About a decade in the making, the 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge debuted in 2006 and now erupts all over downtown San Jose every two years. More than 100 artworks, performances, screenings, interactive exhibits and multidisciplinary collaborations take shape in galleries, museums, parks, outdoor stages, alleys, empty storefronts, the convention center, San Jose City Hall and San Jose State University.
It is the biggest festival of digital and new media arts in all of North America, putting it on par with pioneering festivals like Ars Electronica, which has already been taking place for years. After all, if there exists a definitive North American cultural locale where high-tech engineers collaborate with installation artists, where open-source enthusiasts trade ideas with painters, where graphic designers pool resources with environmental researchers and where PhotoShop geeks mingle with outlaw electronics tinkerers at a global art festival—Silicon Valley should be that place.
This is also a festival where the collaborative processes behind the projects are equally as important as the final products, a festival more about those interstitial crevices where art intersects with technology, humans merge with machines and cultural anthropologists tag-team with computer network engineers.
A key theme running throughout 01SJ, therefore, is collaboration, and fittingly, 01SJ was not just one person’s idea. It was the result of a long, intertwined process between several different entities and a logical convergence of many previously separated endeavors. Folks in academia, government, tourism and the private sector were all working independently on some sort of vision for a huge international event and each strain eventually fused together to craft the 01SJ festival. Order emerged from chaos. A few 01SJ tech-related art projects are now permanently installed in the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, and the San Jose CVB is one of seven main partners that collaborate to make 01SJ happen.
Joel Slayton, director of the Cadre Laboratory for New Media at San Jose State University and now executive director of the festival’s nonprofit umbrella, has nothing but high hopes.
“I think the more participation people bring to it, the bigger this will become in the coming years,” he predicts. “It’s really important that people understand that it’s growing. This [year was] only the second one. Our expectations are huge. But give it 10 years, and this will be a destination thing that people around the world will come and see.”
The next 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge will take place in June 2010.
For More Info
01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge 408.277.3200 www.01sj.org
