Futurefarmers: Taking Stock

Futurefarmers: Taking Stock Twenty years of artwork, engagements, and actions

Futurefarmers: Taking Stock The human brain is wired for categorizing, it’s an essential trait, but one that makes following the myriad artistic, design, and social engagements of Futurefarmers quite a challenge.

Futurefarmers has been practicing as an artist collective since 1994. Founded by Amy Franceschini, this multifaceted design team has run the gamut, both in terms of production and systems of audience engagement. Between 1995-2005, Futurefarmers operated as a high-profile design studio creating, among so much other material, the now ubiquitous logo for Twitter. Their early clients included Lucas Film, Hewlett Packard, Swatch, Autodesk, and Greenpeace. They used the profits from their design projects to support an artist in residency program, research interests, and to engage in art projects around the globe. Over the past decade they have focused their design efforts towards the non-profit sector and activist realm. Futurefarmers’ art practice has also taken shape in the form of civic engagement with a strong desire to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

Their name, Futurefarmers, is a play off the nomenclature of an agricultural organization established in the early 20th century, the Future Farmers of America. As their name suggests, they share a collective interest in living and working on a farm.

They’ve created temporary schools, community bread ovens, and large-scale exhibitions internationally. The Lunchbox Lab, enabled students to discover hydrogen-producing algae—which they showed in MoMA’s 2008 exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind. They’ve developed antiwar computer games, soil testing and remediation programs, even a Homeland Security Blanket! Their ongoing project with the city of San Francisco, Victory Gardens, supports the transition of unused land into food production areas. In this past year they have erected a bake house in Norway and presented projects at the New York Hall of Science, the Berkeley Art Museum, and SFMOMA. Futurefarmers’ work has been included in exhibitions internationally at venues including ZKM Center for Art and Media, the Whitney Museum, New York MoMA, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), and the Edith Russ Site for Media Art. Their awards include a Graham Foundation grant, an Investing in Artists grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, the SECA Art Award from SFMOMA, an Artadia Award, a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Eureka Fellowship.

In an interview with Liverpool based designer Jon Raffe, Amy Franceschini described the early years of the Futurefarmers Co-op:

After a series of coincidences I found myself designing a website for photojournalists in 1994 called Atlas Magazine. This online journal gained much attention (it is one of three websites to be collected by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). From here I began working with many corporate clients including NEC, NIKE, Hewlett Packard, and the like. While this was all exciting and lucrative, I felt my soul slowly melting and needed a creative channel. I started Futurefarmers as an online space for testing out new ideas and technologies that corporate clients just could not swallow. The site began to gain attention and somehow I was able to balance an art practice while garnering client work that remained interesting and challenging.

1995 was a crazy year. I am happy to have lived through that dot-com explosion.

It was a time of phones ringing off the hook, head-hunters hunting us down, and money being thrown at the most ridiculous projects – stuff you have probably all heard before. Anyway, in late 1999 we had to make a decision to either grow into a 10 person studio or to stay small and start turning down jobs. Josh On (collaborator Futurefarmers) and I decided that if we grew, we would just become managers and directors, so we decided to stay small and focus our own projects and a select client list. Luckily, we made this decision just at the right time, as a few months later the economy crashed and we didn’t have much to lose.

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ince 1994, Futurefarmers have balanced their design work with design activisim. They develop projects that are designed to arrange awareness of growing local food, permaculture systems, biofuel production, and the environmental effects of globalization.

Lunchbox Laboratory is a collaboration between Futurefarmers, the Biological Sciences Team, and the National Renewable Energy Lab. Currently scientists are using algae to produce hydrogen and have discovered that it is a viable renewable energy form, in that,algae is everywhere and it could also be used to produce biodiesel. One of the main hurdles for the research is to find the most productive strains of algae. Since there are potentially millions of strains, this task is monumental.

Lunchbox Laboratory is a prototype for a potentially distributed research tool that would be sent to schools such that young scientists can do primary screening of a collection of algae strains. This will serve as a preliminary screening such that non productive strains will be ruled out and only productive strains will reach labs. This project enables students to participate in big science as well as network with other students nationwide to compare notes. The project was included in the New York MoMA’s 2008 exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind.

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hotosynthesis Robot is a three-dimensional sketch of a possible perpetual motion machine driven by phototropism, the movement of plants towards the sun. The motion of the plants would propel this four-wheeled vehicle slowly over a period of time.

