ZERO1 Executive Director Joel Slayton and Jaime Austin - Curator and Director of Programs for ZERO1

ZERO1, the biennial arts and technology festival, announced a massive expansion in its program this year, with more than 100 arts installations Bay Area wide and 40 arts museums, galleries, and studios taking part. The theme this year is “Searching for Silicon Valley.”

The announcement of this year’s program was made at SFMOMA, which is one of many arts organizations that will take part in this year’s festival.

Jaime Austin, Curator and Director of Programs for ZERO1, said that the idea for the theme “Seeking Silicon Valley” came from her experiences from meeting visiting artists at the airport and their wish to see Silicon Valley.

“I would drive them around to the eBay campus, and Yahoo! but there’s nothing much to see, the architecture is like a business park, nothing to distinguish Silicon Valley from anywhere.”

“I also realized that Silicon Valley is as much an idea as it is a place, and that people from all over the world have their idea of Silicon Valley.”

She has partnered with curators from South Korea, London, Amsterdam and Berlin, to help bring together a broad range of artistic opinions on the topic of “Silicon Valley.”

I also spoke with Ben Davis, founder of creative agency Words Pictures Ideas, and the creator of the Bay Lights project, an ambitious $8 million arts project that is part of ZERO1’s program. It will create a light sculpture 500 feet high and 1.5 miles long.

“We’ve raised $5 million so far, we are getting close,” he said. “There’s quite a bit of technology in the project, we’re trying to figure out how to make 25,000 LED lights stretch to make large pixels.”

The Bay Lights

Here is a video of what it will look like:

SVW will be highlighting artists and installations featured at Zero1 over the coming weeks leading up to the opening in San Jose September 12.

Here are some more details: 

ZERO1 Biennial, a dynamic network of more than 100 exhibitions, performances, public art projects and panels that will spread from Silicon Valley throughout the Bay Area and beyond from September 12 through December 8.

Exploring the theme “Seeking Silicon Valley,” the 2012 ZERO1 Biennial, with over 40 new and returning partners, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum, UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media, and Stanford’s Center for Creativity and the Arts, will showcase the work of scores of contemporary artists at the forefront of new media, some collaborating with iconic Silicon Valley companies.

They include such leading figures as:

• Digital artist and designer Jer Thorp.

• Multimedia installation artists Lynn Hershman Leeson, Shu Lea Cheang and Stephanie Syjuco.

• British director and “experience designer” Nelly Ben Hayoun, who’s commissioned work is NASA-inspired.

• German photographer Michael Najjar.

• The international artists’ collective Manifest.AR, which uses mobile augmented reality apps that prompt participants to re-imagine the corporate campuses and products of Silicon Valley.

• Mexican-born media artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, whose interactive video and sound work Frequency and Volume will be on view at SFMOMA as part of the Biennial.

NDS, the TV technology firm Cisco recently bought for $5 billion, was in town for a couple of days this week, ensconced in the W hotel and showing off its vision of TV’s future, which essentially means that this could be a preview of “Cisco TV.”

It was good to catch up with fellow Brits Nigel Smith, chief marketing officer and Nick Thexton, chief technology officer at NDS. It’s their job to figure out how people will be using their TVs so that NDS can provide the technologies that cable TV companies will need to service future subscribers.

Here’s my take and my notes from the demo:

The NDS team were on the third floor of The W hotel in downtown San Francisco, inside a cavernous meeting room, within which they had built an enclosed “living room” filled with the type of electronics  and displays that would likely be found in most homes three to four years from now.

Moving from the expanse of the outer space and into the relatively small living room felt confining and claustrophobic at first, and the massive screen, taking up almost the entire wall in front of the sofa — wasn’t helping matters. But the clarity of the display and the ability to quickly resize the video feeds into small or super-large, helped open up the room. It was surprising how quickly I got used to a massive screen so close to my head.

Messrs. Smith and Thexton believe that most homes will have racks of big screen, borderless LCD displays, tiled across an entire wall. Here are some other predictions:

- Not all content will be viewed at maximum size, morning TV news, for example, would be viewed in a much smaller area. 

- There would be space on the TV Wall for a digital clock, calendar, post-its, etc., (See below.)

- Prime time content such as ‘American Idol’ would have metadata that could trigger tags that change view area size at key places, expanding during dramatic moments. The meta tags would also be used to trigger advertising and other forms of commercial services. 

- The meta tags would be controlled by the TV show producer. (This takes advertising control away from the cable operators, will this be a problem?)

- There will be a bright future for 4K, the super HD technology developed for the movie recording industry. The demo I saw was excellent.

