Futurefarmers: Playshop
March 2004
Futurefarmers: Playshop
The Gate Page by Futurefarmers served as an entry portal to the artist collective’s open access “laboratory” Playshop, a series of workshops, seminars, and installations that took place at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco from January 17 to April 4, 2004. The accompanying Playshop website—comprising a mailing list, database, and gallery—served as a resource for the events and projects in the physical space. The activities at Yerba Buena included Java and Processing tutorials; a Wifi workshop; and circuit bending, or intentionally altering the circuits of electronic devices such as battery-powered toys and keyboards to create new uses and effects. The Playshop laboratory merged art production, education, and curatorial practice to foster a public space for creative exchange.
This project links out to the Playshop website which is no longer online, but can be viewed on the Internet Archive.
Founded in 1995 by Amy Franceschini (b. 1970; Patterson, California), Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an interest in making work that is relevant to its time and place. The design studio serves as a platform to support art projects and an artist-in-residence program. Its artists, designers, architects, anthropologists, writers, computer programmers, and farmers share a common interest in creating frameworks for exchange that catalyze moments of “not knowing.” Futurefarmers deconstructs systems such as food policies, public transportation, campus design, and rural farming networks to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics. Futurefarmers has published A Variation on Powers of Ten (2012) and For Want of a Nail (2019). The group has exhibited work at the Guggenheim Museum (2010) and the Museum of Modern Art (2006, 2008) in New York; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2012); the 2000 Whitney Biennial; the Sharjah Biennale 2017; and the Taipei Biennale 2018.
Gate Pages
Every month from March 2001 to February 2006, the Whitney invited an artist or collective to present their work in the form of a “Gate Page” on artport. Each page was meant to function as a portal to the artist’s own sites and projects. The Gate Pages comprise a range of artistic approaches to the format—while some of them are designed as entry points to the respective artist’s website or promote a recently launched work, others take the form of a more complex stand-alone project.
Wherever necessary and possible, these works are made functional through emulation and reconstructions from the Internet Archive. Not all of them have been restored to their original state and their conservation is ongoing. You can also view the original Gate Pages archive to see how they were presented at the time of their creation.
artport
View more on artport, the Whitney Museum's portal to Internet and new media art.