Composed of six public events spread across 2 weeks, Fog Inquiry: Wandering Seminar is open to the public. Event details are linked below.

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INTERFERENCE
Tuesday, February 18, 10:30-1 p.m.
Bus Stop: Mima Meadow
Anna Friz, sound and radio artist, Film + Digital Media, UCSC
Renate Kupke, project scientist, Center for Adaptive Optics, UCSC
Marijke Jorritsma, user experience designer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Yasi Perera, artist, musician

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BORDERS
Thursday, February 20, 10:30-1:30 p.m.
Bus Stop: Mima Meadow (between Arboretum and West Entrance)
Albert Narath, architectural historian, History of Art & Visual Culture, UCSC
Janette Dinishak, philosopher of biology, Philosophy, UCSC  

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DIFFRACTION
Friday, February 21, 11-12:30 p.m.
Bus Stop: Kerr Hall
Alexie Leauthaud, observational cosmologist, Astronomy & Astrophysics, UCSC

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MERCURIAL
Tuesday, February 25, 11-2 p.m.
Bus Stop: Health Center
Tristan Duke, Tristan Duke, artist, Infinity Light Science
Peter Weiss, atmospheric chemist, Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology, UCSC
Ken Kellman, Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History, UCSC

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I BECOMES WE
Thursday, February 27, 11-2 p.m.
Women’s Center/ Cardiff House
Laurie Palmer, artist, Art, UCSC
Marianne Weems, director of theater and opera, Theater, UCSC
Michael Swaine, Futurefarmers, University of Washington, Seattle

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ECO-SEX (Fog Marriage)
Saturday, February 29, 11-2 p.m.
Bus Stop: Kerr Hall
Annie Sprinkle, artist
Elizabeth Stephens, artist, Art, UCSC
Coastal Fog, Troposphere, Planetary Boundary Layer, Earth  

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Founded in 1995 by Amy Franceschini, Futurefarmers is an international collective of artists and diverse practitioners. Their critically acclaimed, socially engaged, and site specific projects take place in and around art institutions, universities, sailing vessels, farmlands, kitchens, and other community settings.    

For Fog Inquiry: Wandering Seminar, Futurefarmers is creating a series of thematic gatherings responding to the distinct university setting at UC Santa Cruz. The regional atmospheric phenomena of fog that can pervade the campus has propelled the artist group to focus on themes of seeing, sensing, and knowing within uncertain and misty conditions. Coastal fog is heavily influenced by complex ecology of nearby bodies of water, topography, land use, and wind conditions. In the current hazy socio-political climate, Futurefarmers has invited UC Santa Cruz faculty to think together with other scholars, practitioners, and artists to trouble the atmospheric conditions impacting knowledge production on the university campus. 

Anchoring their wandering to six bus stops on the UC Santa Cruz campus, Fog Inquiry: Wandering Seminar will move physically and metaphorically between disciplines and modes of knowing. Mingling performance, site- specific actions, sculpture, and architecture with the domains of science philosophy, the student body, staff, bus drivers, lichen, limestone, activists… : Wandering Seminar is an attempt to contaminate and cross-pollinate between domains usually set apart from one another due to campus design and the constraints of institutionalized learning.

Wandering Seminar is the second phase of Futurefarmers extended, periodic residency at UC Santa Cruz called Fog Inquiry. In February 2019, Futurefarmers operated as a Fog Body moving within the physical and intellectual matter of the campus. By visiting classes and staging events, Futurefarmers created a foggy phenomona to bring together people, projects, and places that would not usually meet. The collective wandered through the blurred and hazy edges of research and certainty while carrying with them a lighthouse, a buoy… their Whistling Tea Kettle.  Mounted upon a 14’ wooden tripod, Futurefarmers erected the kettle at the entrance of each meeting to signal the inquiry. 

Futurefarmers’ Fog Inquiry for the IAS and UC Santa Cruz is supported by the Nion McEvoy Family Fund of the San Francisco Community Foundation, the Gurdon Woods Visiting Artist Fund established by Jock Reynolds, and annual donors to the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. Thanks also to the support of Office for Contemporary Art Norway.