I’m standing at the gate to an apartment building across from an auto-body shop in the Mission, sidestepping vomit in order to park my bike.
“Hello?” I call through the bars.
“You must be Zoe.” The gate opens, and I shake hands with Uriah Findley, one of Foma Labs’s two co-founders. He’s a well-dressed white guy in a gray suit—the look I’d expect for a person who curates experiences for clients who are sometimes corporate executives. As I shake his hand, I realize his fingernails are painted black. “Follow me,” he says.
“I’ll meet you on the other side,” he says again. “But one thing. If you see a book, I suggest you open it.”
I’ve come to shadow a Foma Labs “jaunt,” or immersive experience designed for a specific group of people. I don’t know who the people are; I just know I was told to come early. Uriah and I round the street corner. He stops at an unmarked door, which he opens with a white key card.
“Is this Foma Labs?” I ask.
“Ah, you don’t know where you are.” He pushes the door open and draws back a curtain, and we’re standing in a dark room with large red lights on the walls beating like hearts. In front of us is an old-fashioned fireplace, but instead of a hearth inside, the fireplace opens onto a wooden slide. “Welcome to the former Latitude Society,” Uriah says.
Over the next five hours, I would enter into the tangled web of San Francisco’s secret societies, both defunct and operational — the lineage that ultimately led to Foma Labs. But I’ll pause here to say that staring down that slide after passing through a nondescript door on a nondescript street was the closest I’ve ever come to staring down the mouth of Alice’s rabbit hole. You better believe I tucked my knees and took the plunge.
He points me to three doors; two are labeled “Dark and Crawling” and “Light and Walking.”
“Hold your bag to your chest, and I’ll meet you at the bottom,” Uriah says. Within seconds I’m skidding along the tight curves of the tubular wooden slide, squealing with delight. The slide spits me out in a carpeted room with three doors and a mysterious figure behind frosted glass at what looks like a ticket window.
“Clear!” I yell, and soon Uriah emerges from the slide with a far more graceful dismount than mine had been. His suit is remarkably unruffled.
“Not bad,” he says, dusting himself off. “We oiled the wood this morning.” He points me to three doors; two are labeled “Dark and Crawling” and “Light and Walking.” “Originally, Latitude Society members would deposit their things here,” Uriah says, as he points to a row of deep drawers by the ticket window. “And then a light would go on over the door they were supposed to open. But today we thought we’d let you and the group choose for yourselves.”
I’m already walking toward the door labeled “Dark and Crawling” when I remember I’m on an assignment. I’m supposed to ask this man questions.
“Tell me,” I say. “What does the Latitude Society have to do with Foma Labs?”
“Think of the Latitude as Foma’s ancestor.” He redirects by offering to take my bag and coat, having noticed which door I’m gravitating toward. I resolve to press on his vague answer once I find out what’s behind that door.
“And where does the name ‘Foma’ come from?”
“It’s a tenet of Bokononism, the religion Kurt Vonnegut invented for Cat’s Cradle.”
“What does it mean?”
“Harmless untruths.” Uriah pauses. “I’ll meet you on the other side,” he says again. “But one thing. If you see a book, I suggest you open it.” Wonderful, I think.
I enter into a pitch-black hallway, carpeted from floor to ceiling. The roof slopes as I walk on, and soon I’m crawling through the darkness, feeling my way along fuzzy walls, climbing and descending little carpeted hills. Then the texture of the walls changes, and I see light ahead, shining behind what I realize is yet another curtain.
I draw it back; my eyes adjust; and I’m kneeling in a hexagonal room whose walls are made of books. Which one am I supposed to open? Otherworldly music plays from a domed ceiling so low I can’t stand up. I turn to my right and find a book closed on a short podium. This must be the one.
By now I’m expecting a psychedelic teacake to pop out of the book, or at the very least a red or blue pill. But when I open it, the pages are blank — until they aren’t. A projection from somewhere above me shines onto the blank page, and I’m welcomed into the Society for Art and Design Sciences — or S.A.D.S.
“In this modern age where facts have become endangered, we are working to use the sacred crafts of art and design to proliferate the universal aesthetic truths,” a voice explains over footage of ancient Buddhist architecture, turn-of-the-century dancing couples and waterfalls. “We imagine that you share many goals similar to ours, which is why you’ve been called here today. Now make your way out to the lounge, and await your next steps.”
Despite the fact that I have no idea how S.A.D.S. connects to Foma Labs or the Latitude Society, by the time the projection ends, I realize my smile is so wide that my face is hurting. I turn around and find — you guessed it — another curtain and crawl into a small but beautiful library, where I can stand all the way up at last. There are plush leather armchairs, strange knick-knacks and exotic volumes on the bookshelves, and walls papered with golden birds. I come out into the lounge, a much larger room lined with benches and meditation pillows, and there’s Uriah with my things next to a tray of pastries. So there were teacakes after all.
