Fog Inquiry is an extended, periodic residency at the University of California, Santa Cruz, hosted by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. Fog Inquiry uses the physical phenomena of fog as a conceptual framework to engage various fields of inquiry within the university setting. Futurefarmers sees fog as a state of being whereby hierarchies get troubled, perspectives shift, and new modes of thinking (and making) can emerge. Fog has the potential to mystify our human vision/ perception and inject ambiguity in our experience and hence enhances a multiplication of signals in our senses.

Fog Inquiry brings people, places and ideas together who may not usually meet. Due to the many restrictive factors of a university campus; bureacracy, campus design, geography, funding, access, pedagogy, architecture... a university in-of-itself can become a dense atmospheric condition that needs new navigation tools. Futurefarmers Fog Inquiry endeavors to move through the physical and intellectual matter of the university campus as a Fog Body - a growing and shitfing constellation of people and actions. Like fog, this Fog Body draws from the elusive and complex nature of coastal fog in how it forms, how it evolves, and how it dissipates or disappears.

The first phase of Fog Inquiry, was Wandering Residency. Futurefarmers operated as a Fog Body moving within the physical and intellectual matter of the campus. By visiting classes and staging events, Futurefarmers created an atmopsheric phenomona that brought together people, projects, and places that would not usually meet. 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 through this fog, Futurefarmers carried with them a lighthouse, a buoy, a beacon— their Whistling Tea Kettle. Mounted upon a 14 foot wooden tripod, the kettle was erected at the entrance of each meeting to mark the space of inquiry. The sound and steam of the kettle provided a simple, poetic invitation. Objects are signals and symbols, and this relational object drew in diverse groups, absorbing them into the fog and into conversation.

Wandering Residency culminated with a public exhibition in the Sesnon Faculty Gallery on Tuesday, January 22, 5-7 p.m., with the artists and their collaborators.

IMAGE INDEX

Waveforms

The Bogotá Declaration
Bogota, Colombia
3 December 1976

Brasil, Colombia, Congo, Ecuador, Indonesia, Kenya, Uganda, Zaire

DECLARATION OF THE FIRST MEETING OF EQUATORIAL COUNTRIES

The undersigned representatives of the States traversed by the Equator met in Bogota, Republic of Colombia, from 29 November through 3 December, 1976 with the purpose of studying the geostationary orbit that corresponds to their national terrestrial, sea, and insular territory and considered as a natural resource. After an exchange of information and having studied in detail the different technical, legal, and political aspects implied in the exercise of national sovereignty of States adjacent to the said orbit, have reached the following conclusion
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First Meeting
January 11, 2019
2:00 Cowell Faculty Annex

Notes
Perceptual Shift

References
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Rabbit Duck Ilusion
two different ways of seeing: "seeing that" versus "seeing as"

The Country of the Blind,
H.G. Wells
Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador’s Andes, there lies that mysterious mountain valley, cut off from the world of men, the Country of the Blind.

IMAGE INDEX

Rabbit Duck Illusion

Duck Rabbit Ambiguous Figure

Janette's Office

Lode Vranken, Belgium

Lode has been practicing architecture internationally since 1993. In 1993, he received his masters in a UN course on Human Settlements + Architectural Philosophy from the KU Leuven, Belgium. He taugh in 2005 as a NED delegate at The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain and from 1993-94 at the Asian Institute for Technolgy in Bangkok, Thailand.

Lode co-founded the research coalition, De Bouwerij in Belgium that focuses on social living structures for passive houses and zero¨energy construction. His research is focused on new concepts for small, self-sufficient living units; folding buildings, kinetic structures, rolling shelters all with zero carbon dioxide emission. He is also a partner of Dear Pigs in Belgium and member of the The Ghent School for Metaphysics.

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.