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What is foam?

We are a transdisciplinary laboratory at the interstices of art, science, nature and everyday life.

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Activities

Invisible Worlds Residencies

Invisible Worlds Residencies are a collaboration between the Eden Project and FoAM. We are pleased to announce the three residencies 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.

Dust and shadow

Dust and shadow is FoAM Earth'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.

Dust & Shadow soundwalk

The Dust & Shadow soundwalk is an experiment in attunement to an urban desert environment through diverse forms of listening. Walking in silence through the Sonoran dust in the shadow of civilisation, the walkers may begin to hear the murmur of matter, uncover desert refugia amidst urban life, and forge new connections with the unexpected.

Random Forests

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?

#Environmental #Machine #Learning

Spectres in change

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.

Sonic Kayaks

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.

The voice of nature

This site-specific court piece by Maria Lucia Cruz Correia investigates ecocide and the possibilities of making a new proposal for the justice-system in order to prevent the destructive impacts of climate change. We experiment with how law and justice can serve the ecosystem by proposing a “new type of court room” and create a new form of trial in which nature does have a stand. Through a transformative juridical ritual, humans and non-humans can come to a collective language.

Power of the mud

Power of the Mud is an experiment designed to both explore the potential of home-made microbial fuel cells for powering small domestic or artistic devices and genuinely trigger curiosity from various audiences.

Art in the Kitchen

Art in the Kitchen (Kunst in de Keuken) is a series of workshops where young and old create artworks using edible materials, cooking technologies and recycling.

Behaving genes

Together with Seirian Sumner at University College London, we are developing an open source game that will allow people to build their own wasp society. Players can toy with the limits of biology and test the resilience of their wasp social structures when environmental catastrophes hit.

Greenspace Voxels

Visualising greenspace in cities in 3D using minecraft and physical models, using voxel data from full-waveform LiDAR.

Machine Wilderness

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.

Tasting tomorrow

Tasting Tomorrow is a series of futuring workshops about food as a manifestation of Maltese and European diversity. Together with local experts and enthusiasts we explored the question “What might a thriving food culture in Malta look like?”

Crab Camouflage

Citizen science game developed for the Natural History Museum in London, as part of their Colour and Vision exhibition.

Doing Nothing

Doing Nothing is a practice-based research programme where we investigate what happens when we do nothing at all. We carve out time and space to "be," without expectations or desires for changing or achieving anything in particular. Doing nothing does not mean that we suddenly institute laziness or want to be bored. On the contrary, we find that occasionally slowing the relentless pace of doing is an essential part of the creative process, bringing a necessary distance, awareness and invigoration both to doing and being.

Weaving Codes

What happens when we apply a five-thousand-year-long view of technology to programming? What are the parallels between investigations into weaving as thought and livecoding performance? Both represent new ways of approaching human activities otherwise reduced to purely "utilitarian" roles, but which are central in all our lives. Is weaving - perhaps the first digital artform humans engaged in - actually itself a computational process?

Future Thinking for Social Living

Future Thinking for Social Living is a collaboration between researchers at Falmouth University and independent research organisation Foam Kernow and residents and staff at Miners Court extra care housing scheme in Redruth, Cornwall. Using crafts, storytelling and accessible technology, this project explores ideas about how our wellbeing might be improved by making - sometimes small - changes to the ways we live. We start the pilot by engaging in making activities, conversations and presentations in order to talk about and reimagine together what home is and what makes a home.

Marine CoLABoration

‘Valuing the Ocean’, an initiative of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, aims to help increase the capacity of the environmental sector to communicate the role of the ocean in human wellbeing, particularly through collaboration with others. The Foundation’s London branch has decided to take a laboratory approach - Marine CoLABoration - and invited FoAM to design and facilitate a series of workshops.

Symbai

Symbai is a project in collaboration with Dr Shakti Lamba who studies the evolution of sociality and culture in humans. She collects detailed networks of knowledge and prestige in villages of different cultural backgrounds in rural India. Symbai is a solar powered Raspberry Pi/Android anthropological research tool allowing Shakti and her field assistants to work collaboratively in areas with no power or internet connectivity.

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Pattern Matrix

The pattern matrix is a tangible weavecoding system for exploring the connections between code and weave. Developed as part of the AHRC funded weavecoding project and Future Thinking for Social Living, it was built as a collaboration between Makernow and Foam Kernow, developed during an arts residency at Miners Court extra care housing scheme in Redruth, Cornwall.

