A meditation on diffraction as a methodology seen from two overlapping perspectives, one based on geometrical optics and weak gravitational lensing (the deflection of light from distant galaxies) and the other that questions what diffractive methodologies reveal about the inseparability of science and the social realm.

Diffraction
to break apart, in different directions (as in classical optics)
– Diffraction/intra-action – cutting together-apart
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Karen Barad

A performative inquiry into Janette Dinishak's research on alternatives to 'deficit views' of autism and Albert Narath's work on the history of campus design. In the Great Meadow, a suggestive choreography lead a body of participants from Mima Meadow to the Kresge Food Co-op. A series of questions prompted the participants movement and engagement with a suite of props provided:

What might be the physical characteristics of autistic spaces? How could one imagine an architecture that does not rely on determining spatial concepts such as “order/disorder” and “difference/sameness”? How might autistic spaces complicate modern narratives that locate the work of design in the creation of “health” or “benefit”?

The Great Meadow
Albert Narath
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Kresge Co-op
Founded 1970
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The Mercurial brings chemist Peter Weiss and photographer, Tristan Duke into dialogue and practice through their work with the elusive element of Mercury. This shape-shifting element has been used to make mirror’s, photographic plates, extract gold from ore, and availed swift rotation of mirrors in lighthouses.

The Mercurial wanders through the materiality and lifecycle of this element. Drawing from Peter’s work with traces of monomethylmercury (MMHg) found in coastal marine atmospheric fog, we examine the indexes of mercury accumulation in the environment, including lichens, mountain lion whiskers, and hairs from the legs of tiger spiders. Exercising Tristan’s experiments with mercury-based Lippmann photography, we seek to record an image indexical of mercury - a portrait of its traces in the environment.
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Guest
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Ken Kellman, Kenneth S. Norris Center for Natural History, UC Santa Cruz
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Ken is a lichen and bryologist expert who will open your eyes to the small-scale wonders of these amazing life-forms. Ken is an instructor at the Jepson Herbarium, an active member in the Consortium of North American Lichen Herbaria and contributed lichen samples to Peter Weiss during the research and development of the recent paper: Marine fog inputs appear to increase methylmercury bioaccumulation in a coastal terrestrial food web.

California Coastal Adolescent Puma, California (Puma concolor)
Fur and Whiskers - Bioindicators of Mercury conentrations in Coastal Fog
Courtesy: Norris Center for Natural History

Mercury concentrations have been found in lichen, deer, and puma along a coastal fog gradient. Pumas and their associated food web, have elevated concentrations of MMHg (Meythl Mercury), which could be indicative of their habitat being in a region that is regularly inundated with marine fog.

Laurie Palmer muses on one of five radical qualities of the lichen organism (and parallel considerations for human becoming) - Our “I” is also a “we”. Lichen(s) mess(es) with our grammar; each one is two, part algae, part fungus, in a mutually beneficial symbiosis. As biologist Scott Gilbert said, “we are all lichens,” not individuals but groups, constructed out of multiple relationships. And how could this distributed “self”-understanding change how we construct and navigate the world?

Marianne Weems as theater director and dramaturge reflecst on how “stagecraft” (acting, roles, scripts, improvisation, set design, lighting, character development) and her staged mediatic events relate to this idea of the conditions for “I” to also be a “we”.

A fog of bodies roll in from the coast, tumbling onto the Great Meadow, a gathering site for two lines of force within radical feminist art where ecosex is enacted and medico-judicial categories of sexuality (homosexuality/ heterosexuality) are troubled. Among an assembly of humans and animals, bio and trans, men and women, transgender bodies, mutants, survivors, witnesses, ring bearers... Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkles (along with an extended group of participants) will marry the fog – together a re-eroticism of the universe, a calling into question the hierarchy of species, definitions of sexuality, and the political stratification of the body.

Dramaturgy:

Choreographies Claire June Apana, Sophie Lev, Leila Kaplan, ooooo Officiants Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle  Performance Launa Light, Blessings The Water Underground Ring bearers Futurefarmers Light Sarah Bird Rituals Lady Monster Sound Marijke Jorritsma/Yasi Perera/Anna Friz, Micha Cárdenas and more....

Wandering Seminar was a series of six thematic gatherings that circulated through the University of California, Santa Cruz campus and the culmination Fog Inquiry, an extended, periodic residency hosted by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz between 2019-2020.

