<nettime> theyrule.net /future farmers intervooz

[Sean Healy <evolver@loud.org.au>]

allo kidz...
here's a recent 'uncut' interview with josh from http://www.theyrule.net
& futurefarmers.com....
Have put it up @ http://www.octapod.org.au/s/articles.html
along with recent interviews with:

neotropic (ninjatune UK) about music vs film
mchawking.com - stephen's little known gangsta physics side project
Melbourne's Digital media Collective (make digi-comix)
Arkaos Expose vidi-yo triggering software review
eLefant Traks VS. PirateTV
virtual palestine,
metroscreen
slave didn't do it - bout bantheboot.com etc...
An Ecology of Oz Mutant Media....
"&" Cicada, syd VJ...
ciao!
a boy who can ollie

From:  "josh on" <josh@futurefarmers.com>
Re: they_rule_feedback

> Explain the Future Farmers to your grandkids in 2050?
Futurefarmers is a small design company started by Amy Franceschini in
1995. Futurefarmers has oscillated around a small collective of people
who work with her on various web, print  and art projects.

> Your party blurb for explaining what u do within that?
I take different roles depending on the project.  I do a lot of the
programming on the flash side of things and have helped with 3d
animation, although almost all of the design is done by Amy.  Sometimes
we collaboarte on design like in Texas Drawl and Amy helped out on They
Rule.

> What won you a residency with the farmers, and any tips for budding
Australian design prodigy wannabe farm-hands?
Send us your URLs.  If we are excited by somebodies work and we have
time we usually start emailing with the person.  If we have the
resources then we can offer them an internship.

> What do you think about the increasing shift to software based artistry?
Yay, more media to scribble on!  I think it is great, and there is
unique potential for new artistic investigations.  As we become more
familiar with the technology both the potentials and limitations of the
media will be found.  Although I think the limitations of capitalism
will be discovered more quickly than the limitations of this medium.
Napster bieng an obvious
example.

> What media do you enjoy using? What software is interesting to you?
I like open source software.  Though not everything that I want todo is
easy to accomplish through what is available now. I enjoy using flash
and ph because together they provide a powerful set of tools for making
interactive information visualizations.

> As the creator of 'They Rule', a site exploring the increasingly
concentrated and cross-connected ownership of wealth within
multinational corporations, how do you reconcile Futurefarmers working
with the likes of Levi's, Nike, NEC and MSNBC?
Well I can't speak for Amy on this one, though it is something we talk
about periodically. I don't condemn the workers of these companies that
we work for, for working in them. Futurefarmers is not a political
organization, though as a company and as individuals we are often
compelled to do political projects through our own convictions and
interests. Perhaps one day we will change this.  I would like to become
a journalist...

For me the question is what can we do build a world in which decisions
about what gets produced and how it is produced are decisions made by
everyone democratically?  At the moment these decisions are made by the
market. Proponents of capitalism like to say that the market is driven
by an invisible hand, well now that hand is so stained by blood it
should be visible to everyone. It is going to take more than a few
clever websites to bring this beast down.  They Rule is an interesting
project for me, but the real task is helping to build a movement that
has the confidence, size and will to end the madness of this profit
driven system for good.  I am involved in a socialist organization here
and spend much of my time helping out in this process.

Futurefarmers is some of the least alienating work I could find.  I love
working with Amy, whether it be for a big or a small company.  I hope
that we would draw the line at greenwashing, or nuclear power companies
etc.  I hope I never knowingly cross a picket line or betray a mass
boycott.  But on the whole I find that I can have a more effective
political voice through the united actions of a party than the singular
withdrawal of my labour from the work on the website of a
multi-national.

> Web design seems to mesh the artistic and commercial spheres like
never before. Is it eating or feeding the avant garde?
If you think of these spheres as big balls in a 3dimensional Venn
Diagram then the commercial Sphere would be the size of the sun and art
would be a planet the size of the earth.  Rather than orbiting the sun
the art planet would mostly be burning up inside the commodifying sun of
profit.  A small section of the art planet pretrudes from the sun but it
is difficult to view it as being different from the rest of the planet
because of the overwhelming heat from the sun.

Nothing escapes the alienating force of commodification.  Art and
commerce have a long history now.  Perhaps the web is further entwining
the two, I am not sure.  I doubt that it is a significant change.  Land,
guns, people, vegetables, and Monets all have price tags.  Even if you
try and make art out of that context it has to be viewed from this
reality.  That is not ajustification of course, I don't like that at all. 
When the land becomes private property from which profit can be extracted, 
the land suffers. Likewise with people and art.

We can make art that is reflexive about this, and we can make art which
is didactic, but can we can't make art which escapes this condition.

> Net nostalgia laments the shoppingmallisation of cyberspace - what's
keepin' it real 4u?
The shoppingmallisation is pretty real.  Many people's lives have been
affected by the markets' intial over-ethusiastic zealous for ecommerce,
and now they suffer from its retreat.  In the meantime the utopian
visions that many people have for the internet have seemed to remain the
same.  I think that the left in the west has suffered some terrible
defeats.  There is little confidence in the ability to create a viable
alternative to the system that we have at the present.  The net came
along and seemed new enough and different enough that it contain our
hopes and desires for a better future.  Perhaps this time it could
deliver. Of course it resides in the same material reality that we all
do.  It could not escape commercialization.  The real potential of the
web, the ability to search all the text in the world for a certain
string of text, to locate any piece of music, are hampered by private
interests. The sites that I enjoy are those that try and resist this, or
comment on it.

I check www.commondreams.org almost everyday.  I read
www.socialistworker.org, www.indymedia.org, www.nologo.org,
www.corpwatch.org and others for political content.  I enjoy flazoom,
blogdex, k10k, metafilter, www.ntk.net, www.blackbeltjones.com/work/ for
my links...

> How do we avoid a cubicled future? (where we chew nasa vitamin pill
hand me downs and data dripfeeds )
Huh?  avoid?  That is what I am fighting for! To be honest that is a
better future than many people face right now.  How do we prevent that?
I think the we in the statement is the crucial term. The we has to be as
broad as possible.  It can't be an elite few intellectuals, nor can it
be some enthusiastic terrorists, nor even for that matter a few well
meaning 'culture jammers' the we will have to be all those people and
their neighbours, their children, their parents and their posties. etc.
There is a growing confidence amongst everyday people in
society that we can have some sort of say in how the world is run, and
that it seems to be about time that we do.

> An untouched area of design u'd like to X-plore?

I'd like to continue doing interaction design that involves people
communicating with other people rather than them interacting with
something I have made.  I'd like to get into designing some chatroom
like spaces that facilitate live communication  probably themed around an 
issue.

> A large client requests a 2 line proposal for a FutureFarmers genetic
> engineered artwork. Your ideas?

I don't think it would be possible to do gentetically engineered artwork

right now.  I consider Kac's rabbit to be a genetically engineered PR
stunt.
My reply would be:

Make a tree that grows US $100 bills, throw in some genes from some
tenacious weeds, make it round-up ready;  distribute this through the so

called third world and poor areas. Include a terminator gene that kicks
in after ten generations so that after the US economy collapses we aren't
swamped with the detritus of its ugly currency.


love josh

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