The first thing I saw coming out of the San Jose train station was this flock of digital sheep and the big ewe in the barn. The whole walk from there to downtown was scattered with art. Every hundred yards or so there'd be another one. The docent that didn't want her picture taken gave me a writeup that I sort of glanced at. Mostly I just looked for stuff I wasn't used to seeing. There was lots.

     

I had the impression before I got to the underpass that I was going to be looking at homeless shelters. Instead I was looking at sealed bird houses with digital chirping noises coming out of them. Nice how they separated the red and green ones by as much as possible. Interesting how the white house was the only one out in the full light of day.

  

      

That's my world on the right. I use it figure out where someplace is and look up names I hear on the radio and so forth. Let me empower you to fill your world with Helium thoughts!

  

The stage had some Vietnamese cultural celebration going on. They also had a booth selling $2 Vietnamese sandwiches to all comers. Great deal!

Those Vietnamese Army ROTC types were helping people fold paper cranes. They had the nicely colored paper and everything else.

   


   

That stump has two seats, the upper one about six feet off the ground. Not sure I'd want to pedal from up there, even with the training wheels.

        

The pedal powered sound system sounded really good. The stop was about promoting the bicycle music festival.

The guy that took this picture just wanted to feel the buttons on that turn of the millennium technology camera I was using. He told me the story of having one way back when. I told him that I like the way it can take lots of pictures and not use up much space on my hard disk. I thanked him for taking this picture before he wandered off.

   

The flowers growing in that flower pot were just another fossil fuel based illusion. Pretty though.

     

That chalk board on wheels had enough cues that it was clear you were supposed to put good ideas for your community on it. There were lots of parties on the suggestion board. Block party! Skate party! The only one that was an URL was BikeParty.org. There were also just plain good suggestions. Stuff like "take transit to work" and "eat a peach".

Those white things are all solar powered. Not sure I can explain what they all do, but they were small compared to the real things they symbolized. I got a giggle out of the solar powered windmill.

The Mobile Arts Platform was a stage for a group that was helping people plant their own spice gardens. Things like rosemary plants. They didn't want their pictures taken. One of them was that interesting woman. The one that went by Saturday for a while. Then she said she was going to Minnesota. Then she came back. Or maybe she put it off. Anyhow, now (or at least then) she's a MAPer.

 

They had this Rube Goldberg bicycle based contraption in a couple of parking spots. It was using human power to run a hot dog cooker that was powering the bicyclists. After you pedal for a while they give you a yummy sausage sandwich that came with this label. Reading it reminded me that though I didn't pedal far to get it, the ingredients went 4,541 miles to come to me.

 

This woman (an artist) had gotten 42 "sperm" (bicyclists with flagella on their helmets and suits that puffed up in any breeze) to chase this "egg" (mobile human powered bush) as part of the green prix parade. It was the art communities replacement for that Grand Prix they used to do.

  

People were lined up take a turn riding this thing.

This was a pedal powered karaoke setup. The idea was you'd pick a song and pedal the power to make it come out of the speakers. There were lots of cassettes to pick from.

  

   

Outside the Modern Art Museum there was this old piano set up. These kids were doing a good job on some tune they probably had just learned from their piano lessons. Inside the museum the only thing I was allowed to take pictures of was the Trojan Horse. I gather that had something to do with the Green Prix to.

The Vietnamese festival was still going strong when I came out of the Art Museum. This act was good looking Karaoke dancers. The song they were doing was awesomely sexy and very rapish. Their dancing was well choreographed and a pleasure to watch.

        

That fueling station is a solar powered battery charger for cell phones. If I'd have brought the charger maybe I could have plugged in my camera. Luckily I had plenty of charge.

That shoe and mouse hanging by a thread were part of an interactive exhibit trying to get people to think about the trade offs between going outside and on-line. It was one of those places where I got more "I get it" out of talking to the artist than I got from looking at the art.

South Hall was a huge and cavernous space. There were lots of interesting stops, but I'd gotten there a bit late for some of the artists.

For example this driving game. Nobody was there to explain it.

The most interesting stop was a DIY machine shop in Menlo Park. They have staff that will work with you to design a project if you're not sure what you're doing. They also have LOTS of good machine tools. One of them is a numerically controlled laser cutter. The customer makes a "command file" for it and puts in a sheet to be cut. The above is a piece of cardboard that got turned into an eagle. The machine would have cut Plexiglas just as well. To find out more visit TechShop.ws.

     

Rethinking fashion to make it more sustainable. What a concept!

    

The end of the big tent had been done up as the Empire Drive In, a ghost theater. The seating was a couple of dozen trashed junkers, lit just enough to be shapes you wouldn't jam your shin on accidentally. There were also a few lawn chairs. The show wasn't much, footage of a raven browsing around a porch. Supposedly there was going to be a cello concert in a couple of hours, but I had to be gone by then.

  

The last thing I saw were these excerpts from a movie this director was previewing at ZeroOne. Before rolling the stories the guy explained he had set out to do a movie about Climate Change, but there was no way to get a good story from negotiations like Copenhagen. He had given up on that and figured out that talking about food was a better way to move forward that acheived the same strategic objectives. The movie excerpts were about people who had found their own answers to industrial agriculture. Jim was a guy turned his back yard in Berkeley into a farm, complete with goats, rabbits, and chickens. Jessica made a community kitchen where they use everything local and a lot of volunteer labor to make delicious and nutritious food. Her business model worked because it was an effort by the community for the community. Joy made a plot of land into a teaching garden, where she showed low income kids how to grow and prepare food. I'm looking forward to seeing the whole movie when it comes out.