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ictory Gardens was a demonstration garden, a pilot urban agriculture program, a series of art works and public policies developed between the years of 2008-2011. The project began as a utopian proposal within the context of an exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art where a series of artworks and actions were presented and performed. Viewers were invited to re-imagine and participate in a city-wide, urban agriculture program-based on the historic Victory Garden programs of WW I and WWII. Victory Gardens has now become a city funded project that supports the transition of unused/under utilized land into food production areas; backyards, front yards, window boxes, vacant lots, parks etc. The project instigated the implementation of a new city food policy put forth in an Executive Directive from the mayor in July 2008 to support urban agriculture and transition of underutilized land into farms.

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ictory Gardens Trike is a custom delivery bike built for the Victory Gardens program. The front wagon is detachable so it can be pushed up the hills of San Francisco and used as a wheelbarrow.

The trike can cart all the necessary ingredients to install one garden plot.

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ield of Thoughts is a game of chance born out of the bingo tradition.

How to play: Players purchase game boards for a dollar each (money is either legal US tender, or a fake banana currency provided.) The boards hold a sheet printed with a 5x5 matrix of icons featuring 25 of the 75 icons possible. Pennies are distributed for use as “chips” to cover the icons in the order called out by the game’s facilitators. The first player to have a card where the drawn icons form a specified pattern is the winner. Winning patterns range from making a straight line (5-in-a-row), filling the outside circle (Aroundthe-World) or filling the entire card (Whole-Wide-World). When a player has won they shout “Field!” to stop play and collect the prize. Number of players: 4+ or play in teams.

Play: 1. The caller starts the game by drawing the first peg from the shaker.

2. Players who locate the country on their board place cover it with a penny.

3. The dark orange markers can switch out the orange one marking that country on the map to keep track of which countries have been called for the round.

Keep drawing pegs until a player gets a winning pattern: Shout “Field!” to announce your win.

Prizes: Prizes vary depending on the thematic content of each game. *Good Neighbor Prize: Inspired by Hooked on Bingo, p. 17 “Unbelieving that she could ever get a BINGO because she did not chip. I remember her vividly because not only did she win but I, sitting next to her, received a ham. It was a ‘Good Neighbor’ game and hams were prizes given to the person sitting next to the winners that night.”

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omeland Security Blanket is a set of 5 networked blankets. Each blanket is wirelessly networked to the internet and responds to the Homeland Security Act’s fluxuating, color-coded “Threat Levels”. As a means to “disseminate information”, these blankets register temperature change. An indicator light alerts the user of current threat and comforts them accordingly.

Technology: RF tags, BX24 chip, wireless hub, internet connection.

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oil Kitchen, was a public art commission that coincided with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Brownfield conference. A windmill-powered architectural intervention, Soil Kitchen rehabilitated an abandoned building into a multi-use space where people enjoyed free soup in exchange for soil samples from their neighborhood. Placed across the street from a Don Quixote monument, the windmill payed homage to Cervantes’ notable scene of Don Quixote tilting the windmills. Rather than being “adversarial giants” as they were in the novel, the windmill at Soil Kitchen was a functioning symbol of self-reliance and literally breathed new life into a formerly abandoned building within a post-industrial landscape.

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oil Kitchen tested over 350 soil samples and served 300 bowls of soup per day made from locally sourced vegetables grown on a former brownfield. In addition, a “Philadelphia Brownfields Map and Soil Archive� was produced.

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few decades ago wild horses roamed free in Abruzzo and agriculture was a thriving and predominant occupation. Now big box stores, parking lots and gas stations are quickly taking place of pastures and cultivated land, while modern-day agricultural standards threaten the nuances of traditional production. Nearby cities lure the young, leaving the aging farming population without a generational change of guard. The region gained a momentary spotlight on the world stage during the earthquake of L’Aquila in 2009 and shortly thereafter with the G8 summit, undergoing important changes within a very short time.

Abruzzo becomes the pasture where This is Not a Trojan Horse wanders freely on a 10-day tour collecting traces of rural practices; seeds, tools and products to enliven the imaginations of farmers through discourse, artistic production and to parade their truths to power. The idea of the Trojan Horse becomes a significant modus operandi for contemporary society, beyond the symbol embedded in the historical-mythical event.

Upon return to Pollinaria collected seeds will be planted to symbolize the collective memory of the tour and to celebrate local biodiversity.

Normally we make architecture and space by defining the borders, walls, floors – borders define a space in which we organize social interaction. Mostly we create a physical exterior for a social interior happening; rooms, spaces – a static structure that has an emptiness inside for possible programmed human interaction.

The Trojan Horse had such interior in its belly. But that belly was a place for soldiers.

This is not a Trojan Horse turns all of this inside out. The horse is not a symbol of war, but rather community.

