“San José Semaphore” is an art installation at the Adobe corporate headquarters in downtown San Jose.
Located within the top floors of Adobe’s Almaden Tower headquarters, Semaphore consists of four ten-foot wide illuminated disks composed of 24,000 Luxeon® LEDs donated by Philips Lumileds in San Jose. The disks continually shift and turn, engaging viewers on a visual and kinetic level while providing a steady, glowing, and purposefully moving presence on the San Jose skyline. The giant illuminated disks rotate to a new position every eight seconds and pulse out a message using a visual coding system that is intended to be deciphered. An online audio broadcast will provide a soundtrack of spoken and sung letters, numbers and musical tones that may help decode the message. A low-power radio broadcast also provides the soundtrack, audible within 2-3 blocks of the Almaden Tower on AM 1680. Cracking the coded message is posed as a challenge for the public.
Intended as a meditation on the coded nature of communication, Semaphore’s illuminated disks can each assume four distinct positions: vertical, horizontal, and left and right-leaning diagonal. With four wheels and four positions each, Semaphore has a vocabulary of 256 possible combinations, creating a way of communicating its encrypted message, known only to the artist and those involved with the installation. Cracking Semaphore’s coded message will be posed as a challenge for the public. Challenge details are posted online at www.sanjosesemaphore.org.
The digital artwork is designed to be visible from many streets, freeways and local buildings and will become a significant feature of the San Jose skyline. Commissioned by Adobe in collaboration with the San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs, San José Semaphore engages the public with transmission of a coded message. The artwork’s unveiling coincided with the beginning of ZeroOne San Jose: “A Global Festival of Art on the Edge” showcasing digital art from around the world August 7-13, 2006.
Adobe’s Almaden Tower is situated directly beneath the flight path for aircraft landing at the Mineta San José International Airport, and the San José Semaphore is sensitive to the passage of aircraft above it. When a plane flies overhead, Semaphore reacts visibly to the disturbance, and its steady rhythm is broken. After the plane has passed, the disks resume their steady, purposeful transmission.
Semaphore was created by noted new media artist Ben Rubin, whose exhibitions have appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Skirball Center in Los Angeles (in a show organized by the Getty Museum). Rubin teaches at the Yale School of Art and is represented in New York by the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery.
The San José Semaphore pays homage to a century-old local landmark called the San José Electric Light Tower, erected at the intersection of Santa Clara and Market Streets in 1881 by local businessman J. J. Owen to illuminate downtown San José. The light tower remained a beloved presence above downtown San José until it blew down in a 1915 windstorm.
San José Semaphore also connects contemporary digital systems with the earliest practical telecommunications network: the Chappe semaphore telegraph developed in France in the late 18th century. The Chappe system employed a visual code created by the Chappe brothers that used wooden panels, moved manually by ropes and pulleys, to transmit messages between relay towers 5-6 miles apart.
Modern digital communications use coding systems that trace their lineage back to this earliest system of “high-speed” data transmission. Morse code, binary ascii character representations, and ultimately Adobe’s PostScript all represent evolutionary leaps from Claude Chappe’s original code.
San José Semaphore is part of the City of San Jose Public Art Collection. The work is 70-feet (21.3M) long and 10-feet (3M) tall, and situated on the 18th and 19th floors of Adobe’s Almaden Boulevard office tower. The San José Semaphore is visible from Interstate 87, and from a large part of downtown San José California.
http://www.sanjosesemaphore.org
During summer and fall of 2006, the San José Semaphore operates daily from 7 a.m. until 2 a.m., 7 days a week. Its hours of operation may change; please visit the web page for up-to-date information.
