Futurefarmers, the San Francisco-based collective (artists Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine), asks far-reaching questions as part of a multifaceted research residency 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. Futurefarmers is using the 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. The research framework includes ten picnics with invited scholars, recasting the picnic blanket as a space where the quotidian and the cosmic comingle. These research moments will be documented and made available through the project website and related publication, and will also serve as fodder for the series of public programs at BAM/PFA.
A Variation engages the picnic, the conversation, and the workshop—as a means to extend the metaphor of research and discovery into the arena of public presentation. This project is fueled by an interest in bringing the research projects conducted at UC Berkeley out into the public eye and ear and into the art context. 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.
Follow along with documentation of the research and updated details about events at http://futurefarmers.com/powersoften.
