I was in San Jose for the Apple developer conference in February 2000. California in winter is different from London in winter, but it would be different anyway. It felt like being on a film set; the visual perfection and order, the feeling of everything being staged. The gas station forecourt lawns have sprinklers built into them so they don’t go brown in the heat.
My hotel was next to the technology museum and the art museum. San Jose Museum of Art’s logo was a distended red star; there was a show of conceptual art on. I eventually found a McDonalds and was served an outsized meal by someone who couldn’t understand my Briddish accent. I went into a bookshop, a grocery. The colours, packaging and smells were different. Brown paper, cinnamon. I saw offices for Bank of America and Adobe. Walking around the wide streets and sidewalks I found the old quarter, wooden houses with people who didn’t have anything to lose in the impending dot-com crash sat on the steps.
The freeway to San Jose had adverts for dot-coms on its billboards. I’d just left a company that did work for dot-coms and I was at a company that wanted to be a dot-com rather than write another hit game. I saw Steve Jobs live on stage, listened to lots of technology presentations, and negotiated an open source license with a company that wasn’t there for a product I’ve never finished.
In the evenings I talked Evie on the other side of the Atlantic, called room service and tried to work out how chicken was a vegetable, raided the minibar, watched episoded of “Xena: Warrior Princess” that hadn’t been shown in the UK yet, and beat off my jet lag.
This all worked its way into the art that I made sat on my hotel bed with my new blueberry iBook running a copy of Corel Draw! that nothing will run or read now.