160 161
. Nayland Blake, Bay Area Conceptualism: Two Generations (Bualo,
NY: Hallwalls, ), .
. Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society, The Port
Huron Statement: The Visionary Call of the s Revolution (New York:
Thunders Mouth Press, ), .
. Mark Johnstone and Leslie Aboud Holzman, Epicenter: San
Francisco Bay Area Art Now (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, ),
.
. Theodore Roszak, From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco
and the American Counterculture (San Francisco: Dont Call It Frisco
Press, ), .
. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend
Biology (New York: Viking Penguin, ).
. WELL is an acronym for Whole Earth Lectronic Link. It can be
found online at www.well.com.
. For more recent in-depth scholarship on this history, see Fred
Turners Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy: The WELL and
the Origins of Virtual Community, Technology and Culture , no.
(July ): (also available at
http://www.stanford.edu/~fturner/Turner%Tech%&%Culture%%.pdf),
and Lee Wordens incisive essay Counterculture, Cyberculture, and
the Third Culture: Reinventing Civilization, Then and Now, in West
of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, ed. Iain Boal,
Janferie Stone, Michael Watts, and Cal Winslow (Oakland, CA: PM
Press, ).
. For a thorough discussion of the historical development of
Silicon Valley, including Termans contribution, see Stuart W.
Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The
Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford (New York:
Columbia University Press, ).
. John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, Aerotropolis: The Way Well
Live Next (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ), .
. Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology,
Mute , no. (); the article is available at the Hypermedia Research
Centre, http://www .hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-californianideology
-main.html.
. Franco (Bifo) Berardi, Proliferating Futures (re: Californian
Ideology), Mute , no. (); the article is available at the
Hypermedia Resource Center, Responses to the Californian Ideology,
http://www.hrc .westminster.ac.uk/hrc/theory
/californianideo/response/t...%B%D .html.
. Ibid.
. In , a retrospective exhibition at the Berkeley Art Museum and
Pacific Film Archive, Ant Farm: , brought the group back into the
public eye.
. Center for Land Use Interpretation, About the Center,
http://www.clui.org /section/about-center.
. Bill Joy, Why the Future Doesnt Need Us, Wired . (April );
also available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/.
/joy.html.
. Futurefarmers, Free Soil Bus Tour,
http://www.free-soil.org/tour/.
reversionism, and they maintained an acute awareness and deep
critique of the triumph of profit-driven technophilism. In they
initiated Free Soil, their biodiesel bus tour from San Jose to
Menlo Park (pl. ), revealing to participants the idealistic roots
of high-tech culture as well as the environ-mental eects of the
computer industry on the local landscape.16 Free Soil was part of a
larger series of workshops, lectures, and other participatory
events called Gardening Superfund Sites, which similarly juxtaposed
the fantasies of cosmopolitan mobility and the frictionlessness of
the internet age with the realities of the wealth, material waste,
and aesthetic banality of Silicon Valley, while weaving together
propositions of ecological sustainability and commu-nity resource
sharing. This project segued into their Victory Gardens + (see p.
), which coalesced a growing urban-ag subculture around the charged
historical trope of s wartime can-do collectivism, although as an
expression of antiIraq war sentiment rather than patriotic
duty.
Futurefarmers can be too easily confused with the uneasy
phenomenon of the Rise of the Creative Class that could be said to
inflect Bay Area sensibilities. On the surface, their projects
might appear to fold into the territories of so-called lifestyle
activism, the false promises of a global village, and the
suburbanization of the urban sphere. On another level, however,
their practice is a deep scouting for strategies of critique and
transformation, making them comparable to other artists who follow
lines of inquiry into fields of expertise that oer sharper edges of
resistance to power than are traditionally seen in the annals of
art history. Theirs is a collectivism that owes less allegiance to
notions of the scene than to the idea of tactical alliances across
disciplines, a strategy that is also evident in the work of some of
Futurefarmers
Bay Area contemporaries. Amy Balkin, for example, worked with
environmental justice groups, industry agents, and legal scholars
to carve out a juridical/utopian aesthetic that complicates the
institutional definitions of land-ownership and atmospheric policy
through concise and well-crafted conceptual heuristics. Trevor
Paglen collaborated with satellite technicians, amateur
surveillance enthusiasts, and investigative journalists to produce
elegant photo-graphic images that not only provide stark evidence
of abuses of power but also speak to the history of landscape
photography. Rick and Megan Prelinger collaborated with
experimental archivists, anarchist librarians, and experimental
geographers in their film, publication, and library projects. And
Sergio De La Torre, working with maquiladora workers and Chinese
immigrants, coproduced or reenacted film projects that address the
complex political tensions of borders and make visible the fraught
but submerged imperial attitudes and legacy of the United
States.
In all of these artists works, we see an expanded form of
collective practice in which cross-field collaborators serve not as
populist tokens of authen-ticity or as mass ornaments but as
indispensable sources of expertise. And although these artists, by
and large, have not participated heavily in the current
concretization and institutionalization of social practice
discourse, they may represent its future. As it becomes clearer
that the status quopolitically, materially, and symbolicallyrests
on a precarious mass of hyper-engineered flows and relations, it
seems that artists interested in articulating the contested ethical
line of social practice might have to simultaneously concentrate
and ventilate their knowledge bases. More than ever before, they
may have to treat seriously the conjunction between art and
life.
Bay Area Art and the (Counter) Culture of Silicon Valleydel
Pesco/Nagler
