Fog Inquiry: Wandering Seminar

About the Seminar

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.

Wandering

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.

Phase 2

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 as well as Ray and Robin Yeh-Green, patrons of domestic wellbring for the Wandering Residency.