This week marks the birth of what could ostensibly be called my third child. ZeroOne San Jose: A Global Festival of Art on The Edge burst onto the scene Monday with great fanfare. This Festival has been in the making for nearly six years. I founded ZeroOne (originally Ground Zero) in 2000 as my Henry Crown Fellowship community project and immediately hired Beau Takahara to get it off the ground. We had a fabulous opening at the Tech Museum and then the world fell apart. The crash crushed Silicon Valley that year and a few short months later, 9/11 happened and made an already bleak situation in the Valley even bleaker. The press began calling the World Trade Center site “Ground Zero” and it became apparent we had to change our name. We donated our URL to a non-profit organization doing good work for the victims of 9/11 and decided, rather quickly, on the moniker “ZeroOne.”

Despite our successful launch, ZeroOne: The Art and Technology Network, began to suffer from many of the financial woes besieging the rest of Silicon Valley. Our grand plan for a Center for Art and Technology in San Jose had to be put on hold as we attempted to keep the organization afloat during the dark age. We set about a programming strategy of holding lectures and salons on the subject of art and technology and to work to support a single artist, Bill Viola, in a new piece he imagined using video game technology. We received some funding from passionate donors and thanks to the tireless work and self sacrifice of our director Beau, we persevered.

All the while, a dream swirled in our heads. We should do an art and technology festival in San Jose. Why not? San Jose is the capital of innovation in technology. Creativity is central to innovation. Art is an inspiration for creativity. There’s magic at the intersection of art and technology. No one else in the United States is doing it. No better place than San Jose. Let’s give it a shot!

We then began to talk up the idea to a handful of other organizations in Silicon Valley and settled on a collaboration with the San Jose Seven: the City of San Jose, Cultural Initiatives Silicon Valley, the San Jose Convention and Visitors Bureau, the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose State University, the Tech Museum of Innovation and ZeroOne: The Art and Technology Network. Around the same time, the group decided to put in a bid to host the 2006 Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA) Symposium. If we won the bid, we’d use it as an opportunity to sell the community on an art and technology festival. The San Jose Seven coughed up some money and we hired Steve Dietz to write the proposal to host ISEA in San Jose and to help with the development of a Festival concept. We must have been very prescient, because not only did Steve’s proposal win the bid to host ISEA here in San Jose, but Steve’s leadership convinced the San Jose Seven to cough up even more money and hire him to make the Festival idea a reality.

At this point, the group was real and it no longer made sense to be a team of seven separate organizations trying to put on a Festival. The solution? ZeroOne: The Art and Technology Network went through an evolution. We changed our board to accommodate a senior person from each of the San Jose Seven organizations, hired Steve Dietz to run it and began the long commitment to raise $2 million for a festival of art and technology.

Here we are, now, in the midst of the Festival. The money has been raised. The programming is underway . The artists are here. The performances are on schedule. It looks to be a great success for all of us involved from the beginning and certainly for the City of San Jose which is on a journey to becoming a cultural capital in the United States. I feel like a very proud parent.

There are many, many people to thank for this unbelievable effort. Here are a few: Beau Takahara for her persistence, Steve Dietz for his leadership, Michela Pilo for being there, Wanda Webb for her wheeling and dealing, Kim Cook for the marketing and PR, Joel Slayton for his vision, creativity and brains, Kim Walesh for her ability to juggle a million things and remain sane, Dan Keegan for his spokesmanship, Peter Giles for coming up with “A Global Festival of Art on the Edge,” John Kreidler for working the foundations, Greg Brown for his experience, Tim Brown for IDEO, Katrinna Ella for watching the numbers, Glenn Edens for his financial wisdom, Dan Fenton for seeing the big picture, Joi Ito for providing international advice, Michael Naimark for his artistic genius, Jeremy Hartman for his positioning work, Kathleen Bowden and Joan Stone for holding the bag, Deborah Rappaport for seeing the vision, Len Shustek and Donna Dubinsky for their commitment to art and technology, Rand Siegfried for putting up with me, Kevin Texeira for his insight and relationship with Bill Viola, Andy Steen for her oversight of me, Steven Brewster for going the extra 10 miles, Gordon Knox for the Montalvo relationship, Stephanie Paulson for her patience, Stacey Fischer for her artistic vision, Keith Berwick for the Henry Crown Fellowship Program at the Aspen Institute, Chuck Allison for mentoring me, CXO Communication for its creative support, Amy Critchett for the early days, Jane Metcalfe for her enduring support, Ron Ricci and Randy Pond for their service to the city, Michelle Mann and Miguel Salinas for being the first to believe, Geoff Kerr for his pigeon persistence, Michelle Wilcox, Norio Sugano, Ed Frank and Joel Birnbaum for hosting us at their beautiful homes, Dan’l Lewin and John Volkmann for hosting lectures, and all of our wonderful sponsors including Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, Barco, Comerica Bank, IDEO, Knight-Ridder, Hotel Montgomery, Paragon Restaurant, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Hewlett-Packard, Arts Council England, NEC Corporation of America, Divco West Properties, Sun Microsystems Inc., National Endowment for the Arts, Camera Cinemas, James Irvine Foundation, Council for Cultural Affairs—Taiwan, Flora Family Foundation, On-Net Surveillance Systems, American Airlines, Applied Materials, IBM, Mondriaan Foundation, Amsterdam, Morgan Family Foundation, eBay Foundation, 1stAct Silicon Valley, Brothaman/Stablished, goCar, Smart Design, Steelcase, Yamaha, Swiss Arts Council, Asian Cultural Council, Community Foundation Silicon Valley, Emfit, Horn Murdock Cole, Intel, the Knight Foundation, SAP, Habitat New Media Lab, Cycling ‘74, Plum Voice Portals, Joe Miller’s Company, British Council USA, Arts Council Silicon Valley, FileMaker, Inc., Magellan, Unwired Appeal, VMI Broadcast and Professional Video, Goethe-Institut San Francisco, San Jose Blue, Intellisys Technology, French Embassy, Axis Communications, The Canada Council for the Arts, Lockheed Martin, Steelcase Foundation, Catered Too!, LiteScape Technologies, Inc., Pietra Santa Winery, The Art Ark/The Core Companies, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, Gordon Biersch Brewing Company, CompUSA, E & O Trading Company and The Pita Pit.

We finally made it!