[ISEA2006] Curator Statement: The San Jose Museum of Art – Media Mash-up

Curator Statement

The San Jose Museum of Art is hosting three exhibitions during ISEA2006

C4F3 – The Café for the Interactive City

The C4F3 is a working café of augmented everyday objects. It is an art gallery, a restaurant, a chill space, and much more. In the C4F3, ideas explored throughout the ZeroOne San Jose Festival and the ISEA2006 Symposium make the familiar space of the café both comfortable and thought provoking. Neither a gallery nor a traditional café, the C4F3 encourages an intimate, experience of art and technology. This café integrates art into everyday contexts — on the couch, at the bar or around a table.

Jennifer Steinkamp

Jennifer Steinkamp’s colorful digital projections envelop museum visitors in a three-dimensional sensory experience. Steinkamp, a Los Angeles-based installation artist, works with 3-D animation in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and phenomenological perception. This exhibition offers a comprehensive view of this important artist’s work beginning in 1993.    jsteinkamp.com/html/body_jimmy_carter.htm

Edge Conditions

Cutting edge. Bleeding edge. Leading edge. These are all familiar catch-phrases, which suggest we are glimpsing the future of contemporary art, today. Edge Conditions, however, is most emphatically not about the “next new thing.” It presents works of art in a different context, at the intersection of creativity, choice, and what might be called “technology” but what is arguably the world we live in. Whether it is devices such as pencils and chisels, or ubiquitous aspects of modern life such as electricity, phones, or computers and the Internet, technology is simply a set of tools that are more or less familiar at any given time. An edge is a boundary–a divide between this or that–but an “edge condition” is an intersection, not only of art and technology, but of physical and virtual, conceptual and actual, the future and the present, the familiar and the experimental, the real and imagined. It can be discomfiting and disorienting. “Are you human or are you machine?” “Is this place real?” An edge condition is like an estuary where the river meets the ocean–not quite either but teaming with evolved adaptations. This emergent reality is in some sense the transformative condition we currently live in. The artworks in Edge Conditions explore and exploit this intersectional territory.                                                                    Including, among others:

  1. Ingo Gunther — World Processor (1988-2006)
  2. Dancoyote Antonelli — Skydancing performance
  3. Dancoyote Antonelli — Modernist Marvel: Museum of Hyperformalism
  4. Bruno Echegaray — Immersive Art
  5. In Kenzo — ManorMeta
  6. Octal Khan — Gregory Ain; Mar Vista Residence (1948)
  7. Stella Costello — Primolution
  8. Giovanni Tweak — Light Path
  • Jennifer Steinkamp (born 1958) is an American installation artist who works with video and new media in order to explore ideas about architectural space, motion, and perception.  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Steinkamp