- Our future TVs will not be controlled through touch, or by talking, or by gestures in the air. The controls will be in the remote control tablet. Today’s TV remote is controlled by micro-gestures, a tiny press of the channel button. It makes no sense to replace that with grand gestures, arm waving , etc., Good point.

- The remote control is an iPad or any touch screen tablet. The interface offers easy, slider based controls, and it also doubles as the ’second screen’ allowing web browsing, and for novel forms of TV show interactions.

- The interface NDS has developed runs on Chrome. Even though Google is becoming a competitor in this space, the relationship is defined as ‘co-opetition’ and the two companies have exchanged some TV related technologies.

- The TV content will be made personal through learning what viewers watch. 

- Of course, Twitter comments, Facebook updates, etc can be seen in off-center viewing spaces.

- 22 speaker audio systems will be able to direct audio to listeners, cutting down on room noise.

- Wall TVs could bring the family back around the same screen again, which is something that I miss.

- Various technologies for engaging with adverts, etc., (I’ve never met anyone that wants to engage with an advertisement but their market research is better than mine.)

- Every year they tease me about my being a ‘cord-cutter’ and it’s true, I don’t have a cable TV bill to pay and I haven’t paid one in years. But it wasn’t me that cut the cord, it was Comcast and I saw them do it, it was something to do with my not paying the bill.

I don’t miss Comcast. I now watch all my TV content through an old MacBook Pro sans display, attached via HDMI to my flatscreen TV; and a $10 Radio Shack antenna plucks dozens of crystal clear HD channels out of thin air (better quality than the lossy video compression of cable TV).

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NDS technologies are deeply embedded within the TV distribution infrastructure and this makes it a key player in the “TV War” that’s brewing, the battle for the massive mountain of TV ad dollars that’s motivating a big chunk of the tech sector.

NDS is very focused on the incumbents, the huge cable and telco firms that provide cable TV to the masses. This is precisely the industry that many Silicon Valley tech firms such as Google, Apple, and many others, want to disrupt with their own networks.

Cisco is also very focused on incumbents — cable and telco firms are huge customers. Clearly, there’s a deep split forming in Silicon Valley between the tech companies that want the TV industry disrupted and those that want to keep them in business. Will it become a battle that’s won by the best technologies? …or best business models?

Why Publishers Don’t Like Apps - Technology Review

And Technology Review? We sold 353 subscriptions through the iPad. We never discovered how to avoid the necessity of designing both landscape and portrait versions of the magazine for the app.

We wasted $124,000 on outsourced software development. We fought amongst ourselves, and people left the company. There was untold expense of spirit.

I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.

Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica.

Now we’re redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we’ll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we’ll kill our apps, too.

Publishers can’t afford the app maintenance costs, having to update and support multiple versions is expensive. It’s much better to focus on HTML5 knowing that the tools and the ecosystem will over the coming years provide everything that’s needed to create a web based publication that rivals the functionality of an app — and without forking over 30% of sales to Apple, or anyone else.

However, if you can afford the 30% cut to Apple — it can be a hell of an effective distribution and marketing platform. In some cases it can be a lot more effective than your own marketing and distribution channels.

Kara Swisher at All Things D:

In 2009 Interview, Yahoo CEO Does Not Deny He Has a CS Degree

… Moira Gunn asked him a direct question about his college degrees, specifically noting they were in accounting and computer science.

… “And that’s really the background that I have, and it started back in my college days, and I think that’s really the wonderful part of being an engineer is you think that way,” said Thompson.

Being an engineer in Silicon Valley is essential is you want to lead a tech company or if you want to raise money at a startup. Most VCs, and the majority of Angels will not invest in companies that don’t have tech “lead.”

Also, being an engineer doesn’t necessarily mean you have to have a Computer Science degree. Many top engineers are dropouts, many are self-taught, or took some computer science courses but majored in different subjects.

Mr Thompson clearly felt enormous pressure to play up his engineering credentials because that’s what’s rewarded in Silicon Valley. Yet it’s not academic credentials that mark success in Silicon Valley, it’s leadership and successful exits that matter the most.

He begins by re-stating his original premise: “I believe the internet has been one of the greatest forces for good in the world over the past quarter century.”

He then goes on to say:

Today, the primary threat by far to internet freedom is government filtering of political dissent. This has been far more effective than I ever imagined possible across a number of nations.

Foremski’s Take: The problem with the Internet is that the same methods that a company such as Google uses to monitor its users for clues about what they might purchase next, so it can show relevant ads, can just as easily be used by governments to monitor its citizens for political and oppressive purposes.

“Big Brother” is already here, it’s just masquerading as “Big Sales Assistant.”

