Digital Be-In
Inspired by the spirit of the original Human Be-In held on January 14 1967 at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the Digital Be-In has been an annual "gathering of the cyber tribes," showcasing art and conscience at the heart of the digital revolution.The latest version of the event, Digital Be-In 13: "The Transparent Network" — happened May 29, 2004 at SOMARTS in San Francisco.

Be-In 13 Photo Gallery

What is a Be-In?
A “conscious party.”
A Happening.
A Gathering of the Tribes!
A prayerful memorial.
Humans “being in” together.
 
The Digital Be-In
The original Human Be-In was held on January 14, 1967 in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, co-organized by many groups to bridge the philosophical gap between the Haight Ashbury hippies, who favored peaceful protest to counter the Vietnam War-mongering, and the Berkeley radicals who professed a more forceful approach. Playing on the sunlit stage that day at the Polo Fields were the Grateful Dead – along with, as the poster proclaimed, “All San Francisco Rock Bands” – plus Allen Ginsberg and other Beats reading poetry… and Timothy Leary voicing his soundbite of the decade: “Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out.” It was the original Gathering of the Tribes, and although it was actually a relatively modest event of 10-15000 or so people, it catalyzed the now-legendary Summer of Love in San Francisco and Be-Ins and Sit-Ins and Love-Ins worldwide.

During the 1990s the annual Digital Be-In, begun as a party organized by the cyber-art journal Verbum during the January MacWorld Exposition in San Francisco, galvanized the higher ideals of the digital age, helping to infuse humanistic values in the design of the early digital tools and systems. Leary, who championed the Digital Be-In and appeared there several times, updated his famous declaration via pre-recorded video for the 1995 Tokyo Digital Be-In: “Turn On, Intertune In, Shine Out!”

Human Be-In co-organizers Allen Cohen (publisher of San Francisco Oracle newspaper) and Chet Helms (founder of Family Dog and Avalon Ballroom) have been joined onstage at the Digital Be-In by such luminaries as Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown, Aldus Pagemaker founder Paul Brainerd, EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow, author Ken Kesey, social justice attorney Daniel Sheehan, new media visionary Brenda Laurel, hypermedia guru Ted Nelson and many others.

Putting content first, the Digital Be-In has emphasized a positive HUMAN evolution through the balanced application of “Art, Technology and Spirit.” Since the late 1980s, the event has aspired to represent all three of these elements in a vital, synergistic mix.

Performing artists at the Be-In have included George Clinton, Todd Rundgren, Jon Anderson of Yes, Fiorella Terenzi, and a wide range of cutting edge talents, including top DJs from around the world.

Visuals have always played a major role at the Be-In, where the first gleanings of digital “blendo” (combining on-the-fly mixing and effects with with live video, realtime animation and source material) competed with the not-to-be-underestimated analog artistry of leading 60’s projectionists Glenn McCay, Hal “Rainbow Puddle” Muskat, Harold Adler and others. The “VJ” (video jockey) was celebrated and refined at the Digital Be-In through the early ‘90s with producer/evangelists such as Dan Mapes, Stefan G. and Michael O’Rourke and supported by sponsors such as projector-makers Pioneer and Sony and one-time workstation giant Silicon Graphics, whose in-house VJ band, the Raster Masters, enjoyed their most celebrated performance at Be-In 6...

As did the Human Be-In, the Digital Be-In has maintained a special role over the years in bridging the gaps – between artists and technologists, users and providers, conscience and marketing – and between generations. While sponsors have included commercial juggernauts such as AT&T, Kodak and Microsoft (as well as many smaller, loyal exhibitors), the event has remained a bellwether of progressive ideas and initiatives, showcasing a wide range of humanistic causes, thoughtful new media applications and artful expression in visual arts, décor, music, dance and performance. And when the electronic music revolution met its counterparts in publishing, multimedia, video and the Web at the Be-In…the DJ-guided dance party became the late-night phase of the event, adding a new youthful crowd to the mix.

The Digital Be-In began in 1989 as the Digital ART Be-In, a lively melding of the early digital artists and tool-makers. (It became the Digital Be-In with number 4 on January 14, 1992, which was, synchronistically, the 25th Anniversary of the Human Be-In and sub-titled the New Human Be-In). With enthusiastic support from new media megastars Adobe, Macromind and Painter, the Be-In began by upholding the grander vision and meaning of Art as it was being defined in the digital age. Artistry with zeros and ones takes many forms, including the rarefied craft of software engineering, and the code-warrior co-inventors of the new media world were and are a highly respected clan within the Be-In tribe.

While celebrating the creative riches of the personal computer revolution, we spoke at the 4th Be-In in 1992 of the coming democratization of media: just as the mainframe/dumb-terminal paradigm of centralized computing gave way to the personal computer model of networked intelligent nodes, so would the one-to-many broadcasting and publishing models give way to a new decentralized many-to-many “holonomic network.” Ted Nelson called it (coined it, actually) hypermedia and spoke of an associative network of interconnected intellectual property bits tracked and administered by his fabled Xanadu meta-network. Marc Canter saw it all as a multimedia swirl and turned his VideoWorks animation program into a new kind of mixed-digital-media authoring software, bringing true interactive multimedia and the promise of new markets to an industry that welcomed the demand for faster processors and more disk space. Many visionaries in communications and business described a coming transformation. Digital Be-In producer Verbum magazine put out the landmark Verbum Interactive CD-ROM in 1991 that helped fuel the success, following desktop publishing, of the next wave in digital media: multimedia CD-ROMs. But in 1995 the World Wide Web burst upon the Internet and overnight the fragmented vision we had all been trying to crystallize was suddenly manifest via the TCP-IP, the Web’s graphic user interface (with multimedia extensions!) and hyperlinked content, just as we had imagined: interconnecting mind-screens across the planet at the speed of light. CD-ROMs never caught up, nor did business, nor politics, nor the human psyche for that matter.

Nature itself seems behind this geometrically accelerating evolution, and seems to be evolving us, through this technology, which in its most elegant applications follows organic designs in a kind of “biomimicry” to apply Janine Benyus’ spot-on term. Yes, Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the “noosphere,” the sphere of mind emerging from the biosphere, seems to have been given form at the very stroke of the Future here at the dawn of the third millennium. Will these advanced new technologies save us from our misguided application of primitive technologies? It is the function of the Be-In to nudge the process…

The 13th Digital Be-In is themed “The Transparent Network.” While we encourage various interpretations of the term, a key one is in reference to the fast-evolving infosphere and communications networks that promise an open and widely accessible flow of information and contact between people, groups and institutions worldwide. Open source software, social networks and personal identities, human vs. corporate rights in cyberspace, alternatives to consumer-driven and politicized mass media, the “Digital Divide” between rich and poor and many other vital topics will be in the spotlight at Digital Be-In 13 on May 29, 2004 in San Francisco.

Michael Gosney
from Digital Be-In 13 site
March 2004