August 7th - ISEA
Monday was the first day of NPR’s broadcast at the ISEA 2006 and ZeroOne festival: the digital arts extravaganza that shook up downtown San Jose at the beginning of August.
As an invited participant, NPR found itself another store front from which to broadcast after its summer residency in the window of Artist Television Access on San Francisco’s Valencia Street.
This time NPR was in a ticket booth – quite a spacious one, mind you – at the Camera 12 cinema in San Jose’s downtown district. This lead to some confusion for locals wanting to buy tickets for the flicks but also made for a perfect location for the NPR magic to take effect.
The booth faced a well-used paved street and downtown thoroughfare. It got foot traffic from all kinds of people: the perfect group from which to pick radio participants as Monday’s initial broadcast – a little street prowling with the wireless microphone – makes clear. We had people coming out from the gym across the street; we had environmental street canvassers, school children and the manager of the cinema.
Street prowling, San Jose style
But the week was also about getting some of the many festival participants on the air and our first broadcast to that end included Mark Pesce and John Tonkin whose project “Blue States” tracked and mapped social interactions between people via their bluetooth connections.
ZeroOne: Blue States
NPR was broadcasting on the street in front of the cinema and over the internet but the much-trumpeted free municipal WiFi network was not in effect and so broadcasting across the downtown area wasn’t an option on this, our first day at ISEA. But we got on with it.
“I’m a little confused on the technology. Does this mean there are large balls of twine all around the Bay Area right now?”, said LeE, hamming it up with the next NPR guests – Matthew Biederman, Adam Hyde and Lotte Meijer- as they talked about their paper cup phone network. With several pairs installed in San Jose, Oakland and San Francisco, people could use their paper cups not only to talk to the person at the other side of the string, but to anyone using the phones at that time, anywhere in the Bay Area. It’s all about the simplification of interfaces, explained the guests.
Simpel
The talk then moved from the studio out on the streets as Saul Albert took us roving.
Traffic Island Disks
Proving that we’re nothing if not technically ambitious, we then went back up to the shop window at ATA in San Francisco where Mr Zefrey had two major movers and shakers in place for some radio-vised “Frank Prattle”. Larry Rinder was repping it for the California College of the Arts and Berin Golonu was waving the YBCA (Yerba Buena Center for the Arts) flag. Listen to find out where there aren’t as many mushrooms in SF as in LA, what happened to the ‘c’ word and where the craftsmanship has gone in modern American art.
“Frank Prattle” with the CCA and YBCA
But then we returned to San Jose for an in-studio discussion, for the final hour of the day, between LeE and Sean Cubitt and Roger Malina from Leonardo, a journal and book series from the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology. This global network of scientists and engineers looking at art and science was heavily represented at the event. They talked about the history of the Leonardo network, what’s heating up discussion amongst these thinkers at present and some highlights from ISEA.
Discussion with The Leonardo Network
After that extremely cerebral discussion we switched to a little Dr Dre to round out the day with some musical refreshment.