Usually South First is a busy street, but this evening it was closed to cars for SubZERO, a one evening celebration of digital arts in many various ways...

     

     

The San Jose Fixie booth was more of a parking zone for fixie bikes. It was positioned at the end of the block so that the members could dominate the intersection doing bike tricks with plenty of space for pedestrians to go around them.

     

The first booth I got to where technology had a conspicuously interesting role was the /hug booth. The woman explained that everywhere she went in worlds of warcraft there was this ongoing battle between two factions that seems to have started so long ago that it seemed like they were just interested in passing it on. /hug is all about doing healing and nurturing work to mellow out the vibes and build community. I'm still amazed that now there's a "doctors without borders" for the online world.

Kids loved the robo-balls. They would roll up and stop in front of you. Maybe if you were curious they would playfully invite you to look closer.

AstroTable is a table like globe you can zoom in on any point on the earth's surface. The resolution is good enough that you can just about tell about what kind of car(s) were parked in your driveway when they shot your house.

     

I didn't know it until I bought a $2 hot dog from the woman you can barely see behind her hot dog statue, but that was part of a bigger exhibit I could find out more about at ICA.

     

The walker's high tech component was a software package on her phone that used GPS information to tell her where to walk next. She was in too much of a hurry to get with the program to tell me much more than that.

  

The high tech component of this plywood furniture is that you can download the plans to make these pieces and many others from playatech.com. One feature is that can you make most pieces from one or two sheets of plywood. Another is that once made you can disassemble them so they are flat for travel, making them very portable.

This guy would get volunteers from the crowd to come up and randomly pick two tunes. Then he would mix them together to make quite dancable music using his high tech computer with the glowing screen.

  

     

As far as I could tell, the only thing digital about that rooster is the picture of it you are looking at. There's a handle on the other side of the neck that blows the whistles that double as a comb, but all that does is release compressed air. I saw NO WIRING anywhere on the thing.

     

ICA was filled with works the theme of which was "rejection". One wall was covered with artfully arranged rejection letters. A table had bottles of wine from rejection winery. (Probably the stuff you want to drink when eating crow.) At the back of the room were these four screens showing footage of this woman eating hot dogs until her body rejected them. Look at the expression on her face. At other points in the silent film she is using body language that clearly says "I want to ralph". I'd call her "the hot dog vendor that made me one with everything."

     

Out on the street this woman was recycling plastic bottles and jars into bugs caught in the web. I remember she explained that she had gotten children to make the bugs. She also talked about the dangers of not recycling plastic. Things like that thousand mile wide garbage patch killing the fish of the Pacific Ocean.

Meanwhile, at MACLA there was this wall crawling with transparent cucurachas.

     

I talked to a woman who told me that the raisin box art was inspired by a poster made for the farmworkers struggle back in the 1960s. I think the artist for that is now a Professor at San Jose State. That one had been titled "SUN-MAD RAISINS" and had talked about the exploitation that farmworkers were (and still are) forced to suffer. I enlarged the details. On the actual painting it  the messages are about the right size to look like a box of raisins you'd expect to see at Safeway.

     

When I saw this guy wandering around followed by this blinking robot cart I figured out it was his dog. Either that or his disciple.

        

If you touched your palm to the outstretched hand of the Buddha and dropped a coin in the slot while thinking about something, he would give you a text message to ponder about it.

        

In Anno Domini there was a crew of break dancers taking turns wowing the crowd. They really were a treat to watch.

        

One womans art project was very corny. Not only did she paint the bodies of two people with a corn theme, but her booth had a video of improbable corn footage going in the background. Things like somebody peeling what looked like a banana that turned out to have an ear of corn inside. That big pot of corn is part of (a frame in?) it. The woman holding the object wasn't the main artist, but rather her interpreter just then. I'm not sure who the artist was.

Michelle was mainly beautiful, nice, and a pleasure to talk to.

I enjoyed the evening so much I missed the last train to Mountain View. I ended up having to wait something like 45 minutes for the 22 bus, and then after riding that for something like an hour I had to walk another half an hour to get home. It was very late when I finally got to bed.