Like Burnham, San Francisco-based artist Amy Franceschini grew up outside The City. Her childhood was split between the orchards of her father’s vast commercial farming operation in the San Joaquin valley and her mother’s organic farm on the coast. Seeing firsthand these two very different methods of growing food gave her a unique perspective on how humans relate to their life-giving planet. After high school, she left the farms for San Francisco State University. The plan was to major in photojournalism and document the fascinating ways humans interact with the earth.
While her career as a photographer would end up not panning out, pursuing it did guide her to the font of her creative career. Franceschini was serving an internship at a monthly photo magazine when a graphic designer job came open at the publication. With a little coaching, she turned out to be a natural for the job. By 1995 she had co-founded both online magazine Atlas (www.atlasmagazine.com) and Futurefarmers, a design studio/artist collaborative specializing in creating entertaining ways to spark environmental dialogue. In the twelve years since, Franceschini’s design work has received rewards fattening both prestige and pocketbook. Not only did Atlas become the first website to be included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but major corporations began paying Franceschini just to brainstorm design ideas for them. That is all terrific, Franceschini will tell you, but the key for her is that the commercial work feeds so well the projects that really matter.
It is tough to encapsulate into one easy title all the various project spearheading the thirty-six-year old Franceschini does. Perhaps it is best to refer to her as an Expert in the Field of Curiosity. Or maybe Environmental Inquisitor. It is important to note, however, that this Environmentalism is not necessarily in the Sierra Club/Green Peace sense. Yes, Franceschini is concerned with protecting the earth’s fragile balance. But she also deals with environmentalism in a much more immediate way: how do we interact with all our surroundings—both manmade and natural—and what can we do to ensure that relationship is healthy for both parties? This is where the Futurefarmers art comes in.
Whereas most artists think of their endless hours hunched over a computer as anything but soul-enriching, the ever analytical Franceschini constantly finds ways to use computers to bring out the brighter human qualities. For example, an application she learned for a design job can be also used to create a computer game people have to congregate to play—like the Futurefarmers project in which people explored, virtual-reality style, the 3D-modeled maze of their scanned fingerprints. An activity like this, Franceschini points out, not only uses computers to create human interactions, but it also gets attendees talking about the nature of their own relationships to machines.
The sheer number of these discipline-spanning, notion-rewiring projects Franceschini has developed over the years is astounding. Whether it is turning a park in Norway into a giant board game, designing a robot to run on photosynthesis, covertly landscaping toxic Silicon Valley Superfund sites, or “hacking public spaces,” Franceschini finds entertaining ways to get people off their asses and involved in exploring sustainable interlockings of technology, community, and nature.
In addition to her work as a new media artist, Franceschini is also a very old media artist—old as dirt. Like Daniel Burnham, she sees greening the San Francisco landscape as part of her larger plan. Unlike Burnham, Franceschini didn’t wait around for the government’s support. With her current Victory Gardens project, she is turning neglected front and back yards in San Francisco into visually pleasing food producers. Named for the US civilian agriculture programs implemented during World War I and II, Franceschini’s program seeks to revive the spirit that saw San Franciscans turning large sections of the city into gardens. Ironically, instead of a war triumph, the Victory in the title of her two year pilot program could now refer to a climate of sustainability that keeps the US from having to go to war. But it’s not all so serious-minded. Along with education and seed bank programs are suggestions for planting parties and cute but practical gardening implements. Franceschini wants to make gardening fun, so people will look at it not as a chore, but as a life-enriching activity. Already Franceschini and collaborators have given three free gardens to homes in San Francisco. Additionally, plans have been developed to scale up the program. The hope is that Victory Gardens will eventually be incorporated, as policy, into the city government. With several key city officials having publicly supported the program, that day may soon come. The San Francisco Museum of Art would surely back that notion. It recently awarded Franceschini a SECA award for artistic promise.
For all her successful projects, Franceschini claims as her biggest victory the students she instructs both in workshops around the globe and in her teaching jobs at places like Stanford (where she got her Master’s), San Francisco Art Institute, and California College of the Arts. Recently, in her boxy gray live/work studio, below a piece by fellow San Francisco art heroine Margaret Kilgallen, Franceschini talked about what she tries to impart through her work.
Looking at what you’ve done over the years, it’s hard not to be impressed by the breadth and diversity of your ideas for projects. Where do they come from?
The inspiration is to figure out the world around me. A scientist at UC-Davis told me, ‘The more I know, the less I know.’ It’s so true. There’s so much to know and, in a sense, such a short time to know things. I feel art is a way to formalize the questions and the learning that I do. To me, to really grasp what I’ve been researching, I have to put it into a form. The form becomes the finishing of that research journey.
