Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart's Delight
a multi-site artwork created by a team of YLEM members for the ZeroOne Electronic Arts Festival, San Jose, 2006
| YLEM - Artists using Science and Technology presents
Pioneers Hitchhiking in the Valley of Heart's Delight
a multi-site artwork created by a team of YLEM members for the ZeroOne Electronic Arts Festival, San Jose, 2006 Hitchhiker concept and sculptures by Jim Pallas.
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TechnoHitchhikers dug the Valley. They came, by train or car or were born here, and conquered. Their inventions delight us all. |
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Cue up Marvin Gaye's "Hitchhike", for a so-called Motown boy—your author—blithely thumbed around New England in my collegiate 1970s, a habit given up upon hearing tales of disappearing California hitchhikers when I moved west.
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Current location of all released hitchhikers based on the GPS tracking data they are sending our way - Lee de Forest, Hewlett and Packard, Frederick Terman, William Shockley and Robert Noyce. Full size wooden cutouts of these men were equipped with GPS units. A note on their back requests passers-by to help them reach a destination in Silicon Valley. They begin in places throughout the US related to their history. To see maps that include GPS points along their routes, read on. Overview here. |
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From San Francisco we relocated to Silicon Valley—where the computer graphics work was to be found—in 1988. By then I drove a 1965 Cadillac Coupe de Ville from our apartment complex parking lot to the corporate ones. We arrived in time to witness the Valley's final defruiting, deorcharding; Orchard Supply Hardware soon bowed its overall'd knee to Fry's Electronics and Weird Stuff Warehouse. It's not my fault! We moved out of the Valley in 2000, back to my home state Michigan, crossing the country in a 1995 Firebird with a fistful of good CDs given us by the KFJC-FM Los Altos Hills disk jockey called "Ann Arbor" (coincidentally, David Packard's birthplace!). Now back in Michigan from whence I began, I watch the auto industry further contract and spread dissolution and anguish through rustbelt industrial communities like Flint, Saginaw and Bay City. This summer I'm called back to the Valley by its pioneers... |
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3. William Hewlett and David Packard 5. Gordon Moore 7 Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak |
 Updated December 21, 2006 Sun Microsystems donates Hewlett and Packard to The Tech Museum in San Jose! |
Travelogue by Julie Newdoll December 8, 2006: The beginning of a hopefully happy ending. The Tech Museum in San Jose announced they would like to be the permanent home for the hitchhikers. If you would like to donate to The Tech to help make this exhibit a reality, please contact us: |
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Copyright © 2006 Julie Newdoll, Jim Pallas, Mike Mosher, Mario Wolczko
