This lecture is part of The Sensory Engagement Lab’s Lecture series, organized by Liz Lessner. SEL fosters collaborations between performers, artists, technologist, and other thinkers to produce interactive and experimental art works. The SEL is part thought experiment, part collaborative making session, part research lab.
Go back to the future with Anna Scime and Liz Flyntz to see what we can learn from activist media makers of the past. Igor Vamos also weighs in on performance artists versus protestors, and the role of mischief in media making.
One way to think of Ant Farm, the subject of a recent exhibition at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, is as the art-world equivalent of an underground music act. They were founded in San Francisco in 1968, against the backdrop of psychedelic counterculture. Despite their impressive back catalogue, they are remembered mainly for two smash hits—Cadillac Ranch, 1974, and Media Burn, 1975. And like so many bands, they have recently reunited, with a slightly different lineup.
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The visual records on view alone make clear that time capsule creations for the group served more as occasions to consider the present-day in the present rather than to eventually communicate it to the future.
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Founded as an “underground architecture” practice in 1968, Ant Farm explored the design of modern life itself. Drawing inspiration from Stewart Brand’s counterculture Whole Earth Catalog and experimental architecture from Europe, the group began to design and manufacture inflatable structures — makeshift and multi-use bubble buildings — and eventually published its own how-to handbook, 1971’s Inflatocookbook. Always inflected with their distinctive political sensibility, a taste for nomadism, and a goofy sense of humor, their practice evolved into a kind of multimedia guerrilla performance art, especially when affordable video technology allowed them to begin documenting their work as they toured the country in jury-rigged “media vans.”
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Jason Sayer, “Never-Before-Seen Works from Ant Farm and LST to Go on Display in Brooklyn”, The Architects Newspaper, July 12, 2016
https://archpaper.com/2016/07/ant-farm-pioneerworks-brooklyn/#gallery-0-slide-0
“The implementation of photographs has changed–and you see that,” says Pioneer Works curator Liz Flyntz. “We know it’s happened, but we don’t really think about it until we’re confronted with a whole bunch of images people take with their phones. People still take photographs the things they always have–their friends, their boyfriend or girlfriend, their dog–but they also use the utility of having instantaneous images they carry around with them all the time. "
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Sarah Cowan, “Alternative Media: Software and Video in 1970s Counterculture”, Hyperallergic, November 13, 2014
https://hyperallergic.com/162314/alternative-media-software-and-video-in-1970s-counterculture/
A Hyperallergic review of my one-sentence, Tumblr hosted interview blog titled Why Did You Go To Art School?