By Marcia Tanner
The ISEA 2006 Symposium / ZeroOne San Jose Festival Of Art On the Edge held in San Jose, California in August inspired intense international post-mortems on numerous international art/tech list-serves. Debates over accessibility, intended audience, commercialism, the relevance of the Festival’s themes, the suitability of the location, the quality, quantity and selection criteria of the art work shown, the presentation of technology-based art as extravagant populist spectacle, and the conference’s organization and choice of speakers, were rife in the immediate aftermath. Attendees were still reeling from San Jose’s unsettling placelessness, unique demographics and stupefying summer heat; unsatisfactory symposium venues; a packed schedule of public projects, parties and events; the exhilaration of some of the outstanding sessions and presentations; and the pleasure of meeting and exchanging ideas with their peers.
Wisely waiting a month for the dust to settle, Paul Klein and Meredith Tromble of the San Francisco Art Institute organized Assessing ISEA / Zero One San Jose as the third in a series of Design+Technology Salons at SFAI on September 19.
Paul Klein, Chair of SFAI’s Design+Technology Department, launched the series to encourage dialogue and debate about the topics that are shaping the contemporary discourses and material practices of our designed and technology-based society.Faculty member Tromble founded SFAI’s art and science curriculum and helped bring the editorial office of Leonardo/ISAST (The International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology) to the SFAI campus. Leonardo and the Exploratorium, San Francisco’s pioneering science museum, co-sponsored the event.
Intended as a critical assessment of the 2006 ISEA/ ZeroOne festival in relationship to urban, social, and economic systems,the Salon brought togetherorganizers, artists, curators, and other community members to evaluate, extend, and challenge the dialogue begun at ISEA 2006 / ZeroOne San Jose. Panelists included Hou Hanru, international curator, critic, SFAI's Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs, and Chair of SFAI's Exhibition and Museum Studies program; Joel Slayton, artist, researcher, and Director of the CADRE Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University; Beatriz da Costa, interdisciplinary artist, co-founder of Preemptive Media, and Assistant Professor of Arts, Computation, and Engineering at UC Irvine; and Christiane Robbins, an artist working at the intersection of studio practice, digital media, and critical theory. Slayton organized ISEA 2006; public works by da Costa (whose “Pigeon Blog” was a signature piece) and Robbins (I- 5 Passing) were included in ZeroOne SJ.
Although this writer attended the events in San Jose, she missed SFAI’s Assessment discussion and is heavily indebted to a report by SFAI student D.C. Spensley.
The Salon’s discussion had barely begun, Spensley writes on his blog, before it was waylaid by troubling ideological issues that loom large in the Western cultural context. According to him, the discussion was dominated by questions of access and the intended audience for ISEA 2006/ZeroOne San Jose. Both inquiries, he says, were characterized by discussants as "dangerous."
Why is it dangerous to discuss the intended audience of an art presentation? he asks. Does it call into question the definition of "public"? This may be problematic, but dangerous?... and what kind of access was spoken of?
Spensley’s Assessment of the Assessment is worth reading, primarily because he raises questions about the issues that inevitably come up in forums like this, and why it may be easier for participants to engage these issues than to address more amorphous questions of “ethical content, social advocacy . . . and [the] humanistic voice of the artists. For more on Spensley’s responses, read his blog: http://dcspensley.blogspot.com
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