01SJ Biennial: Build Your Own World

Nancy Nowacek, a former Metropolis art director, set up shop creating her Office for Movement Advancement and Research. Squared in by weighted banker boxes, Nowacek set up a standard office--desk, task chair, file cabinets--and covered them in a dirt-like granite. "The idea is to create a possible office for the future by burying the office of today," she says.

+ View Full Sized Image

The "Flinestonification of the office," as Nowacek calls it, requires "crawling, scrambling, kneeling, and readjusting." As a result, she and her staff--who worked on the pile of dirt for the full two weeks--found that moving around throughout the day and being engaged in their activities and space meant they made and needed coffee far less often than when working in their office.

+ View Full Sized Image

All Raise This Barn, West, a project by MTAA, proposes how to build a community when a quintessential community-building event--barn raising--no longer occurs. Here, the artists polled people online to decide how the barn would be built, asking what color it should be and even "Should this barn be a barn?".

+ View Full Sized Image

TechShop, Inc built a temporary workspace in the center of the South Hall to provide artists the tools needed to build their exhibits. TechShop is a member-based workshop with locations in Menlo Park, California, and Durham, North Carolina, with shops opening in Detroit, Michigan, and San Francisco and San Jose, California.

+ View Full Sized Image

Mexican artist collective DreamAddictive, founded by Leslie Garcia and Carmen Gonzalez, created OpenSolarCircuits for the biennial. Powered by solar energy, each box produces a different sound, that changes when one moves closer to or further from the sensor.

+ View Full Sized Image

The project encourages "social interactions," Garcia says, "because you have to control the piece in a group."

+ View Full Sized Image

Examining the ways in which art and technology intersect, Victoria Scott and Scott Kildall created the Gift Horse: a 13-foot-tall Trojan Horse filled with models of Trojan Horse computer viruses.

+ View Full Sized Image

Visitors were encouraged to create models of computer viruses such as the ILOVEYOU virus or Koobface Facebook virus, as well as physical illnesses such as smallpox or H1N1. The Gift Horse was filled with the models, paraded to the San Jose Museum of Art, and had its belly split open, allowing the viruses to spill to the floor, for public exhibition.

+ View Full Sized Image

In Name Your Price, artists from the University of California, Santa Cruz' Digital Arts and New Media program asked visitors what influenced their clothing decisions and showed ways to reuse garments, such as cutting sweaters into lengths and weaving them into a rug, as shown here.

+ View Full Sized Image

At the far end of South Hall, Todd Chandler and Jeff Stark created the Empire Drive-In. The duo built a functioning movie theater using entirely salvaged materials, from the 25 cars from a junk yard (wired so sound came through the FM radios) to the wood used to hold up the screen. Throughout the festival, it served as the theater for daytime screenings and evening events.

+ View Full Sized Image

In 2006, Monica Haller created the War Veteran's Book Workshop to help those affected by the Iraq War share their stories. Over the course of ten days at the biennial, she worked with five veterans to create five soft-bound, print-on-demand memoirs.

+ View Full Sized Image

During the main weekend, Haller opened the pages of the books and the process of making a War Veteran's Book in a small library she created in the South Hall.

+ View Full Sized Image

Artist Nova Jiang created Archipelago, a series of "mobile desert islands" (they can all be ridden around by the hidden bikes underneath). Jiang invited visitors to ask a question on a piece of paper, put it into a recycled bottle, and slip it into a hole in each island. Each paper was marked with an ID code for the writer to enter at urban-archipelago.net to retrieve answers from the site's readers.

+ View Full Sized Image

For solarCircus, Tiffany Holmes invited attendees to participate in workshops in which they were encouraged to hack solar-powered hobby kits to "make a miniature kinetic city," she says. "The goal is to promote environmental stewardship.

+ View Full Sized Image

During the weekend parade, Holmes carted around the mini solar city on a wagon, letting the little creations whiz and flap behind her.

+ View Full Sized Image