No matter where you are, the Way of Zorop is open to you. Give in! Walk the gentle path.

Don a colorful scarf (optional). Strike up a conversation with someone. Find out what you have in common with them. And then tell us about it. We'll add the affinity you share to our great star chart of human connections. And you will be part of our bold experiment, to build our own better, more connected world.

Your Zoropathian will engage the strangers and discuss the affinity they have. Your role is to capture the key elements of the affinity and send them via a web form (or text) to Zorop Central. So smartphone competency is valued in a Zoropathian’s Assistant, as is a friendly attitude. A web-enabled phone is a plus also! And you'll also take pictures of people.

You and your Zoropathian get to see the 01SJ digital art festival from a unique perspective – as contributing artists. Your fun and fair play will touch dozens of people and give them a chance to participate in Zorop’s grand experiment.

We’re asking Assistants to sign up for one or two two-hour shifts on Friday, Sept 17 (6-12) or Saturday, Sept 18 (10-6). Use our calendar to reserve a time slot. We will instruct you in everything you need to know to be an excellent Assistant, either live at one of our workshops or online. And give you a small honorarium!

Just do it! It will be fun. Send us an email and introduce yourself.

An encouraging smile, an easy way with people – these are the attributes that make a good Zoropathian.

Zoropathians get to see the 01SJ digital art festival from a unique perspective – as a contributing artist. Through their fun and fair play, thousands of people will get a chance to participate in Zorop’s grand experiment.

We’re asking Zoropathians to sign up for one or two two-hour shifts on Friday, Sept 17 (6-12) or Saturday, Sept 18 (10-6). Use our calendar to reserve a time slot. We will instruct you in everything you need to know, either live at one of our September workshops or online. And give you an honorarium!

Take the next step! Send us an email and introduce yourself.

(If being a Zoropathian is not right for you, perhaps you can be a Zoropathian’s Assistant?)

Her name is Lola.

She is nonstop party.

Play our game and you can climb aboard!

To get on the bus, (a) say hello to a stranger, (b) find out something you have in common, (c) both of you find a Zoropathian and tell him or her about the affinity you share, (d) get your reward in Zorops!

Bonus tip: The more unusual and heartfelt your affinity is, the more Zorops it will earn – and the quicker you’ll get on the bus.

The Mexican Party Bus runs during Absolute Zero on Friday night, Sept 17, from 6 pm to 1 am. If you want a friendly reminder about Zorop, send us an email. (And at this point applications to be a Zoropathian or Assistant are still open – which is a great way to get in on the party from the inside!)

Perhaps we’re not sure what the first step is. And we can’t see how all the little steps taken by individuals add up to something bigger.

Perhaps we’re just unable to visualize what the beginning of the path looks like.

Zorop’s idea: the first step is getting strangers to connect. We reward them when they do, with Zorops, encouragement, and rides on the Mexican Party Bus.

The second step is to record and visualize all these individual achievements. We want to see what happens when hundreds, maybe thousands, of strangers begin talking to one another. And map those connections according to the ancient wisdom of the Pantoglyphs.

As our galaxy of affinities emerge, will the social fabric grow stronger? Will these shared moments lead to more? If we get this ball rolling, where will it lead?

Some say it leads to a more peaceful world. In their view, world peace is a meme that sprouts all the time but struggles to take root, and Zorop is a patch of moist rich soil.

But you don't have to believe that! All you have to be is curious.

To be part of Zorop, mark your calendar: at Absolute Zero on Friday night, Sept 17, or at 01SJ on Saturday day, 10 - 6. If you want a friendly reminder, send us an email. (And at this point applications to be a Zoropathian or Assistant are still open – which is a great way to experience the festival.)

Connecting with people is so important. You hear it so often, you can lose sight of how true it is. The most boring bus ride can flip into the funnest evah if you connect with the guy or gal sitting next to you.

The effect goes beyond the event. If you connect with someone on the bus, the whole city seems friendlier. (YOU seem friendlier too.) And every friend you have, every lover, was a stranger once, but then somehow you connected, and your worlds changed.

If you want to connect with someone, an arts festival like 01SJ is a great place to start. People don’t normally go to an arts festival with a closed mind. They come precisely to be opened up by new perspectives and experiences.

Zorop wants to help.

