Ideas and innovation at Silicon Valley art and tech fest (photos)

The 2010 01SJ Biennial, which opened this week in San Jose, Calif., in the Silicon Valley, asks artists, engineers, and designers to hack the world, building and rebuilding--physically and conceptually--with ideas and innovation.

With a DIY ethos that asks questions through art and offers answers through design and engineering, the 2010 01SJ Biennial, which runs from September 16-19, will feature hundreds of artworks along with performances and events, all engaging the future with concepts in art and design.

Artist Natalie Jeremijenko's xAirport project, a 150-foot zip line above an artificial marsh created in Downtown San Jose, models a system design intended to address the role of wetlands in our urban environments.

Taking advantage of the space necessary for metro airports, Jeremijenko playfully strategizes methods for environmental integration into our world, producing symbiotic diversity in living environments.

Name Your Price: Unpacking Social Costs, a project from the UC Santa Cruz Digital Arts and New Media Program, seeks to promote fair labor and ecological practices by calculating specific information about clothing choices and making the data available to consumers.

In an effort to expose the benefits and costs of what we buy, the installation asks a series of questions regarding a consumer's values and clothing purchase preferences. Then it produces an assessment of the consumer's current wardrobe and offers suggestions for future shopping.

Playing off the idea of the "Trojan Horse" as a digital virus infecting computers, Kildall and Scott are leading workshops during 01SJ in which participants will create origami-like paper sculptures modeled after real viruses. The sculptures will fill the belly of the beast before it leaves the South Hall and makes its way through the city.

Arriving inside the San Jose Museum of Art at the end of 01SJ, the Gift Horse will spill its viral contents onto the floor, releasing participants' artwork into the museum.

More than a fun way to view films, the Empire Drive-In evokes a grungy nostalgia for the heyday of the automobile and pre-multiplex movie watching. Today, only 381 drive-ins remain active in the United States.

Calling it a "mixed-reality simulation," Hertz created custom software that turns the real world view into an 8-bit video game interpretation.

Insanely dangerous? Yes. Crazily awesome? Absolutely!

An interactive listening experience that translates the ripening of tomatoes into digital sounds, the Tomato Quintet relies on the gasses emitted from the fruit during the growth process.

On the final day of the 01SJ Biennial, the performance-artist tomatoes will be made into salsa and served during a high-speed playback of the sound data recorded over the weekend.

Borrego Cubero says that while bridges are often seen as devices of connecting, unification, and inclusion, they are also paradoxically exclusionary, with technology as enabler in a process of "spanning the landscape."

In the series of works, bridges such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bixby Creek Bridge are examined as they relate to the interaction of human social networks.

Insert a quarter, and follow the path of the deliberately overengineered gizmo as hacked and discarded electronics perform one step after another, leading to the printing of a ticket. My receipt read "Everything has the potential to become a pancake."

The piece is designed to lead to discoveries between strangers, and it maps the creative connections made during the gameplay over the coming weekend of 01SJ onto an interactive visualization projected onto an Onomy Tilt Table. The visualization can then be zoomed in an out, letting viewers navigate through the universe generated by the community of collected data.

Read more at Zorop.org.