foam

On 24 January we held our first day at De Wimpel with a class of 5th-graders and their teacher Myrte, on the topic of mushrooms.

What do Tarot and plants have in common? Beyond the floral motifs that appear on almost every card, perhaps it is stories that are the connective tissue between them: stories of divination, oral histories and ethnobotanical writings on human-plant relationships; recipes, myths and science fiction.

Notes from the Alternate Reality Games Tutorial are now on the Libarnyth: http://lib.fo.am/arg_tutorial

Lionel is excited to announce that he is one of four contestants to have won this year's Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award. The €25,000 award will allow him to pursue a personal art-science project in collaboration with the Kluyver Centre for Genomics and Industrial Fermentation, investigating the possibilities for decorating concrete buildings with a "living paint" made of lichen.

Over the last couple of weeks Germination X has managed to attract 70 players picking and planting in a permaculture world, with plants now covering 92 5x5 tiles - watch out Zynga :) This week has seen some more additions, firstly giving gifts to spirits has a large effect on their emotions positive and negative, and while it needs a bit more work - the wording of messages is modified according to the spirit's emotional state at the time they send them.

An interview with Maja and Nik is featured in the recent issue of MCD – "L’INTERNET VOIT VERT / THE CULTURE OF GREEN TECH" – in which they discuss groworld, resilience and facing uncertainty.

The Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm is an interdisciplinary lab that does serious research on unserious activities and comprises computer scientists, interaction designers, sociologists, psychologists and game designers. They are also part of SICS, and are partners with FoAM on the Lirec project. Last week I was lucky enough to work with them for 5 days focused on Germination X. The main objective was to start designing a user study to discover people's feelings about their relationships in the game. We started off with a talk and a workshop, inviting the other researchers to help us decide the best ways of doing this - using interviews, online questionnaires, in game surveys or raw data from the game.

A company of artists from Europe and a company of artisans from Oaxaca set out to meet each other. Over two years of journeys and collaborations, these partners will make and grow things together, create rituals and events, street art and venerative objects, share ideas, inspiration and hospitality. At the heart of our project is the transforming power of culture: the insistence that our stories and symbols, our various senses of the sacred and the profane, are not a shallow surface over hard material and economic realities, but tectonic forces, capable of unsettling everything we know.

Slowly Germination X gets less like a prototype and more like a full game, lots of new stuff this week - as this is the first online release of the work done over the past month. Players can now pass items of fruit to each other or spirits as gifts (by dragging fruit over messages and dropping them). There is some limited player development with some small surprises to prolong the gameplay a bit (spot the new plants). There is now a new mechanism to introduce players to the game and get feedback from them and also navigation to quickly locate plants - click on a message to teleport to the plant it concerns.

Last weekend it was the annual FoAM gathering to discuss long term ideas, some self reflection and consideration of external perceptions. We were guided on this mission by Simone Poutnik and Hendrik Tiesinga, members of FoAM and founders of Natural Innovation. They decided to trial a new method on us all, Lego Serious Play. Now, I'm a bit battle hardened when it comes to alternative business management strategies as I've been exposed to quite a few in various places over the years, but despite Lego's high scoring buzzword bingo website, I can independently verify this approach as very much a success.

Welkom bij Voedsel 2.0, een thematische lunch over duurzaam eten. De bedoeling van deze lunch is om ideeën over de toekomst van voedsel uit te wisselen, terwijl je zintuigen met – voor vandaag ontworpen – gerechten geprikkeld worden. De oude Grieken wisten het al: Tijdens Griekse 'symposia' kon het samen eten, drinken en praten met onbekenden leiden tot baanbrekende filosofieën. En het doorbreken van sociale grenzen.

During 2008 and 2009 a small group of groworlders including members of FoAM and invited participants Tale of Tales and Six to Start worked on designs and prototypes for games that would strengthen the connection between plants and people.

“Naikan is a method of intensive self-reflection that can lead to more inner freedom and joy. A week of Naikan allows you to examine your view on life by observing your inner world, calmly, in a completely safe space. The silence and withdrawal enable a deep, meditative and emotionally intense experience, by which self-perception can be re-calibrated and a fresh view on our life story can take place.”
– From Christina Stadlbauer’s page: http://shiatsubrussel.be/index.php?/english/naikan---looking-inside/

“FoAM's burgeoning intergenerational residency programme, combined with Alex Davies and Alexandra Crosby's experiment in parenting, has produced some interesting results. Alex Davies is a Sydney artist, until recently based in Austria working with Time’s Up.”

“Most of you must have been puzzled on occasion as to what i have been doing here: but I assure you that the most puzzled one has surely been myself...” More of Alkan’s research notes:

• http://libarynth.org/research_report_alkan