.
7. Sound designer Guillermo Galindo and Gustavo Vazquez from Mexico will present a live version of their installation Glance, which was made by asking diverse residents of San Francisco about their hopes and ideas about the future, and is performed using their cyber-totemic instruments.
8. French collective RYBN will bring Paris their proprietary Smell-O-Rama technology from Paris for a multisensorial immersive experience of desolate urban landscapes.
9. META.AM will perform a live audiovisual improvisation.
10. Many star VJs well known in contemporary art will be seen at work late at night: Vanessa Gocksch aka Pata de Perro (Colombia), Nuutti Koskinen (Finland) and Tim Jaeger (San Diego) with Alex Dragulescu (Romania), among many others…