ON THE FIRST full of day, June 5, of 01SJ, the sun came up and the office Internet connection went down. Duly noting the irony of going untethered just when San Jose's digital-arts festival was commencing, I decided to take the 01SJ program map and follow the numbers to all the designated viewing spots.

I wouldn't exactly call this full-fledged flaneuring—my pet lobster was safely at home, for starters—but more of an urban walkabout.

Just beyond my office door, the San Jose Institute of Art invites visitors to express themselves, a key strategy for the festival, which encourages lots of interactivity. Nora Ligorano and Marshall Reese have modeled a funk-art section of the moon rising from the floor of the gallery and dotted with whimsical models of possible colonies by contributing artists.

Visitors can then respond with their own images of the lunar surface, using either a computer drawing program or the old-fashioned way, with colored pencils on paper. Mere physical presence isn't required—the sketches can be seen online in Second Life.

Heading north, I peered into the window at MACLA, which was in the process of preparing for the arrival of Rubén Ortiz-Torres' amazing customized scissors lift, a.k.a. High 'n' Low Rider, one of the featured delights at Wednesday's opening-night ceremonies.

Angling north by northwest—the low-flying planes headed for the airport were uncomfortably like jet-powered crop dusters—I nipped into the San Jose Convention Center, where artist Marina Zurkow has commandeered some of the informational video screens. Her piece Paradoxical Sleep animates a vision of the nearby Guadalupe River rising to flood tide during some future global-warming catastrophe.

The sometimes rippling, sometimes rushing waters cascade through the empty corridors of the convention center, whose slab walls and blank columns are viewed from stark angles. One image on the constantly changing screens shows the giant concrete marbles outside the main doors starting to submerge.

In one witty scene, the waters lap against an orange safety cone warning that wet floors can be slippery. If only this imagined water world would wipe out the insipid Muzak that torments lost souls in the convention center.

Heading west from the convention center, I crossed Discovery Meadow and took in Peter Hudson's outdoor installation Homouroboros. Fuzzy monkey dolls swing from a superstructure that looks fashioned from pieces of discarded exercise equipment (at least, a decent use for the Bow-Flex!). They can be set to revolving at an alarming rate by drumming furiously on the synthesizer pads at ground level.

Eventually, illuminated by strobe light bursts, they blur into a flash-card sequence—more formally known as a zoetrope—depicting a serpent tempting the [human] ape with the fruit of good and evil. Or so I was informed; this is one of those installations that really only works at night.

I angled north along the sunken Gaudalupe River Walkway. On this pleasant mid-June day, the river hardly looked capable of lapping my shoes much less inundating downtown. A Monarch butterfly and a spectacular yellow and black swallowtail lazed their way over the thicket of vine-covered streets beneath the Adobe building. A once-wild duck paddled over looking for a handout at the Santa Clara Street bridge, where I again ascended to street level.

A few blocks to the east, I entered the Comerica Bank looks for the UCSC digital arts and new media show called Bureau of Disruptions, which is described in the program as consisting of works that "interrogate the borderlands, edges and contested territories of contemporary new media art practice."

And what better place to do so than in this tastefully appointed temple of finance. Alas, the show was nowhere in evidence, and although the teller I approached said that she had heard something about the show, she didn't know either, and directed me to the parking garage.

On North First, at Fountain Alley, I looked again in vain for a video projection, called Downtown Mirror, about the past and present of San Jose. I think I saw the video projectors themselves (although they might have been surveillance cameras staring back at me), but any actual effect would probably have to wait for nightfall.

At the northern most extremity of 01, I took in the simple circular monument to Robert F. Kennedy in St. James Park. A semicircular wall contains a minimal plaque; a stone lectern of sorts beckons speakers to announce their own platforms. On the afternoon of June 7, Helena Keefe intends to install a temporary "fabric slipcover" as part of the RFK Memorial Forum Remix. Perhaps no embellishment is really needed; I stood there almost exactly 40 years to the day after RFK was assassinated. A woman bearing a bouquet of flowers bowed her head at the wall. The charge of memory is still potent.

(Meanwhile, a note to the city: Why is the magnificent three-tiered cast-iron fountain in the park being allowed to rust away? That's just shameful.)

The final outliers of the festival are to be found on the campus of SJSU. Eddo Stern's Portal, Wormhole, Flythrough is another one of those nighttime events that looks curiously reduced under the noonday sun.

The engineering building on campus showcases the entries in a contest to design a climate clock for San Jose—a kinda of 21st update of the old Electric Light Tower. Most of the ideas center around making global climate change visible in some data-driven fashion. Hell, you can tell that by the smog and haze level most days.

I did like Soundhenge, a grouping of swooping acoustic slaps—the world's best sound system, picking up broadcasts from around the world out of the ether.

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