The inside is a place for gathering. It’s a sphere where the “in between” between people becomes the center rather than the individual. The moment people come together there is a “with” that makes them community, one united subject. The architectural space becomes being together.

This architectural construction has no inside.

This is not in a building that defines social space inside borders. This is Not Trojan Horse is a center instead of a border. The social space is formed around the object as a concentric circle without borders. It becomes a physical space with moving edges. The architecture loses its physical function as defining the edges of social space as it folds inside out.

This is Not Trojan Horse is moving.

It is not a center, but a nomadic physical structure in a physical network, moving around in this rural area, creating a new physical network. By its moving, the Horse makes the social meeting place it was before into a social rhizome. The architectural space now exceeds its own construction and becomes virtual possibilities for new social interaction.

Local tradition becomes global renewal.

The physical structure looses its dimension and start to form a scaleless physical space. This is not a Trojan Horse is a sort of architecture that through the constructive and physical new social possibilities emerge – a new form of rhizomatic thinking about architecture where the body disappears in a nomadic social group subject. The structure gives reason to the creation of new social and political “concepts” in the Abruzzo region and further – on the net, in the minds of the people it meets… It becomes new thinking, a resistance to the traditional discourse – bio politics. * The main source of inspiration for this work is Epios: A Sculptor by Cooley Windsor written in 2008. Windsor tells the story of the Trojan Horse through the architect appointed by Agamemnon.

Simon Says: Futurefarmers Think Outside the Box

by Leigh Anne Miller

An engineer, a ceramist and a mechanic walk into a bar . . . More likely the inception of a Futurefarmers project than the set-up to a bad joke. The San Francisco-based collective—a melting pot of multidisciplinary activities and participants, from scientists to gardeners to bus drivers—began in 1995 when a museum offered Amy Franceschini, then a freelance web designer, a design job. She wanted to do an art project instead, and Futurefarmers was born.

Initially, Franceschini treated Futurefarmers as “a hiding place to get away” from her day job, but the collective soon became all-consuming. In addition to San Francisco, current members are based in Germany, Denmark, Sydney and Baltimore. For Michael Swaine, resident carpenter and long-time Farmer, “collaborating with an engineer and a ceramist and a car mechanic to help us realize our dreams is the most exciting part.”

Over the past 15 years, Franceschini has taken Futurefarmers all over the world, organizing participatory events in cities from Karlsruhe to Montreal to Boulder. One of their most popular ongoing projects is an online database listing unused plots of arable land in San Francisco. “The Reverse Ark: In the Wake,” a 2009 exhibition at the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, featured a giant ship made out of recycled local lumber, a “free school” with workshops and readings, and Futurefarmers’ first “pedestrian press,” their take on a low-tech, human-powered printing press.

Franceschini and Swaine were in New York in mid-March to prepare for their latest project, a 10-day exhibition loosely inspired by Simon the Shoemaker. Simon was, as the story goes, a 5th-century B.C. cobbler who, along with other uneducated youths, participated in discussions with Socrates on the occasions the philosopher ventured outside the Agora.

Hosted by the Guggenheim as part of their “Intervals” series, the show opens today and is on view through May 14. “Intervals: Futurefarmers” includes a revamped pedestrian press, plus a series of readings (aka “Sole/Soul Sermons,” at the Guggenheim), non-traditional lectures at locations throughout the city (one involves a field trip to the Gowanus Canal), and other participatory events, like gathering soot with Swaine that will be turned into ink for the press.

Towards the end of the pair’s two-week stay, I stopped by the Guggenhiem to see them in action. Franceschini and Swaine had set up an efficient-looking workshop in the corner of the rotunda, where they and a few other Farmers were constructing curved wooden benches and carving letters into the bottoms of brick-size blocks of wood. These lettered blocks would eventually become clunky, strap-on shoes, used to print a text—step by step and letter by letter—onto a long narrow scroll of paper unfurled along the Bowery, in front of the New Museum.

Before they headed back to San Francisco, we met up at the Guggenheim’s downtown offices. I wanted to know how they got from “Hey, have you read this cool story about Socrates and Simon?” to “Let’s do a project at the Guggenheim all about it!” Franceschini and Swaine looked a little bewildered. Swaine explained why it’s so hard to assign credit. “Amy and I have been working together for so long that we forget where the ideas start. This is an example where we’ve really forgotten the beginning. I remember different parts, but not when it coalesced.”

