It may look like an adorable baby chick with a flower on its head, but Foo Foo is a sentient AI being who has come to earth to show humans a path forward through its environmental crisis. It’s designed to be humanity’s savior.

Fair warning, it will dwarf you in the space it occupies at the Momentary, but it resembles a gigantic, cute friend, said artist Sam Borkson of FriendsWithYou, the collaborative responsible for making and sending Foo Foo out into the world.

“I’m excited to enliven it in person,” said Victor Gomez, curatorial associate, contemporary art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Gomez worked with former colleague Xuxa Rodriguez to get the chick on display. Foo Foo sits in the corner near the Onyx Coffee Lab at the Momentary, a communal space where people work and get coffee, and will be on display through December 1. This is the first real appearance of the character outside of the context of a larger series.

“Previously in that space was Beeple, which was very technology heavy and Foo Foo is quite the opposite,” Gomez said. “It’s fun, inflatable, it’s very playful and has a youthful vibe to it. It’s very different.”

Gomez and Rodriguez were captivated by FriendsWithYou’s mission and how seamlessly it aligned with their art spaces’ goals around the intersection of nature and architecture. They wanted to bring it to Northwest Arkansas and worked with FriendsWithYou to do so. A number of the Momentary’s recent programs have focused on the environment and ecosystem.

“Foo Foo is such a beautiful embodiment of those ideas,” Gomez said. As part of the FriendsWithYou OCEAN universe, it’s sent to earth “to guide us and give us hope around those concerns.”

It doesn’t hurt that it’s also fun and entertaining. Gomez thinks people of all ages will be able to connect with Foo Foo, which he describes as playful and different from everything else currently on display at the Momentary. He also hopes that people will be inclined to learn more about FriendsWithYou as a result, both their mission and their practice, given that they’ve done a lot more than work with museums and public spaces.

HANDS BEHIND YOUR BACK

FriendsWithYou is comprised of artists Sam Borkson and Arturo Sandoval III, known as Tory. Their motto is “magic, luck and friendship,” which anchors their art project’s mission to foster community, positive impacts and a greater connection to nature through modern spirituality, according to the exhibit description.

Sam and Tory have been working together for more than 23 years now.

“We created this idea as an answer to isolation, like a healing, a new communal way of really coming together,” Borkson said by Zoom.

The two of them met during their college years, but not in class. They found each other at the raves they attended and quickly learned they had a shared philosophy. Both subscribed to the generational peace movement, which was very anti-establishment.

“It was the first time where we saw, were privy to, the new modality of this very soft power,” Sandoval said. “Where you would have … counter to a general way of thinking, like rainbows and positivity as men.”

That was one of the things FriendsWithYou wanted to accomplish with their work, expressing that men could be a source of positivity and create moments of union from “an eternal kind of place,” and honor a way of being. They wanted to create art that could be the source of interaction not just with the pieces themselves, but with other people too.

The first creations by FriendsWithYou were outside of the norm for art modalities. They made amulets and what Sam and Tory call “pseudo powers,” then a lot of installation work.

“We wanted to create super, high impactful moments,” Sandoval said. While many people are used to art being displayed “not to be touched,” both say that if you go back far enough in history, you’ll see that it wasn’t always like that. “Art was very accessible, it was meant to be in your home.”

Along the way it developed into a different type of importance. Sam and Tory fight the modern notion that art shouldn’t be touched, and try to create works that people can experience “on a core human level, as opposed to this removed modality of going to a gallery or museum,” Sandoval said. “This kind of work relies on the child-like naivete to try to transcend that formality.”

DREAM LIMITLESSLY

Neither Sam nor Tory went to traditional art school. Instead, their earliest perspectives on art came from being in the first generation to grow up as the internet became available, which gave them the chance to see the whole world from home.

“We just gravitated toward the art that spoke to us,” Borkson said.

Some of that was in the fine art world, including American artist Chris Burden, who worked in performance art, and French painter Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp, whose work is associated with cubism, Dada and conceptual art. But others they liked were using film as a medium to reach people more deeply, like Japanese animator Hayao MiyaZaki.

“We were getting a good taste of relational and almost anthropological art from just the internet and the world,” he said.

The two were studying religion and spirituality at the same time that they were learning more about fine art and doing experiential art making themselves. It had an effect on their perspective, process and creations.

At first it was all about the communal art experience. The way that some people see Foo Foo and immediately think “That makes me happy,” is essentially the reaction they were going for in the early days. Now they are aiming for deeper experiences, but they always intend to imprint an experience upon someone.

“Whether that’s a positive experience, a dangerous, scary or adventurous experience, we hope that it leaves a good impact on anybody who comes across our work,” Borkson said.

The amulets came first. They were essentially plush dolls, designed for people to hug and take with them, attach to them or stow in a bag. In the first installations visitors were supposed to touch everything, not unlike a playground for all ages. FriendsWithYou’s first exhibition at the MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) Miami, “Cloud City,” had slides; Sam and Tory appeared in costumes and moved toys around the giant space.

“We were really just wanting to play with what the future of art could be, not only interactive, but ‘What is it?’” Borkson said. Not having attended formal art school meant that the two of them understood some things about it, but weren’t fully read on it. As a result, they felt greater license to play around, not having been shackled with the same restrictions on execution. “We were really free to make a special, strange thing.”

Making paintings because that’s what sells best on the art market is among the arbitrary things they did learn, but it wasn’t what excited them. Crazy installations that couldn’t be sold or shared easily are what spoke to them more.

SOFT SAVIOR OF THE HUMANS

Foo Foo arose out of the OCEAN concept, conceptual art work that acts as a religion or spiritual tool, Borkson said. OCEAN was a way of renaming the earth and getting rid of boundaries, like the borders of countries, to focus on how humanity is interconnected to each other and the planet.

With the works come written mythologies that are not in any particular order, but are meant to “instill faith and hope in humanity, our relationship to nature and bring us closer through allegories and myths.”

In this tale, Foo Foo is in a near distant future when artificial intelligence is helping humanity survive and stay present in the world. When things turn dark, Foo Foo is the AI plant-meets-animal who comes to humanity’s aid in a moment of technological upheaval.

Whereas a lot of art is impressive in the right that it was so difficult to make, or took so much time, Sam and Tory admit that creating Foo Foo wasn’t like that. As an inflatable, it’s much more practical and easily movable. More important to them is instilling a feeling in people.

“The object is not as important as the idea, it’s represented by the object,” Sandoval said. The same goes for deciding what medium to use to express the idea and elicit an emotion. In general, Sam and Tory work with a lot of inflatables, metal sculptures, LEDs, film and video. But they let the idea guide all, so that the medium follows the idea, not the other way around. “We’re trying to get to some truth and we’ll apply it to a medium without having to per say have a precise mastery of that medium.”

In this case, Foo Foo’s medium as an inflatable stresses its friendly demeanor: it looks cute, it’s fluffy, round and reminiscent of childhood, Borkson said. He hopes it will get a giggle or a smile out of people, at the very least.

“The most we hope is that they … get deeper into why we’re really doing this, to help our overall human vibration,” he said, describing it as a call to action. OCEAN are Sam and Tory’s stories to help make the world better and encourage other artists to tell their own. “FriendsWithYou is calling everyone to be just as kind as possible.”