The dilemma Google faces is that every bit of progress the company makes in improving the efficiency of the commercial Internet, and thereby improving its profits, unavoidably improves the potential efficiency of governments to exploit those advances for potentially harmful purposes. The technologies and methodologies are both identical as a process.

Governments can simply buy data “off-the-shelf” from Google, and other companies, and instead of using it for commercial reasons such as selling diapers, use it to uncover and track networks of political dissent.

Even easier, governments can force Google to give it data by court order, or passage of laws.

But there are solutions that would greatly hamper any government’s ability to force Google, or other Internet companies, to provide them with data. The data could be “laundered” and anonymized to a far greater degree than is currently done.

Anonymized data still has commercial value, companies don’t need to know “Joe Smith” — the name means nothing, it’s user behavior that counts, and they could still sell Mr Smith a new TV without knowing his name. Governments need names in order to persecute and prosecute dissidents.

While it is theoretically possible to de-anonymize a dataset by cross-mapping against other datasets — it’s not a trivial problem and it would certainly limit what an oppressive government could do.

Yet, despite his concern about people’s freedom and the government monitoring of Internet users, which Mr Brin describes as “dangerous,” Google has made itself into a one-stop data warehouse housing the single largest collection of identifiable data about nearly every Internet user that ever lived. Why subpoena 50 companies when one will do?

Google has become the single largest potential storehouse of data about political dissent yet it has done little to make sure that data can’t be used for harmful purposes.

It’s paradoxical that the US government has fined Google several times for collecting private data when it’s precisely that type of data that would be useful to an oppressive government.

There are other inconsistencies in what it says and does. Google found a way around South Korea’s law that mandates Internet companies collect the real names of users posting comments. Google did this because of concerns about the safety of it’s S. Korean users.

Yet Google insists people use real names for its G+ service, and it has aggregated previously fragmented user data into one, by implementing a unified privacy policy.

How does Mr Brin explain the huge contradiction in his public warnings and Google’s actions in pursuit of its business objectives?

One possible explanation is that there is a deep split on such issues within Google, as there was over its China business. Mr Brin was firmly against Google’s move into China, on which he eventually prevailed, resulting in a retreat from the search market in that country

Maybe Mr Brin doesn’t speak for Google but for himself? In which case his public hand wringing is worth little compared with what he could do within the company. He could harness Google’s army of braniacs to develop new online technologies that could thwart government abuses while at the same time improve commercial applications.

There’s lots Google could do that would protect all Internet users from being harmed by dangerous elements within any government, or any other organized group.

“Do no evil” is a wonderful motto but it’s meaningless if Google allows others to use it for evil.

Why are we reading about products as a news story and not in an ad?

Whenever I look at the tech press it is heavily focused on product reporting; about gadgets, features in apps or online services, and details about underlying technologies in software, hardware, and the Internet.

Product launches, especially by industry heavyweights such as Apple, are examined in great detail; before the launch, in live reports from the launch, and for weeks afterwards.

The product is weighed, it’s specifications checked against the specifications insiders thought it would have; it’s measured and compared endlessly with other products. It’s taken apart and each component catalogued, and journalists report estimates of how much money it cost to make.

Even a product’s color is questioned in news stories, as in the white iPhone that some said was more beige than white.

Vast amounts of product journalism are being produced. Many mainstream newspapers and magazines are beefing up their product news. And multitudes of reporters race to be the first to write up the product specs of a new device.

When and why did this start?

When did journalists decide that it would be a great job, reporting about products?

When did readers start to think it was cool to read endless news stories about products?

There was a time when it wasn’t like this. Reading about products was usually done by reading advertising - reading news about products was rare. How did it change?

Tech journalism became product journalism for one simple reason: it was created.

Tech companies spend 40% and more, of their annual revenues on marketing. Their cost of sales is very high and it amounts to billions of dollars in marketing. But the problem with advertising, as we can see thanks to the Internet, is it doesn’t work that well.

Over the past two decades tech companies have been steadily shifting their substantial marketing funds into public relations, with the express goal to have news stories published about them and their products.

The reason is simple: Advertising is only one-third as effective as a news story about a company or product.

PR is much more efficient than advertising, you get far more marketing bang.

You sell far more product through news stories and that’s what public relations firms do for their clients, they get their story into the media - and these days - into social media too. They help companies sell large amounts of products.

PR spending continues to increase, every PR company I know is booming, hiring like mad. And it’s because the PR firms do their job well, and the tech industry gets what it pays for: lots of news stories about their products. It’s not because the media are independent thinkers.