Zorop breaks the ice. It gives you a reason to talk to people you don’t know. “Hey, excuse me, there’s this game going on...” It gives you something you can do together: “Hey, Mr. Zoropathian! We've found we have something in common...” It encourages you to connect, on whatever level, with something funny, surprising, or touchingly real.

And Zorop rewards you for making the connections. There’s schwag such as the Zorop cards, the Zorop tats, and the pinnacle of Zoropathian fun, the Mexican Party Bus. But underneath the perks, there’s something more lasting. You’re helping to build a permanent record of how people connect and why. This is all going somewhere.

To be part of Zorop, mark your calendar: at Absolute Zero on Friday night, Sept 17, or at 01SJ on Saturday day, 10 - 6. If you want a friendly reminder, send us an email. (And at this point applications to be a Zoropathian or Assistant are still open.)

Okay, you live in Portland or NYC or maybe Melbourne, why do you care about Zorop?

(And what could you do even if you did care?)

The thing is, you have friends in the San Francisco Bay Area. Or friends of friends. People you know might be interested to learn about the 01SJ digital art festival and excited to participate in an ambitious (and quixotic) experiment to catalyze world peace.

Or who, if you whisper "Mexican Party Bus!" will instantly say, "Where? WHERE?"

Write them an email, wouldja? Facebook or Tweet it? Something like –

Dudes, there's a game going on in San Jose on September 17 called Zorop. I don't know all the details but it seems like something both meaningful and fun. (On one hand, you got world peace. On the other, a party bus.) Check it online at zorop.org. It's part of something called Zero One: 01sj.org.

That's all.

Unless your friend is one of those people people. You know, talks to strangers, makes friends easily, laughs a lot, always up for it, twinkle in the eye. In short, your friend has Zoropathic tendencies.

Do not be alarmed, quite the reverse. In your email, up your game:

Plus, you would make a perfect Zoropathian! Srsly.

Are we serious? Yeah, actually. Click more squares to learn why.

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area, consider coming to 01SJ.

Why? Because it is a digital arts experience. It only happens once every two years. This is the third one and it's already the biggest event of its kind in the world. And so on and so on.

But mostly because, at 01SJ, you can connect with Zorop. And through Zorop, you connect with other people at the festival.

This is what you do. Say hello to a stranger. Chat with them and  find something you have in common. And then tell us about it. (Us = friendly Zoropathian standing right over there)

Maybe you're both originally from Newark. Maybe you both never felt Seinfeld was that funny. Whatever it is, we want to hear about the thing you two find you have in common.

Why?

Because we are taking all these little sparks of affinity and making a roaring bonfire out of them. And you can be part of it!

Okay cool. But why does this make it worth your time to come down to San Jose?

First, connecting with people is fun and meaningful. Second, we have a Mexican Party Bus!

Third, world peace. Are we serious? Yeah. We are. Click other squares to learn more.

If you are in the San Jose area, come to the 01SJ digital arts festival in September.

In addition to all there is to see, there's also plenty to do (engage with Level5, walk secret paths of Radio Nonchalance). But more than anything, you should connect with Zorop.

It's easy to do. Say hello to a stranger – find something that you have in common – tell it to one of us (the Zoropathians).

Maybe you're both cat (or dog) people. Maybe you both dig Slipknot. Whatever it is, we want to hear about it.

What happens then?

We classify your affinity. We beam it directly to Zorop Central in South Hall. Your discovery is added to the great star chart we are plotting: you are helping the universe of human connection emerge right in front of our eyes.

What do you get out of it? (Assuming the above is somehow not enough!)

First, the thrill of connecting with another person. Second, a card from us (worth one, two or more Zorops – depending on how cool your affinity is). Five Zorops gets you onto the Mexican Party Bus!

Third, world peace. Are we serious? A little bit, yeah. Click other squares to learn more.

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 is a playful investigation of the elusive connections between people. It asks: What happens when we make these connections less ephemeral? When we encourage them and map them and together watch them grow – is it possible to build our own friendlier world?

ZOROP quixotically pretends that World Peace is a meme that really just suffers from a visualization problem. Its gentle, eccentric Zoropathians encourage strangers to connect and maps these connections as they happen. As it grows an ever more complex visualization of the 01SJ Biennial and the affinities its visitors share, will we gain a universal insight into creating a more peaceful world?