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Future Fabulators

Future Fabulators encourages us to imagine, experience and investigate living in a range of possible futures, designed as artistic experiments today. It takes uncertainty as a creative challenge in creating cultural spaces in which visions of everyday life in the time ahead become tangible and discussable. FF merges the voices of futurists, scientists, artists, policy makers and economists with those of the experts of everyday life, aiming to raise awareness about the impact of future visions on contemporary culture and lifestyle.

Human in Residence

If you'd like to spend a bit of time working at the FoAM Kernow studio, whether it's a few hours or a month, then there is some space available.

Open Sauces

Open Sauces is a collection of projects, writings and events related to sharing of food, food culture and food systems. Although their format might change, these activities all combine tasting, socialising and learning. Open Sauces brings together people interested in both environmental and cultural and scientific and systemic aspects of cooking, eating and sharing food. We come together in members’ kitchens, in labs, studios and public spaces, keeping the source of our sauces and other culinary delights open for anyone interested in testing out our recipes or joining the Open Sauces Cooking Club.

Play

Here are all our games, demos and interactive prototypes collected together in one place. Some of them are citizen science games where you can help researchers carry out scientific experiments, others are interactive demos of things we have been building for different projects.

Flotsam

An exploration into screen-less programming languages for teaching children programming, explaining the complexities of weaving, and livecoding performances. Recently featured on the Adafruit blog, Flotsam is a flexible prototype made out of driftwood for figuring out what this sort of programming could be, based on a Raspberry Pi.

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Project Nightjar

Citizen science games and online experiments for Project Nightjar, one of the Sensory Ecology Group’s studies, based at the University of Exeter (Cornwall Campus), in collaboration with the Behavioural Ecology Group at the University of Cambridge. The project aims to increase our understanding of camouflage in the wild and its relationship with survival. To do this we study the camouflage of ground nesting birds, and their eggs and chicks.

Library

At FoAM’s studio in Brussels we collect books, media and materials related to our activities and interests. In our multi-sensory library visitors may read, view, listen and touch snippets of the culture that FoAM’s collaborators cherish. The most traditional part of the library is our hard-copy section which includes books, magazines, zines and pamphlets. It is an eclectic collection of scientific and philosophical texts, artistic anthologies, richly illustrated design books, software manuals and recipe collections, futuristic science fiction, and even obscure facsimiles of alchemical manuscripts and botanical guides.

Coaching

In order to increase personal and collective resilience of people working in the cultural sector, FoAM has a coaching programme, in collaboration with Vali Lalioti. Coaching is a powerful process that helps people achieve their full potential. It is a safe and non-judgmental partnership that uses trust and belief in people's own abilities to empower the coachee to find their own solutions to achieving their objectives.

Butterfly Mimicry Game

How do butterfly wing patterns evolve? The Heliconius Butterfly Wing Pattern Evolver is a game where you take the role of a hungry bird and drive the evolution of an edible species to mimic the patterns of a toxic species. The game is based on genetic models used by the researchers at Cambridge University and was commisioned for use at the 2014 Royal Society Summer Exhibition in London.

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Mongoose 2000

A behavioural research tool for use in remote areas lacking reliable internet connectivity or power. Developed for the Banded Mongoose Research Project at Exeter University for use in their field site in Uganda, Mongoose 2000 uses a Raspberry Pi to synchronise behavioral observation data across multiple Android tablets used for daily recording of mongoose behaviour.

Sphaerae

Sphaerae is a semitransparent portable pavilion for synaesthetic compositions, new imaginaries and transdisciplinary experimentation. Sphaerae can touch down on uncharted territories making temporary ecosystems with fragile and complex atmospheric conditions as an instrument to explore the phenomena of light, sound and movement.

Spork Factory

Computational matter is a research area concerned with self organising material comprised of large numbers of processing units, able to communicate with each other and react to their environment. FoAM are running a series of DIY computational matter experiments, including Spork Factory, which approaches the problem from two directions.

Resilients

Resilients are people of all ages preparing for uncertain futures by experimenting with resilient forms of living and working as a form of artistic practice. The Resilients project collects, creates, shares and supports these emergent practices, while grounding them in historic cultural roots.

