Team 8: Futurefarmers

TRANSPOLAR CATAPULT FEEDBACK LOOP

A wooden catapult that allows people to “send ice to the North Pole.” The public is invited to come, make a form / ice sculpture and “send” on the catapult.

When the catapult is released, the ice does not actually fly into the air, but comes back through the catapult and into a fire-heated caldron where it melts and contributes to a collective pot of warm tea to be drunk by the public.

This piece illustrates the complexities of global warming — and could be a central point of gathering and informal discussion around related issues; participation, mitigation, innovation. We see the piece only being “live” during our visit and then remaining as a sculpture for the duration of the festival.

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Futurefarmers

Futurefarmers is a group of practitioners aligned through an open practice of making work that is relevant to the time and space surrounding us. Through collaboration, we explore the relationship of concept and creative process between interdisciplinary artists. Since 1995, Futurefarmers has served as a design studio producing projects for clients including Adobe, Swatch, Hewlett Packard, Levi’s, Autodesk, Nike, LucasFilm, Greenpeace, PBS, NEC and MSNBC. Founder Amy Franceschini is an artist and educator. She founded Futurefarmers in 1995 as a means to bring together multidisciplinary practitioners to create new work. In 2002, she founded Free-Soil. She is a professor of fine art and design at University of San Francisco and teaches graduate seminars at California College of the Arts. Futurefarmers have exhibited internationally at numerous galleries and museums, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York Museum of Modern Art, the ZKM in Germany and at The Whitney Biennale. They have received numerous awards including the Fleischaker Eureka Award, Artadia Award and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 2006 SECA Award.

Lode Vranken

Lode Vranken is an architect in Belgium, devoted to designing and building zero-energy homes.