“Zoe!” I turn around and find Anthony Rocco, the other half of Foma Labs, standing behind a stately looking wooden bar. He’s also a lanky white guy in a suit. “How was your journey?” he asks.
“You didn’t think we’d throw you into a dark tunnel without supervision,”
I say the only word I can think of: “wonderful.” As we shake hands, I notice he has a tattoo drawn to look like a wristwatch with a blooming rose where a clock face should be.
I realize I just crawled through Uriah Findley and Anthony Rocco’s résumé. The Latitude Society experience is like one item in their portfolio. “It doesn’t quite communicate itself in a slide deck,” Uriah says. “I co-concepted this place…and a few other things.” Apparently, Uriah’s other Latitude-related design collaborations could be found all over the city while the society was operational. They included a sandbox that filled an entire room and a quest in which keycards were traded for coins and used to play an arcade game that gave clues. “But it also means production,” he goes on. “We formed the wood for the slide right here. Picture having a two-ton pallet of books delivered to this address. Anthony and I were two of a handful of employees of the Latitude Society.”
Though the Society is defunct, the Latitude space is currently used and maintained by the Rathskeller Club, which lent it to Foma today. I ask Anthony about his former role.
“Operations,” he says. “I was a lighthouse technician.” Lighthouse? Before I can ask for clarification, Jessica Lachenal, vital Foma Labs accomplice and former Latitude employee, pops out of a door I hadn’t noticed. We’re introduced, and Jessica explains that the “lighthouse” is the Latitude control center, that the tunnel is fitted with multiple trap doors and that she’d been listening to my every move. “In a tunnel that dark, microphones are much better than cameras,” she says.
“You didn’t think we’d throw you into a dark tunnel without supervision,” laughs Anthony. This focus on safety is integral to the Foma design model. But more often than not it means watching out for a participant’s emotional well-being rather than their physical needs.
“People with no history of claustrophobia have freaked out in the tunnel,” Anthony says. “I’d usually come in with a flashlight and let them know I’m there for them and that it’s safe to continue if they want to.” He pauses. “I think I learned more about experience design in the lighthouse than in art school.”
In Foam Labs’s ideology, the goal of an immersive experience is to let participants have their own experiences, and that can involve key moments in which they are made to feel cared for. Uriah and Anthony analogize it in a Medium article with a Battlestar Galactica quote about making participants “feel safe enough to be brave.”
At Foma’s first public event in April, Obfuscia: Déjà Vu, in which a fictitious hotel was populated with clairvoyants hosting various psychic events, “safe enough to be brave” meant being there for a participant processing the loss of a friend in the Ghost Ship fire.
“I could tell she’d been crying when she came outside,” Uriah says. “I asked her how her experience was going, if she needed to leave or if she needed anything at all. But ultimately, we just stood together until she decided she was ready to go back in.”
At this point, Anthony leaves and ushers the foretold group into the lounge, and a coincidence arises that not even Foma Labs can explain. In walk the deans of the college from which I graduated three days ago. They’re not from my department, but I recognize a few from my master’s ceremony. The group I’m joining is California College of the Arts.
When I explain this, Anthony says he and Uriah welcome these kinds of synchronicities. “In fact, we kind of trade in them.”
Now the Society for Art and Design Sciences, S.A.D.S, starts to make sense. Michael Wertz, a printmaker and assistant chair of the CCA Illustration Department, is one of the participants. He worked with Uriah and Anthony on the Latitude Society after falling down the rabbit hole of the Jejune Institute, the first secret society Uriah co-produced. S.A.D.S. is a society designed solely for today’s event in a collaboration between Wertz and Foma. Now I realize the quest is just beginning.
I’ll need to pause here because as we’re about to set off, Anthony hands me an NDA (non-disclosure agreement).
“We recognize that it’s odd to ask a reporter to sign an NDA. But the technology you’re about to use isn’t public yet.” As it turns out, Foma Labs works not only in alternate reality (facilitated through hidden tunnels and secret societies) but in augmented reality (facilitated through devices à la Pokémon Go). Though I can’t say exactly what we did, I can say the technology was provided by GoMeta and that it will be revealed to the public in the next few weeks.
So we’re off on a design-themed jaunt that I can’t legally describe, with clues all over the Mission, ending in a picnic in Dolores Park. Michael passes out S.A.D.S. pins that he designed, and the quest is complete.