You’d think the media sites would prefer advertising money for product launches rather than writing about them for free. After all, there are far more interesting stories to write. I’ll share some ideas over the next few weeks. The future of tech journalism is certainly not in product journalism.

It’s not easy being a media company because you need to develop the skills to do it well. But lots of businesses know that they need these capabilities and they are beefing up by adding former journalists, and other media specialists, to their staff.

The media those companies produce is a loss leader, it’s a cost of doing business.

And that’s why media companies lose money, media is a loss leader. But unlike other companies, they have nothing else to sell.

Every company is a media company — but every media company is just a media company — and that’s the problem: they need to also become something else. They now live in a world where they have more competitors than God — it’s no wonder they can’t make money.

Media companies will be able to weather the storm of disruption if they adopt what I call a “Heinz 57″ business model — they have to develop a variety of revenue streams — in addition to how they currently make (or mostly lose) money.

When every company is a media company you’ll lose if all you are is a media company.

(Image by Chris Dichtel.)

The Guardian newspaper’s plans to offer courses in digital media production is an important development and one that should be followed by US newspapers. It would provide much needed revenues to many struggling media businesses.

[Every Company Is A Media Company - The Guardian Newspaper Will Teach You How]

I’ve written many times that the future of journalism is in helping communities, which includes businesses, to tell their stories. Media literacy is important but that’s just one side of the coin: knowing how to produce and publish digital media is just as important, maybe more.

Freedom of speech is worthless if you don’t know how to make it heard. Newspapers know how and they can teach that know-how to others.

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It used to be that you needed a hugely expensive printing press or a TV studio to learn how to create and publish media. The cost of equipment is no longer an issue but the quality of the content is an issue.

The skills needed to create compelling and ethical media are not easy but they can be taught and media companies are in a great position to offer such services.

In the not too distant future we will teach basic media authoring skills to kids as soon as they’ve figured out how to read: how to produce and edit videos, posting on a blog, reporting, interviewing techniques, audio recording, and photography. Then some basic HTML and CSS before middle school.

Media skills will become as common as knowing how to write your name. But in the meantime there’s a good business in teaching those skills to other businesses.

Community newsrooms

US newspapers have a great opportunity to build on what The Guardian is doing, by getting into the education business. There are both public and commercial benefits.

If a city newspaper can teach its communities how to produce great media, it’ll not only create enormous goodwill but also gain access to growing numbers of citizen journalists who know what they are doing — and know how to do it well. The newspaper would get some great content at very little cost.

New business services

Every company is a media company but most don’t know how to be a media company yet this is now an essential competitive requirement. This is a great commercial opportunity for a media company.

The $14,000 per person that The Guardian Media group intends to charge for its courses is not expensive, most corporations have budgets that can afford to pay that and more.

Businesses are desperate for compelling, high quality media that tells their stories authentically.

Currently, businesses turn to PR firms to help them in get their stories published, and to teach them how to work with journalists. All PR firms offer “media training” to their clients but their interest is to control and restrict what’s said — rather than create open communications with the media.

We could do with less of this type of media training. If we have open dialogues between businesses and the general media, we might then be better able to spot big problems early.

Gatekeepers and watchtowers

The financial meltdown in late 2008 led to many questions from politicians, and from the media itself— how come reporters hadn’t seen the financial crisis coming? Why had the media not investigated the business practices of mortgage firms and Wall Street? Why was there so little communication prior to the crisis?

Was this a failure of business reporters to dig deeper? Maybe, but teaching better media communications skills to business executives, especially by a media company instead of a PR firm, would be a step in the right direction.

Storytelling

All businesses want to know how best to tell their stories. Who better to tell them than a media company? Surely it’s better to learn from people that do it everyday instead of those that don’t?

Newspapers could teach executives about how best to contact them, how to talk with them, what they need, how soon they need it, what they should not fear in saying; and educate them about media production, how the news cycle operates, how a newsroom works, the teamwork in producing a news story.

It’s shocking how little business people know about how to speak with the media and how little they know how the media sausage is made. But it’s understandable if they solely rely on PR firms.

Media training by media companies would improve business communications, resulting in greater transparency and light into the world of business. And, imho, it would go a long way in helping separate the word “shady” from its far too common companion: “business practices.”

Natasha Wynarczyk and David Woode report in the Press Gazette that The Guardian will offer training courses in digital journalism at a cost of $14,200 (£9,000 per person).

Richard Lindsay, spokesperson for the Guardian News and Media group, said:

“The Guardian aims to promote open, courageous and professional journalism that can take advantage of the new information systems rather than being threatened by them. That is the primary aim.”

“Often to get the input of people in the industry on a regular basis is difficult but we think we can bring something to these courses. It’s as simple as that – we’ve got something to contribute.”

