Famous Hitch Hikers’ Safety Assured by Fine Art Registry™ Tags — Part 1
by David Charles - 7/17/2006
What? Messrs. Hewlett and Packard and other notable electronics pioneers spotted hitchhiking through Silicon Valley? Are we on LSD? These guys have been dead for years.
No, we are not on drugs. With some of them already on the road, the “Hitchhikers in the Valley of Heart’s Delight” project is already rolling as 5 life-size cut-outs of key pioneers of Silicon Valley in hitchhiking poses, carrying GPS tracking systems and each tagged and registered with the Fine Art Registry make their way, we hope, to their destinations, courtesy of those brave drivers who stop for hitchhikers, even if they are famous scientists and engineers painted on plywood cutouts.
The Show and the Players
Between August 7th and August 13th 2006, ISEA is holding the ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge at the San Jose Museum of Art. You can get all the available information on this upcoming event here: http://01sj.org/.
(ISEA: Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, an international non-profit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and emerging technologies.)
In brief. YLEM wanted to participate in the ISEA show, naturally. (YLEM: San Francisco based organization for artists using science and technology. To find out more about YLEM go here: http://www.ylem.org/). (Make sure you come back. There’s a lot to this project and it’s fascinating as well as being a hoot.)
So Julie Newdoll, Director of Exhibits was told: “Get us a show at the ZeroOne Festival.” (Julie was given this position when she raised her voice and asked for a science and art show so that she could show her own very remarkable art work which combines art and science in very beautiful paintings. http://www.brushwithscience.com/.)
Julie contacted the YLEM membership for ideas. One of the responses was from Jim Pallas, a well-known artist living in Michigan whose main problem in life is getting any work done despite his grandchildren, 15-year old twin girls and a younger lad whose main purpose in life is to use Jim’s studio to make robots whose sole function in life is to crash. He manages to get things done despite them.
Jim said, “I have had a ‘hitchhikers’ project going for years and years, maybe we could do something with that.” Since 1981 Jim has been making plywood, life-size cut-outs of people, painting them with a likeness of the person and then getting them placed by the side of the road somewhere with instructions on the back for whoever stops to pick them up to get them to a specified location. Very successful. http://www.ylem.org/artists/jpallas/BIO/JPBIOINF.HTM (Jim), and http://www.jpallas.com/hh/index.html (hitchhikers).
A plot was hatched. “I thought the concept was hilarious,” recalls Julie. “I came up with the idea of using pioneers of Silicon Valley.” After all, the ISEA ZeroOne conference was bringing digital artists from all over to San Jose, heart of Silicon Valley and birthplace of many of the inventions that these artists are using in their daily work. These people should know why it’s now called Silicon Valley and no longer Valley of the Heart’s Delight and how it is that the plum orchards have been replaced with Intel, Apple, Adobe and all the other high tech companies.
It took quite a while to choose the 5 pioneers that Jim would make into hitchhikers. Eventually it came down to Lee de Forest, Frederick E. Terman, William Shockley, Robert Noyce and David Packard and William Hewlett (hitchhiking together).
The third member of the team of YLEM artists collaborating on the project is Mike Mosher, of community mural fame in San Francisco and now Associate Professor, Art/Communication Multimedia at Saginaw Valley State University, Michigan, from which position he reaches out far and wide with his art which uses computers, hypertext and plywood cut-out kiosks. You can see examples here: http://www.ylem.org/artists/mmosher/Opening.html.
Mike is building a kiosk which will be stationed at the ZeroOne show and will be the public’s main interface with the project. The kiosk features a cut-out of Gordon Moore, a key figure in Intel’s development and one of the individuals considered for the hitchhiker project, only kept off the road because the total number of hitchhikers was limited to 5.
Embedded in the kiosk is a computer screen which provides access to Mike’s hypertext presentations about the pioneers and to maps which track the hitchhikers in their pilgrimages via the GPS phone and tracking system.
There is a fourth member of the team, who volunteered for the project somewhat diffidently and certainly not knowing the full extent of what he was getting into: Mario Wolczko, Julie’s husband, who works at Sun Microsystems and whom she sweet talked into lending his electronic wizardry and expertise to help with the GPS tracking side of the venture, of which more later.
“Much to my surprise and dismay, our exhibit was picked and we had to actually do it,” says Julie, a very good sport who maintains her sense of humor through all the vicissitudes of carrying through a very complicated project full of technical and logistical traps and pitfalls while continuing with her own art projects, while tending to the various needs of her 18 month old baby boy and her 5 year old daughter.
This is the first time that these individuals have collaborated on any kind of project.
...continue article page 2: The Project ›
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