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

As part of their ongoing artistic collaboration, and thus on a lark more or less, Ken Eklund and Annette Mees* started to prowl the outer edges of recorded thought about ”world peace.” Their corkscrewy tour took them past reluctant saints, synesthesiacs, and strange pantoglyphs from a lost language, but it ended with this idea:

World Peace is a meme with a data visualization problem.

If strangers could see the attributes they share, and how those connections weave our social fabric, would conflict fade away and die? Which led to this realization:

Maybe a small group of quixotic volunteers can fix World Peace.

Thus Ken and Annette announce their grand experiment, ZOROP. The goal: to jailbreak World Peace using the 01SJ Biennial as a focusing lens. The method: ask some kind people ("Zoropathians") to encourage strangers to explore the things they have in common. Classify each of these commonalities and plot them using the best 3D technology they can afford. And maybe, just maybe, watch a new era of universal brotherhood begin to unfold. In any case, reward faithful contributors with a tour of 01SJ aboard the Mexican Party Bus.

What’s your role? Do you find yourself hearkening to Zorop's quixotic call? To start a gentle dialogue, send an inquiry.

* Ken Eklund is a freelance game designer living in San Jose. Annette Mees is a founding member of Coney, an agency of play in London. They met as strangers on a sidewalk in New York. Artists Bios at 01SJ ZOROP at 01SJ

If you want to know where Zorop really begins, look at the emancipation movement, early 19th century. Paul Hawken talks about this: it was the first time in the history of the world when some people went to bat for some other people – people they didn't know, people whose welfare was no economic concern of theirs. A quixotic idea really, to end slavery, since at that time 3 out of 4 people were slaves.    But it was an idea that had an inevitability about it, and once it reached a certain threshold, became unstoppable. It was in a situation very similar to the one that the idea of "world peace" is in today.

So now let's jump to the early 20th century, to a woman we'll call Partizan. We don't know much about her. From early childhood she saw colors and auras – she apparently had an acute form of synesthesia. She could see colored lines between people, and colors flowing.    The colors overwhelmed her in her early life, which was very troubled. But in her later years they apparently enabled her to make connections easily among people. She got a reputation as a sort of reluctant vagabond saint.

Partizan worked with people as her canvas. She never wrote anything or drew anything that we have found. But toward the end of her life she said to a writer in Russia: "If everyone could see what I see, peace on earth would inevitably follow." Wow. Fast-forward now to the 1970s, when a young man named Peter Tamarov came upon this statement of Partizan's, and it set his mind on fire. Because Peter was an early advocate of memetics, the field of study that deals with memes. A meme is a cultural idea that spreads from one mind to another, "virally" – memes are like the genetic material of human culture and ideas.

Peter saw that world peace is a powerful meme that seems to be continually trying to take hold. Heaven knows it's something that everyone wants in the general, we just end up bickering about the particulars.    Inspired by Partizan's words, Peter did a study about why it is that world peace continually fails as a meme. And he concluded: she's right, it's a visualization problem. If strangers could see the attributes they share, and how those connections weave our social fabric of cooperation and goodwill, the meme might take over. Peace could very well break out!

We're only just learning how important the fabric of our connections is. Maybe you've heard how researchers are finding that changes (good and bad) reverberate strongly through social networks – how if someone in your circle of friends gets more fit, you're more likely to get fit, and if one of your acquaintances gets divorced, you're more likely to get divorced. The effect is surprisingly strong.    Well, it turns out this isn't an entirely new concept. One of the relics handed down to us from antiquity are the Pantoglyphs. Much as the Tarot covers the range of human experience, the 14 Pantoglyphs cover the range of human connection...

So the idea of Zorop is to combine all these disparate discoveries into one grand experiment. We get strangers to connect with each other by making a little game out of it. We classify these connections using the Pantoglyphs, the ancient categories of connection. We gather the connections and map the constellations that form when stranger after stranger after stranger makes heartfelt connections in the 01SJ festival. And we see what happens.    Will some friendships get started? Will the effects be even more dramatic? Will we create a “critical mass,” memetically speaking, at 01SJ?

Of course, you don't have to know the full story (much less believe in it) to enjoy taking part in the experiment. Form a connection with someone new at 01SJ – tell a Zoropathian about the connection you have discovered – earn a seat on our Mexican Party Bus!    And (possibly) bring world peace just a little closer to reality.

Would you like to experience the festival as a Zoropathian or assistant? You can request a time slot here.