The first thing I saw as part of Zero-One San Jose (01SJ) was a talk about cities by Stuart Brand. He talked about cities, and how low income people need to be able to live near where they work. That is not the way it is for the rich. He said good things about letting cities develop organically, because too much regulation prevents human intuition from making their world a comfortable place to stay.

The next 01SJ thing for me was not until the next evening. That was first Friday, and this time it was part of 01SJ. Instead of just having the galleries open, there was a whole street fair. I didn't take pictures of a lot of it. The first thing that inspired me to take out my camera was the stationary art car parade.

  

The art on this car is glued on old coins, pebbles, shotgun shells, found objects, and eWaste (circuit boards).



     

ICA had a booth where they were putting a glow in the dark stylized ICA on your shirt if you took it off for them. I figured why not, and got them to upgrade the front of my shirt.

  



I like that "LEGALIZE FREEDOM" sticker. For some reason it reminds me of that one I saw on Hope St. that went something like "OBEY THE LAWS OF PHYSICS".

 

In the gallery ICA had a model of the moon with an assortment of signs of habitation. People were offered tools to make art of the thing for half an hour. Then our pictures would be collected together. Later they would be put in a digital world named Second Life, in a gallery on an island named Artopolis. I drew a picture of the Tree Museum, so at least theoretically you can see the first picture I've drawn in (maybe) decades there. Probably mine is the only picture from the set with "TREE MUSEUM" on the side of a guitar body shaped building on stilts in big letters. It was a pleasure to stand at an easel and draw. There was a guy wandering around filming the event, so the random strangers doing art were also part of another art project to. If you see an overweight guy in an orange POWER TO THE PEACEFUL shirt and an IMPEACH CHENEY cap in that film, it was probably me.

  

There was a table where a woman was wagering her rocks, paper, or scissors against your (whatever you wanted to put up). The deal was three rounds of that old game I know as Rock, Paper, and Scissors. First one to get two victories gets the haul. I put up a MEND YOUR FUELISH WAYS sticker against her plastic scissors that cut with a wavy line.  I beat her and won the scissors. While we were doing this Jamie found a cool pair of folding scissors and fell in love with them. She made me sweeten the pot, because those cost more. I added in three different deception dollars to the sticker, and she went for that deal. Jayme beat her to. We both got scissors we wanted for what felt like nothing.

I went by later and she had collected a bunch of pens. I wished that she had won the sticker, because then it would have been seen on her table by quite a few people. The variety would have added something. Oh well...



  

If I had taken that picture of the woman holding the balloon just a few minutes later the glow from the stick in her other hand would not have been drowned out by the setting sun. I went back later, but she was gone, leaving only the moon thing she had been part of. The perfect picture was probably taken just a few minutes after I took this one.

     

MACLA had the most political art of all the galleries I saw.

  

There was another booth where they were adding details about landmarks that are no longer there to Google maps. I wrote up the footsteps I left in wet cement on Democracy Boulevard in Bethesda, Maryland, back in the mid 1970s. The woman behind the desk had a fabulously detailed satellite image of the place, and we zoomed in until there was so much detail it was easy to click in a yellow marker on about the right spot. Jane was ahead of me in line, and she did something similar with the place in Missouri where her father got married. They had just as much detail there. It knocked my sox off.

     

Graffiti Research Labs had a number of interesting things that boiled down to projecting stuff on the sides of big buildings. In the parking lot outside Anno Dominae people were drawing graffiti on the side of the office building using a green laser pointer. The computer was sensing their lines and telling the projector what to put up. People were putting up all kinds of rude, crude, and interesting things. There was an art party gathered around that one. At another they were taking pictures of people and typing their home city's into the image and putting that up. I can't remember another time a head shot of me filled the side of a three story building. Now I wish I'd taken a picture of it. Then you could share that microsecond of fame with me.