Futurefarmers, a San Francisco–based art collective, creates projects that are diverse both in terms of production and in their strategies of audience engagement. Recent projects include lunchboxes that incorporate hydrogen-producing algae, antiwar computer games, and the Urban Garden Registry (2008), an online map of unused land sites in San Francisco that are feasible for gardening and food production. If anything typifies a Futurefarmers project, it is the balance of both critical and optimistic thought and the use of both inventive and pragmatic design elements. In 2005 the group examined the vanishing art of shoemaking in the installation Shoelace Exchange; for the Guggenheim’s Intervals series the group further investigates this craft with a site-specific installation for the museum.

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