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The Tufts Daily
Where you read it first | Thursday, March 28, 2024

Futurefarmers expand on the little things with 'Errata - Brief Interruptions'

futurefarmers

“Errata – Brief Interruptions” is the collective Futurefarmers' current exhibition at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (CCVA) at Harvard University. The collective is loosely defined, but it was founded on the partnership of Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine. Both Franceschini and Swaine were at the opening of the exhibition, where they created a performance art piece off the visual works in the gallery.

Rebecca Uchill, the curator of the exhibition, described “Errata – Brief Interruptions” in the exhibition's program.

“[It's a] performance that uses the Stiles and Harts bricks with canvas straps as a modular mobile stage and the library errata sheets as lyrics for a musical composition," she wrote.

The first floor of the exhibition contained all the objects Uchill lists in her description of the performance. In a glass bookcase, books from the Robbins Library of Philosophy were opened to their errata, a slip of paper listing the typos in the book. As Swaine mentioned in the performance, one book had an erratum pointing out that ‘violent’ had been printed out as ‘violet.’ Both artists are concerned with errors and how they can provide jumping-off points for creation.

“These interruptions [errata] reveal the human hands that make authoritative objects,” Uchill wrote.

In the case of the bricks, Stiles and Harts is a brick company that still produces bricks using the ancient Egyptian method where each brick has to be poured by hand into a mold and then shaken. The most-featured brick was one with a human imperfection – the fingerprints of a man who worked at the brick factory whom Futurefarmers were able to identify as "George."

The beginning of the performance started with a group of people repeating the contents of the book errata at varying volume levels. They began outside, then entered the building, where they started to tap on the bricks covering the ground with fluctuating intensity.

The group spread throughout the space as the performance went on and each performer found a different way to produce sound. Some banged on the glass and concrete structure of the CCVA, while others built structures out of the bricks by slowly dragging them into position and then abruptly setting them in place. These created a variety of sounds (some more bearable than others) that composed a rhythm, which then had an interruption.

Franceschini and Swaine both got onto a ledge and started speaking about the bricks and books on display.

They talked about the search for the featured brick in the performance and the man whose fingerprint was found in the brick, along with an "error" that occurred when a literal bug entered a computer and brought its machinery to a halt.

The pair recited a list of "sounds" consisting of various actions that related to the instances of human error highlighted throughout the show: the computer bug, the erratum slips and the Stiles and Harts bricks. They acted out these "sounds'' and viewers felt a sense of obligation to listen.

“Errata – Brief Interruptions” found its inspiration in the streets of Cambridge, while at the same time, the group began to notice little differences that can be found among individual units of mass-produced objects as a result of human error. All these errors can add up and become opportunities to experiment with how humans leave their mark in an increasingly technological world.