“My dad was an undercover FBI agent,” Anthony says.
We part ways with the other deans, and I walk back to the former Latitude Society with Anthony, Uriah and Michael. Uriah smokes a Black & Mild as all three men pass out the leftover bagged lunches from our picnic to homeless people en route. Back at the Latitude, we say good-bye to Michael Wertz, and I sit down with Anthony and Uriah in the comfy leather chairs of the library.
My first question: “How did you two get into this?”
“My dad was an undercover FBI agent,” Anthony says. I fail to repress a squawk. He’s used to it. “Being from Venezuela, he played the part of a drug dealer very convincingly. We were trained at a young age with the cover story that he worked at a department store, so reality was already shifty for me.” From there Anthony tells the story of falling in love with old movies but getting disillusioned at film school in New York City. “It wasn’t just about who had the best story; there were weird politics involved. I decided to say, ‘Fuck film,’ and ended up in the performance-art scene touring Europe. I gave up my apartment in New York, and at that point I was willing to go anywhere someone would buy me a plane ticket. That was how I ended up at the Burning Man festival.”
Uriah chimes in, laughing. “Because when you’re willing to go anywhere, you eventually end up at Burning Man.”
Anthony found his way to San Francisco with the 2011 Burning Man Trojan Horse Project. He describes that time in his life as a “period of weirdness” in which he picked up secret societies like lose change. That was how he met Uriah.
“My backstory’s not nearly so glamorous,” Uriah says. Anthony flutters his lips. “I grew up in the suburbs of Orange County [CA] DJing, taking over laser-tag arenas, late ’90s end-of-the-rave-scene business.” Uriah went to Expression College in the Bay Area for sound arts and met Jeff Hull, founder of the Jejune Institute, the Latitude Society and, coincidentally, retail fashion company Oaklandish. They met playing Capture the Flag. After working smaller jobs for Hull, Uriah was charged with building the automated room that ran the Jejune Institute. “Then for seven and a half years, I worked on secret societies, eventually as a lead producer.”
“But we’re done with secrets now,” Anthony says. “When we started Foma, we got all these emails.” They both start laughing preemptively, knowing the story he’s about to tell. “People came out of the woodwork, asking, ‘Can you tell me what you’re doing? How do I start the game?’ And we’d reply back, ‘We’re a for-hire company. The game is: get us a job!’”
“But it’s not that far off.” Uriah adds. “Jeff always intended Jejune to be a case study for a design firm.” Now they’re finishing each other’s thoughts like a lamp-lit married couple in suits.
Anthony: “But that was 10 years ago, before there were social media metrics. You couldn’t quantify anything. Now we can measure impact and prove it to our clients.”
Uriah: “And Jejune was a big, expensive machine to run. It was essentially paying for its own first case study. We operate like most design firms in that our clients pay for their own case studies.”
Now we’ve hit on the mission of Foma Labs, the mission that neither the Jejune Institute nor the Latitude Society was able to accomplish: to design experience and make the act of experience design financially sustainable. Vice magazine already took care of the money-flow question for the former Latitude Society’s lavish clubhouse. But suffice it to say, even a secret society can get a piece of the venture-capital pie—though in the case of the Latitude, that pie was destined to get eaten. Foma has a much different approach.
“Viewers, players and society members all need to be trained that art costs money,” Anthony says. “But it’s just as important for art makers to get into the mindset that they deserve to be paid.” This is where curating for CEOs and interacting with branded content comes in.
“People can sense when they’re being marketed to,” Uriah explains. “But if they know they’re being marketed to from the get-go, there’s space for an authentic experience. And one that actually pays the artists.” He goes on to reference their highest-paid installation yet. “PepsiCo flew us to Milan to create an event for 50 C-level executives in which an android gave dispatches from the future. It worked.”
For the time being, it looks like the corporate events will bankroll Foma’s public events in order to keep ticket costs relatively low. I press for what the next public event might be. The answer: Halloween.
Uriah: “We want to do something that feels David Lynch–style creepy.”
Anthony: “We want to do something that isn’t a certain event on Pier 70.” He’s referring to the San Francisco Ghost Ship Halloween event, not to be confused with the Oakland Ghost Ship art space where the fire struck.
We say a warm good-bye, on hugging terms by now. I thank them for what I realize has been the most fun day on the job I can remember.
“Fun is what we do,” Uriah says.
I climb the stairs and exit the gate, and there’s my bike and the puddle of vomit I sidestepped that morning. The grating sounds of the auto-body shop cut through the foggy afternoon, and I’m still smiling, swimming in the knowledge that there is a whole world dedicated solely to fun just under my feet.