Why Socrates and Simon? Franceschini filled in some of the blanks. “We both happened to read this story about Socrates being disenchanted with life inside the Agora. Something was empty, and he found what he was looking for in a craftsperson. The more and more we meet scientists, it’s like we’re doing the same thing, trying to figure it out, asking ‘what does it mean?’ It’s really refreshing to work with scientists and hear them say, ‘the more I know the less I know.’ That’s the space that’s interesting to me.”

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A Variation on Powers of Ten What are the limits of knowledge? Where is there still mystery, and how are researchers moving towards these “unknown” territories? Futurefarmers Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine ask these and other questions as part of a multifaceted research project inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’s film, Powers of Ten (1977).

Powers of Ten is a short documentary film that depicts the relative scale of the universe in factors of ten.

It illustrates the universe as an arena of both continuity and change, of everyday picnics and cosmic mystery. One iconic image from the film depicts a couple picnicking on a blanket, serving as a human-scale grounding for the macro- and micro-explorations in the film. Futurefarmers uses this film as a conceptual and aesthetic framework for exploring related ideas - the production of knowledge; how its limits are understood, measured, represented, and transgressed; and the relationship between diverse fields of inquiry. With methods both formal and informal, the research framework includes ten picnics with invited scholars, recasting the picnic blanket as a space where the quotidian and the cosmic comingle, as a simple picnic serves as the setting for folding scientific, theoretical, and philosophical conversation into everyday ritual. These research moments will be documented and made available through the project website and related publication and programming.

A Variation works with museum’s who are embedded inside major research institutions. Unlike exhibitions where the final products of thought, inquiry, and production are presented as static objects, this project foregrounds the process of thought and inquiry as its own production. It engages in forms that are fluid, contingent, and mutable - the picnic, the conversation, the workshop - as a means to extend the metaphor of research and discovery into the arena of public presentation. As more research institutions receive funding from private corporations, much of their research occurs behind closed doors. This project is fueled by an interest in bringing this research out into the public eye and ear and inviting the discourse of academic research into an art context and vice versa.

Like all research, the project is driven in both form and content by questions; importantly, these are not just concrete questions about what we know and how we know it, but fuzzier questions about the use and consequences of that knowledge. Where does the desire to expand our knowledge and understanding come from? To what lengths will we go to “know?” Who is impacted by this quest and where has this knowledge led us? What is the human factor within the search for knowledge? Like the film Powers of Ten, A Variation is a journey through various fields of inquiry, from human psychology and philosophy to ecology, microbiology, astrobiology, environmental science, and zoology, that collects and presents knowledge (in this case, as it is constituted inside a major university) that will provide a contemporary portrait of various perspectives on our changing world.

-Amy Franceschini, Michael Swaine, and Elizabeth Thomas/Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator

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latbread Society is an international assembly of farmers, oven builders, astronomers, artists, soil scientists, bakers, and folklorists aligned through a common interest in the long and complex relation between humans and grain. Since 2012, Flatbread Society has expressed itself in various incarnations— as temporary, mobile architecture; public programming; and hands-on workshops that provoke debate around patterns of food production and consumption, class, the everyday, religion, and lore through the production of flatbread. A series of sculptural “props” travel with FBS and are used to cook, move, and propagate ideas that grow into embedded practices in a specific time and place. These props adapt ancient traditions as a means to carry lineages of thought and action into new forms. The Telescope Rolling Pin is an example of two forms coming together to function as a path between the past, present, and future.

Flatbread Society is currently working in Oslo, where they are building Bakehouse Bjørvika, a public baking facility and a grain field. This is part of a larger public art program called Slow Spaces curated

by Claire Doherty. In May 2013, the Boat Oven, drifted through Oslo to excite local imagination around potential forms and functions of the coming Bakehouse.

Gallery 16 Gallery 16 was founded by artist Griff Williams in 1994. Since then, Gallery 16 and its fine art imprint Gallery 16 Editions has produced exhibitions with over 200 artstis and published over 800 prints, artist books, and multiples with artists including Ari Marcopoulos, Jim Goldberg, Colter Jacobsen, Bill Berkson, Harrell Fletcher, Lynn Hershman, Amy Franceschini, Adam Lowe, William Kentridge, Tucker Nichols, Rebeca Bollinger, Libby Black, Deborah Oropallo, Jim Isermann, bell hooks, Ann Chamberlain, Elliot Anderson, Carol Selter, Rebeca Bollinger, Rex Ray, Margaret Kilgallen and Rudy VanderLans.

Futurefarmers artwork is available through Gallery 16.

Gallery 16 is located at 501 Third Street, San Francisco, CA 94107.

Inquiries may contact Griff Williams at 415-626-7495.

All images Š Futurefarmers gallery16.com