Fog Inquiry:
Futurefarmers used the regional physical phenomenon of fog as a framework to engage various fields of inquiry within the university setting; fog as a state of being whereby hierarchies get troubled, perspectives shift, and new modes of thinking (and making) can emerge. Fog Inquiry made appearances in classes and staged actions in response to events on campus, thus becoming an atmopsheric phenomona that brought together people, projects, and places that would not usually meet. Due to many restrictive factors of the university campus; bureacracy, campus design, geography, funding, public access, pedagogy, architecture... a university in-of-itself can become a dense atmospheric condition that needs new navigation tools. Futurefarmers wandered through the blurred edges of research troubling disciplines, hazing over the borders of certainty, questioning the tools used to collect data at these edges. To guide them, Futurefarmers built a Whistling Tea Kettle mounted upon a 14’ wooden tripod which signaled their various Inquiries on campus. This relational object drew people into a dense fog of questioning and invitations to Wander further...

Fog Inquiry culminated with a public performance in the Sesnon Faculty Gallery on January 22, 2019 together with the artists and newly accumulated collaborators.

Wandering Seminar: Wandering Seminar thus moved through the physical and intellectual matter of the campus as a Fog Body - a growing and shitfing constellation of people and actions. Like fog, this Fog Body drew from the elusive and complex nature of coastal fog in how it forms, how it evolves, and how it dissipates or disappears.

Bus Shelter as Classroom

Wandering Seminar used the architecture of campus bus shelters as a meeting point and geographic anchor for each gathering. At the onset of a gathering, a curated Fog Body met at a bus shelter to activate each theme through performance or participatory action. Often engaging people waiting for the bus. Gatherings started at a relevant bus stop and wandered to related sites - often itineant bodies joined the wandering as the body moved around campus - accumulating, dissipating and showing up at the next Wander.

ooooo.be, Belgium

ooooo is a transuniversal constellation that initiates, mediates and facilitates, curates and appropriates projects, abducing thought, reflection and praxis on relevant issues. oooo is hosted by Marthe Van Dessel, an activist and performer who creates interfaces, devices & protocols to instigate our urban and institutional hardware & software. She engages in the administrative, cultural, socio-political dimension of personal and collective identities. By triggering intersubjective alliances she confronts the 'self & other' with the commons, co-authorship and the redistribution into the public domain.


Sophie Lev, artist, writer, student UCSC

Sophie is interested in the poetics and politics of agentic matter. Their practice explores the links between embodiment, objects, and language, using word play and double entendre to build a relational reorientation and sensitivity to entanglements between bodies. They think and make projects about cyborgs, rituals of land tending and place-making, agency, psychoanalysis, puppetry, and communist affect. Sophie is co-founder of the artist collective Ritual Capital.

Elizabeth Thomas, Curator, Writer, San Francisco

Elizabeth produces research-based and site-responsive artworks across a range of media. She has collaborated with Futurefarmers for nearly a decade. As Phyllis Wattis MATRIX Curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum, she curated new projects with Futurefarmers, Trevor Paglen, Emily Roysdon, Allison Smith, Ahmet Ogut, among others. She teaches in the Curatorial Practice program at California College of the Arts and the Exhibition and Museum Studies program at the San Francisco Art Institute. She writes for a range of publications.

BERG, San Francisco

A design collective founded by Benner Boswell and Alexander Kozachek who met while studying at the California College of the Arts. They have choreographed the collective’s Graphic Sublayer Transfer System workshop in Bay Area galleries and museums, including the California Academy of Science, The Museum of Craft and Design and Youth Art Exchange’s [X]space.


AV-net, Belgium

AV-net is a technical and logistical rescue team for infra-structural, service-oriented and life urgencies.

Brian Karl, curator, producer, writer, San Francisco

Brian Karl has served as Artistic, Executive, and Program Director at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Harvestworks Media Arts, and Headlands Center for the Arts. His writing has been published in Art & Education, art-agenda, Artforum, Flash Art, Frieze, Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Migration Studies, SFMOMA’s Open Space and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. His media work has screened at Kadist Foundation, as well as in the Whitney Biennial, and the New York and San Francisco Film Festivals. He teaches at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts and San Francisco Art Institute. Brian received his PhD music and anthropology at Columbia University.


Wei Wang, Printmaker, Graphic Designer, San Francisco

Originating from China, Wei’s transcultural background gives him a multi-focal perspective, which he expresses through digital design, performance art, traditional and experimental printmaking, bookmaking, and installation. Wei works to redefine found objects and printed ephemera by examining their informational structure which gives way to their past and future possibilities. Wei’s current work is focused on cultural communication, social justice, and sentiments about the migration of time and space.