How did you first become involved in environmental causes?
When you grow up in a rural area, you have this connection to the land that you don’t even really understand. It became evident to me moving to a city, how much open space and natural space was important to me. I just started thinking about how the system we live in currently doesn’t allow us to take care of our land. The system we live in forces us to create tons of waste. I felt somehow convicted to figure out ways to exist in this culture without having such a large impact. If I’m going to continue to be an artist, I’m going to have to fly around in an airplane all over the world. That’s a huge cost on the environment.
A lot of the projects you’ve worked on as a part of Futurefarmers, like the hydrogen generation project, have a lot of science know-how that goes into them. Do you teach yourself those things on the fly?
When I was in school I just got by in these classes. I realized later that I don’t really learn in a classroom environment. I learn way better one-on-one. I’m really interested in science, but I don’t have the patience to go through and get a science degree, or a biology degree, or an anthropology degree. So I try to create projects where I’m curating a forum of people I want to learn from. The hydrogen algae bioreactor started from an interest in thinking about how we as individuals can create our own energy. What if a whole bunch of individuals did something that would add up to something more concrete? I read this article on HotWired about this scientist and the title was “Hydrogen From Pool Scum.” This guy, Tasios Melis from UC-Berkeley, had discovered that if you stopped giving algae oxygen it produces hydrogen because it has a metabolic switch from eons ago when it didn’t need oxygen to survive. I called him and asked him about his project and he said, “Come visit me in my lab.” It seemed really simple; you have water, you put algae in it, you put a lid on, bubbles start to come to the top, you harvest the bubbles as hydrogen. So I thought, What about making this technology available to people if they do have pools? He said, “I actually made a backyard model. It costs $100.” I said, “Why don’t you develop it?” He said, “I don’t have time because I have to write grants to keep my lab alive and it’s really hard to get money for this kind of research. We’re an oil nation and that’s where the money is going.” I said, “Can I develop your backyard model?” He said, “I’d love for it to be developed.” He introduced me to this grad student, Jonathan Meuser, who I collaborated with. My interest was in building the model with things you can find off the shelf or in the trash. We debuted the model in a gallery. He installed the whole thing while I asked him questions about the process and about the science. I asked him, “What’s the hurdle of this research? It seems so simple and so viable.” He said that the main hurdle is that there are billions of strains of algae. To find the one that’s most productive takes a lot of work. I thought, Wouldn’t it be great if you used high school science classes? You can teach them this process and through that, they’ll narrow down which ones are the most productive. He was really into that idea and he proposed it at a lecture a couple months ago.
How did you pick the name Futurefarmers?
Picking a name was kind of forced. I was doing design and I had to get a business license. They were like, “What’s the name of your company?” I was like, “Uh…” At that time, I really wanted to buy a farm and do what I’m doing here but have a residency and have people come from all over the world to grow food and make art. I thought if I had the name Futurefarmers on my check, whenever I’d write a check, it would remind me not to spend money because I wanted to save money to get a farm. But about three years ago I just realized that the farm is just this ideal and that I actually don’t want to live on a farm. I really like the city. The current project I did, Victory Gardens, is about making the city more of a farm.
I saw at SFMOMA the display of your Victory Gardens work and saw the Bikebarrow and Shovelpogo you designed, but it seems to me people would wonder how it is art. How do you respond when people bring that up?
That question has come up a couple times. My interest in doing that project in the context of an art institution was because art is the language I know how to speak. I’m not a politician and I’m not an activist. I’ve realized that I’m really thinking more symbolically and metaphorically. I like the idea of asking questions and creating platforms that spark questions to try to use art as a tool to create change. I don’t know if that works or not but I wanted to try. It was pretty helpful to be coming at the project as an artist rather than coming to the city as a politician or an activist. Those two pieces you mentioned had a sense of humor to them. That lightened things up and opened doors that I don’t know necessarily would have been opened had I come to it from a different route.
My hope is that art doesn’t have to have such serious definitions. I think that by saying something is art or that something is not art is creating a hierarchy. What if everything was art all day long in your life? Wouldn’t life be more interesting? Why does an orange have to just be an orange? Why can’t that be a medium that travels a really long distance and carries all this information that’s invisible but is there? What’s the meaning of peeling an orange that has come 1,500 miles to your tabletop? How many hands have touched that? I think what that’s doing is creating a little more awareness around everyday objects and everyday surroundings so we don’t become numb and immune.
For more information on Amy Franceschini’s various projects, visit www.futurefarmers.com.
– Buck Austin