Co-Presented with Aurora Picture Show

What If, Why Not is the first film to delve into the work of the renegade 1970s architecture collective Ant Farm, best known for its iconic land-art piece Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas. Radical architects, video pioneers, and mordantly funny cultural commentators, the Ant Farmers created a body of deeply subversive work that questioned everything by posing a set of creative and comedic alternatives. Combining futuristic notions gleaned from Buckminster Fuller and NASA with lo-fi production methods; utopian visions with a love of trashy backyard Americana; and a respect for "high" intellectual ideas with an irreverent, often crass sense of humor, Ant Farm's work was quintessential American in its ethos and methodology and emblematic of a period in American history that continues to captivate and shape modern culture. As architects, the Ant Farmers designed "The House of the Century," a ferrocement residence of organic shapes near Angleton, Texas, and they promoted inflatable structures as affordable, anti consumerist options for shelter. The Ant Farmers were also video art pioneers whose work offered devastating critiques of the mass media. Media Burn (1975) propelled a Cadillac through a wall of flaming televisions and The Eternal Frame (also 1975) reenacted and refilmed the Kennedy assassination in Dallas's Dealey Plaza. Incorporating archival video, new footage shot over the past nine years and computer animation based on period architectural sketches, this multilayered film considers Ant Farm's significance in today's neoconformist culture and its impact on the artists and designers of the future. "What we were trying to do was the ultimate form of architecture, which was predicting how society would use space, land, and time," said Curtis Schreier of Ant Farm.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 12

What if, Why Not? Underground Adventures With Ant Farm
7:00 PM   |   UH Theater, University Of Houston, Houston, TX

Featuring a Q&A with Ant Farm founders Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier and directors Laura Harrison and Beth Federici, plus a reception amidst the student-designed/Ant Farm-inspired inflatables in the Architecture School atrium hosted by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center!

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13

What if, Why Not? Underground Adventures With Ant Farm
9:45 PM  |  Angelika Film Center, Houston TX