ABOUT:

Free Soil will present a bus tour, outdoor film/video festival and on-site exchange in conjunction with the 2nd Biennial 01SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge in San Jose, California.


Building upong the energy of our first bus tour: A Journey through the techno-utopian beginnings and environmental currents of the Silicon Valley, Free Soil would like to use this years gathering of artists and practitioners to think about how we learn. How can we use our tools and practice to reflect and engage with the world around us? The early work done in Silicon Valley by people with visions of improving the world wasn't isolated from their politics or what was going on around them. It was part of a broader movement and a profound cultural shift. "Technology is shaped by the prism of culture, politics and economics," says John Markoff. Through this bus tour and its related events, Free Soil will look at education as a form of cultural production and creative resistance.

Previous Bus Tour Links
www.free-soil.org/tour/
www.futurefarmers.com/superfund/gazette/tour.html

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Free Soil:

Amy Franceschini
www.futurefarmes.com/survey
Amy is a new media artist and educator. Her work is pervaded with images of growth-reminding us that both nature and our own creative natures are precious commodities that must be nurtured and sustained whether it is on the web or in our own backyards. Amy founded Futurefarmers in 1995, as a means to bring together multidisciplinary artists to create new work. She is currently teaching Media Theory and Practice courses at Stanford University and the San Francisco Art Institute.
amy[at]futurefarmers.com

Nis Rømer
http://publik.dk/
Nis works with public art in the city, on the web and in the newsmedia. With a playfull and interactive approach, he makes situations for change and reflection. He has a special interest in the social and political organization of space and in how processes of globalization affects the city and our natural environment.
nisroemer[at]gmail.com

Stijn Schiffeleers
www.boutiquevizique.com/BV/news.php
Working in many media Stijn reveals the subtleties of life via film, video and interactive installations. His work embodies a sense of play and sensitivity that reminds us to take a closer look at what surrounds us. Stijn lives and works between Gent, Belgium and San Francisco.

Michael Swaine
Michael is an inventor and designer working in many media. He is the analog anchor of the studio. Michael has collaborated with Futurefarmers since 1997. Michael is dedicated to working in the community, Swaine's "Reap What You Sew" Generosity Project involved him pushing an old fashioned ice cream style cart on wheels with a treadle-operated sewing machine on it through the streets of San Francisco. Currently, Michael is teaching at California College of the Arts.

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Collaborators:

Teacher With the Bus
www.teacherwiththebus.com/
A project initiated by Jens-Peter Jungclaussen. The bus is a former school bus that runs on vegetable oil and serves as a mobile classroom combining leisure with an environmental message that fosters education, entertainment, and sustainability.

Erica Gangsei
Erica Gangsei is a sculptor, performer and activist from Brooklyn, NY. Her installations, performances, and public interventions chart hidden currents of origin and meaning in the physical world. She studied Philosophy and Fine Arts at Amherst College and received a BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2006. Gangsei lives and works in San Francisco.

Adam Wight
Instigator of the Local (campus farmers market at UC Berkeley), the People's U (free school on UC Berkeley Campus) and worker at two new Berkeley Food Co-ops.

Hope Hilton
Hope Hilton was born in Atlanta, Georgia, USA and is co-founder of the curatorial artist collectives Dos Pestañeos (NYC) and 21citiesatonceperformed (Atlanta). As an artist Hilton curates, collaborates, designs, writes and walks. She recently completed a 60-mile walk in the Southern United States, recognizing the walk a slave named Henry made to announce the birth of her great-great grandmother. She is most interested in researching and creating social architecture as an education strategy.

Geoff Morris, Interaction Designer
www.futurefarmers.com/geoff/
Geoff Morris is currently finishing his M.A. in symbolic systems at Stanford University. He uses technology to reveal truth.

Corrine Matesich
Corinne Matesich draws, researches and will remain a student for quite a while. Her interests are currently in developing a better educational experience through informal paths and collaborative groups, and entertaining ideas for rigorous imagination exercises. She lives in San Francisco, CA, and Tucson, Arizona.

David Elliot
http://hadto.net
David Elliot is an artist currently finishing his MFA in New Media at UCLA.

Rick Prelinger/Prelinger Archive/Library
www.archive.org/details/prelinger
home.earthlink.net/~alysons/library.html
Rick Prelinger is the founder of the Prelinger Archives in 1983 and co-founder of the Prelinger Library. Over twenty years, it has grown into a collection of over 60,000 "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films. In 2002, the film collection was acquired by the Library of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Its goal remains to collect, preserve, and facilitate access to films of historic significance that haven't been collected elsewhere.

The Prelinger Library is an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of approximately 40,000 books, periodicals, printed ephemera and government documents located in San Francisco, California.

Shada/Jahn (Steve Shada & Marisa Jahn)
www.marisajahn.com
www.steveshada.com
www.mucketymuck.org
Steve Shada & Marisa Jahn are artists and co-founders of "Pond: art, activism, & ideas." Their work explores, constructs, and intervenes natural and social systems. Ranging in practice from deeply personal to highly participatory, their work often relies on the collaborative authorship and distributive intelligence of surrounding people and situations. They are interested in the way that collective authorship shifts the production and interpretation of art towards an appreciation of process, context, and re-invention.

Sarah Lewison
www.carbonfarm.us
www.carbonfarm.us/KATALOG
Sarah Lewison is an artist and writer whose work explores power, economic, material ecologies and political subjectivity through time-based performative events.

Veronica Wiman
www.urbanconcerns.org
www.genderandpublicspace.org
Veronica is an independent curator and writer. She is currently a guest curator at Johannesburg Art Gallery and Bildmuseet. Her main interest lies within the interdisciplinary in art, social practice and alternative education, exploring the politics and participatory relations in the public realm. Contemporary conceptual craft, design and responsible architecture is a specific interest which often is included in the discourse around the projects or implemented practically in exhibitions and interventions.

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Postscript:

What we want to learn...
How we want to learn...

"The bus allows the use of scattered resources, such as parks, museums, industry, libraries etc. It can establish a short term base at these places which allows a relaxed and varied use of the situation and makes the duplication of the resources of a school unnescessary."
-Excerpt from Streetwork: The Exploding School, Ward and Fyson


"Today's child is bewildered when he enters the 19th century environment that still characterizes
the educational establishment where information is scarce, but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns subjects, and schedules."
-Marshall McLuhan, 1967

"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both."
-C. Wright Mills