Super K Sonic Boooum 2 Gold, a 50-foot-long installation by Nelly Ben Hayoun, attempts to re-create the experience of a sonic boom from Japan's Super-Kamiokande neutrino observatory. The installation is one of many coming to the Zero1 Biennial in San Jose, California.
More than 100 new media artists, engineers and filmmakers explore the theme Seeking Silicon Valley next month when the Zero1 Biennial comes to San Jose, California.
It’s one of the biggest art and technology festivals in the world. Some of the highlights of the Zero1 Biennial, showcased in the gallery above, include:
• Berlin artist Aram Bartholl’s Dead Drops, a simple but subversive concept in which USB flash drives, embedded in various walls, invite viewers to “drop” their own data on the drive — or find strange and interesting data stashed by someone else.
• Transect Cascade, a striking sound installation consisting of a “sinewy volume of scattered intersecting black surfaces, frozen in time, held unnaturally in space by a grid of stainless steel aircraft cable,” according to the piece’s creator, San Francisco artist Nicole Aptekar.
• Discotrope: The Secret Nightlife of Solar Cells, a project by UCSD art professor Amy Alexander and Syracuse University art professor Annina Rüst in which a disco ball is modded to use solar cells as mirrors. “The ball rotates slower or faster according to how much light reaches the solar cells on the ball and creates kaleidoscopic projections on surrounding walls, floors, surfaces and people,” explain the artists in a statement. Custom software was written to project videos onto the ball, and a live performance was built around the system. The solar-powered ball reflects images from YouTube videos of people dancing on the surrounding walls.
Other highlights include a cinematic installation titled Present Tense by Lynn Hershman Leeson; media artist Eduardo Kac’s Aromapoetry, a “new kind of poetry in which the compositional unit (the poem) is made up of smells”; and new work by San Francisco map-art powerhouse Stamen Design.
The Zero1 Biennial takes place in and around San Jose from Sept. 12 to Dec. 8. All photos courtesy Zero 1 Biennial.