Well said. The Guardian has a lot to contribute. It has been one of the top pioneers in digital journalism and it has won awards for its publishing and its journalism. This should be a great course.

This is a great idea for US newspapers too. Teaching their communities about digital media production would result in an army of citizen journalists that know what they are doing, and know how to do it well. That would generate some great content for the newspapers.

And teaching local businesses how to interact with the media and how to produce media would also generate content and revenue. $14,000 per person is chump change for many corporations.

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Please see Shel Israel on the same subject: Why the Enterprise Needs a Few Good Journalists - Forbes

Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco

I love any excuse to go to the Palace of Fine Arts and visit The Exploratorium – two of my favorite places in San Francisco.

On the first Thursday of every month The Exploratorium hosts its “After Dark” series of unique events. This month the theme was ‘Gastronomy’ looking at the science and the art of creating food. Several thousand people turned up for lectures, tastings, demonstrations, and to play around with The Exploratorium’s marvelous, hands-on science exhibits.

The theme reminded me of the incredible, and very much under-appreciated importance that the invention of gastronomy has had, both on our development as a species and in developing our civilization - no other technology has done the same.

The development of cooking food had a monster effect on our ancestors. Cooking unlocked vast amounts of hidden nutrition in raw foods.

The development of the cooking pot literally blew our minds - our brains jumped in size and our bellies shrank – which made us smarter and also better looking.

All that extra food energy went straight to growing and fueling our brains, which need 24/7 glucose, our highest octane food fuel and burn 25% of our calories.

The cooking pot allowed us to build a Ferrari of a brain, expensive to maintain but incredible in performance. We left the other primates in the dust and now we’re on the doorstep of our next big leap, into some sort of mixed biological digital world.

If gastronomy hadn’t been invented there would be no civilization, science, arts, building of big things, or development of semiconductor and computer technologies because we wouldn’t have the time for it.

It turns out that it’s very difficult to digest a full day of energy from raw food. 2500 calories is a shockingly large volume of raw vegetables, salads, berries, fruits, etc.

An experiment at Bristol zoo in the UK, with human volunteers agreeing to eat a raw food diet for the summer, had to be shut down after a few weeks because the people were losing so much weight they were becoming malnourished and it could have led to serious health problems. They simply could not chomp, chew, and swallow enough raw food during the day to meet their nutritional needs.

The evidence is that we evolved alongside the cook pot and we become sickly without it, it’s a technology that’s absolutely vital to our well being.

Outsourcing our stomachs

The development of gastronomy essentially created an external stomach that helped us to extract the maximum nutrition from what low-energy food. Less time eating raw food left more time for hunting animals, whose rich and highly nutritious flesh and organs further accelerated our brain growth.

It’s humbling to think of the enormous effect on our lives and evolution that the simple cooking pot has had. It surely must rank as the single most important technology ever invented.

Today we are in the midst of our next big step - outsourcing some of the work of our brains to external machines. We’ll see massive changes and at a faster pace than those from the patient cooking pot.

What will come from our increasing, and ultimately inevitable collision of our biology with our technology?

What new inventions and behaviors will this bio-digital future produce? What types of new cultures and societies will arise? (Stanislaw Lem, the Polish science fiction writer brilliantly explores these types of futures in “Cyberiad” and in many other books.)

What does the economy look like in a future world where manufacturing technologies are 10,000 times more productive at 1,000th of the cost? What happens if only 10 percent of the population working can produce the needs of all 100%? That’s where we’re headed, and beyond, thanks to the good old cooking pot.

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Finding my way around the Gastronomy event was made a lot easier thanks to my guide, Quynth Tran, a former newspaper reporter now working on the public communications team at The Exploratorium.

She says that the After Dark Series has been very successful and the concept has been followed by other museums. The California Academy of Sciences set up a competing Thursday night event called ”Nightlife.” (My favorite evening museum event is the superb “Friday Nights” series at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park.)

The place was filled with a lively, curious, and great looking crowd. Ms Tran says that the After Dark evenings will become weekly when The Exploratorium moves to a new location in the Embarcadero.

I had a great time and it was welcomingly Geek-free – my “Highlight” app barely blipped all night.

If you want to leave the echo chamber for some very enjoyable hours, this is a great place to come on the first Thursday of the month in San Francisco.

Next month the theme is ”The World of Your Senses.”

The US premiere of a special exhibition of Tibetan thangka style paintings and engage with Tibetan monks from India to explore sensory perception through Buddhist and scientific perspectives.

Here are some photos from the Gastronomy evening:

(Photos by Tom Foremski.)