Invisible Worlds Residencies are a collaboration between the Eden Project and FoAM. Three residencies were chosen to take place throughout 2018: Disintigrated Rock by Rosanna Martin, ...and then we see if we will be friends by Katharina Hauke and Till Bovermann, and Ferment! by Hoon Kim, Sean Meaden and Elizabeth Fortnum.
For millions of years making sense of the environment was the domain of biological organisms, but now machines are starting to join in. This research programme looks at what the arrival of AI could mean for landscapes and non-human inhabitants. What are fundamental ingredients for environmental literacy and how could these be made accessible to an AI?
Dust and shadow is FoAM's contribution to a transdisciplinary research and residency programme exploring environmental issues specific to the desert of the North-American Southwest. We combine philosophical inquiry with speculative design and action research to explore divergent approaches to desertification (both ecological and cultural), zombie-utopias, panpsychism, beyond-human relationships and probabilistic future preparedness.
Recent world events and concern over ‘fake news’ and ‘post-factualism’ have highlighted the difficulties encountered when trying to find trustworthy sources of information. The ability to judge the reliability of different sources of information is a skill that can be learned. The AccessLab project aims to improve access to and the judgement of information, through direct citizen-scientist pairings. there are three workshops open for participants in 2018.
This programme is aimed at reimagining what robotics could mean in functionality, materiality and ecology, when they are designed as expressions based on habitats and trophic interactions. What would the creative process look like? Machine Wilderness is a project prototyping artificial organisms as functional agents within biomes and landscapes, actively contributing to biodiversity.
The voice of nature is a site-specific court piece, in which we investigate ecocide and the possibilities of creating a new proposal for the justice- system as an answer to the current vacuum in the environmental crime system. We are experimenting with the interconnectedness of a conventional court, restorative justice and transformative processes as a away to unveil the hidden stories of traumatic environments and its correlation to colonialism and ...
Spectres in change is an artistic investigation reflecting on acute planetary challenges of the present against complex historical trajectories, on the island of Seili in the Archipelago Sea. Several artists and collectives, including FoAM Earth, develop long-term research-based projects that take the myriad questions raised by the island context as their starting point.
In this project we ask - what determines the ability of a virus to infect some hosts but not others? Working with evolutionary biologist Ben Longdon, we're developing a citizen science project using visual programming, craft, tangible interfaces and games to explore virus host shifts – where a virus jumps from one host species to another.
The Sonic Kayak is a musical instrument with which to investigate nature. Kayaks rigged with underwater environmental sensors generate live music from the marine world, providing the paddler with an extra dimension of senses with which to explore the underwater climate, while enabling citizens to gather important climate/environmental data.
Cricket tales is a citizen science project, developed in collaboration between foam and the Wild Crickets researchers. By tagging events in the cricket CCTV videos, players contribute directly to research which will determine whether crickets have individual personalities.