Project Description

Quest for Success was a performance competition event that spanned four days during the 2006 ISEA/ZeroOne Festival. During the event, 15 artist/competitors utilized locative media to navigate the streets of San Jose, California, in an effort to win a valuable, 6-week residency at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, California.

As passengers in GPS enabled Go Cars, the competitors followed navigational clues to search for narrative hotspots located about the city’s downtown core. Each hotspot triggered an audio track played over the cars’ audio systems, telling the competitors historical tidbits about the city. The number of hotspots discovered determined the number of minutes available to competitors for giving their project pitches to groups of internationally recognized curators in the C5 Limousine. After three nights of competition, three semifinalists participated in the final competition - they had 5 minutes to deliver their proposals before a large public audience.

This project utilized locative technology in a reality TV-like competition format to explore historical narrative and make commentary on the competitive networking inherent in art-world latter climbing.