Peace Release
September 10, 2010

ZOROP Seeks World Peace On the Streets of San Jose
Game Blurs Line Between Art and Social Change at 01SJ Biennial

SAN JOSE, Calif. – San Jose-based game designer Ken Eklund (SCU ’79) and London artist Annette Mees announce their latest collaboration – ZOROP – which premieres September 17-18, 2010 at the 3rd 01SJ Biennial in downtown San Jose, CA.

ZOROP is an experimental game, a playful investigation to discover the hidden connections and experiences shared among strangers on the street, and visualize them in a beautiful interactive map that develops and grows throughout the duration of the 01SJ festival.

Friendly Zoropathians Make Connections

Strangers meet, or they don’t. They hit it off, or they don’t. The connection lasts, or it doesn’t. It’s a trivial event, except that it isn’t; every friend and lover was once a stranger. ZOROP uses play to catalyze connections among people in a quixotic tilt at transforming the persistent meme of World Peace into an unstoppable one.

At 01SJ, a cadre of volunteer Zoropathians don bright scarves and head out into the streets, encouraging people who don’t know each other to connect and discover hidden things they have in common – mutual friends, a shared passion, coincidental intersections. The Zoropathians classify each of these connections and map them using the best 3D technology they can afford, feeding the information into a visualization display in the South Hall venue.

World Peace

As part of their ongoing artistic collaboration, Mees and Eklund explored the outer edges of recorded thought about the concept of “world peace”. Their convoluted journey took them past reluctant saints, synesthesiacs, the Pantoglyphs, and an obscure philosopher named Zorop who provided them with a seductively simple idea. As Mees puts it, “What if everyone could see the hidden attributes and experiences they share with other human beings? If people could see the connections and how much they tighten the weave of our social fabric, would disagreement and conflict fade away? Could shared understanding be the key to world peace?” Eklund adds, “So maybe spreading the meme of World Peace comes down to a data visualization problem”.

Could it be that simple?

Mexican Party Bus

In addition to the opportunity to contribute to the spread of World Peace, partcipants in the grand ZOROP experiment will have the chance to tour the 01SJ Biennial on a festive Mexican Party Bus. As Eklund says, “We think we have found the keystone that every other peace effort has been missing…”

About ZOROP

Zoropathic connections transcend the physical world. Connect and learn more about ZOROP:

@ZoropPrime on Twitter (http://twitter.com/zoropprime)

ZOROP on Facebook (http://facebook.com/pages/Zorop/141140772593618)

ZOROP main site (http://zorop.org)

ZOROP at 01SJ (http://01sj.org/2010/artworks/zorop/)

ZER01 has commissioned ZOROP for the 3rd 01SJ Biennial, and presents it with the support of the James Irvine Foundation.

About the Artists

Ken Eklund (@writerguygames) is a game designer and thought leader in the area of serious games and collaborative gameplay for the social good. He is the creator of the award-winning World Without Oil, a landmark massively collaborative alternate reality game, and was team lead on EVOKE, “a ten-week crash course on changing the world” for the World Bank Institute. Eklund lives in San Jose, CA. He graduated from Santa Clara University in 1979.

Annette Mees (@annettemees) is an artist and theatre maker. She makes stories that create interactions between people and places, combining technology, live performance and theatre, always making the audience the hero. Mees is part of Coney, an agency for adventure and play, and is director of The Performance Lab, an ensemble dedicated to deepening audience engagement in original settings. She is co-artistic director on Interludes, a cross-disciplinary project developing new ways of telling stories using technology and performance. She was recently awarded the WGGB Theatre Encouragement Award for her work with writers and was also named one of the artists to watch in 2009 by Courvoisier’s Future 500.

Two years ago Ken and Annette met as strangers on a sidewalk in New York, both looking for the same party. They have talked about things they have in common ever since.

Editorial contacts:

Ken Eklund, ZOROP

writerguy@writerguy.com

Annette Mees, ZOROP

annette@youhavefoundconey.net

Jaime Austin, ZER01

jaime@zero1.org