Physical and Alternate Reality Narratives (PARN)

The central focus of the PARN project is dealing with the possibilities and problems of creating, presenting and representing narratives in physical space. Storytelling is a fundamental human capacity and is widespread in a variety of cultural forms as well as being one of the ways in which, according to many researchers of learning and awareness, we make sense of the world as we experience and reflect it. As the acclaimed poet Simon Ortiz puts it: “there are no truths, only stories.”

The Farm Crap App

A sustainable agriculture project designed to help farmers make the most of their manure (slurry, farmyard manure and poultry litter). It's a smartphone app which contains 3 components; the calculator, the image library (to which you can add your own photos), and the record sheets. The calculator will determine the amount of crop-available key nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium) within the manure at different spreading rates helping you decide how much to spread in order to meet the crop requirements, and also what this looks like.

Code Club

Code club is a UK wide network of volunteer-led after school coding clubs for children aged 9-11. Since the start of 2013, Dave Griffiths has been working with Troon County Primary School in Cornwall, initially teaching Scratch Programming to make simple games and then as the young coders become more proficient - trying to keep up with what they are doing.

The Bicrophonic Research Institute

An artistic, musical and technological research initiative founded by Kaffe Matthews and Dave Griffiths and joined by many bicrophonic artists exploring the conjunction of sound, cities and bikes. Using GPS technology and small linux powered BeagleBoards and Raspberry Pis, the Bicrophonic Research Institute produces sonic bike installations across the world. See the main site for this project here for up to date information and latest performances.

Boskoi

FoAM seeks to promote human-plant interaction in a variety of ways. Boskoi is one such tool for this purpose: a mobile phone app that helps you map and navigate the edible landscape. It offers detailed information on wild food sources – their location, edible parts, medicinal and culinary uses. It is a database of ethnoculinary and ethnobotanic knowledge. Based on Ushahidi (an open source project allowing users to crowdsource crisis information via mobile), the app can also handle mail, SMS, tweets and uploaded pictures.

Livecoding

Livecoding is an emergent performing art in which software writing is improvised in realtime in front of an audience that can watch every keystroke unfold before them. Computer coding and algorithms are celebrated as aesthetic objects in their own right. Partly a reaction to a lack of audience engagement in traditional laptop performances, the origins of Livecoding lie in computer music, but fluxus – a rapid prototyping, playing and learning environment for 3D graphics, sound and games – has played its own part as one of a small number of tools designed for graphical live coding.

Arboreal Identity

If we understand the rules used to create, manage and destroy our identities, we can use those rules to create new identities. You can establish the basis of an identity if you can provide an answer to the questions: what's your name? where are you from? when were you born? What if we could establish a legal identity for the trees? How would it look like and how could we implement it?

Hosting Craft

A series of practice-based tutorials about the facilitation and hosting techniques, guided by Maja Kuzmanovic of FoAM Brussels. The tutorials themselves use participatory learning techniques, collected over the years through FoAM's workshops, seminars and retreats.

Scheme bricks

A way to livecode visually, by plugging in and tearing off bits of code. Currently being tested as a visual programming language for music performance (used primarily as a part of techo livecoding band slub) and 3D minecraft-ish world inhabiting robots in Al Jazari, scheme bricks is heavily inspired by Scratch a visual programming language for children to learn programming.

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Germination X

Computer games allow us to adopt new lives and see the world from different perspectives. FoAM has been working for a number of years on using games to strengthen the connection between plants and people. Our latest approach takes popular games such as FarmVille as inspiration, but explores what would happen if these games were infused with aspects of permaculture, and where “plant spirits” help or hinder you as you discover a world organised by companion planting. Germination X is a project to experiment with technology and research from the LIREC project and use it in an online multiplayer game.

Foodprints

Foodprints explores how the discipline of biomimicry can promote urban food resilience and opportunities for biodiversity to flourish in urban developments. There is an inherent relationship between the city and how food arrives on our plates. We want to investigate how to create “resilient” cities that mimic nature’s ecosystems, where all the elements are interactive, responsive, engaging, conducive to life, abundant in feedback loops, and always making best use of resources.

groWorld

The groWorld initiative brings together three “forces” capable of transforming the world on human and ecological scales: culture, gardening and technology. These three strands of inquiry inform and support each other, aiming to forge new symbiotic relationships between postindustrial human societies and the rest of the earth.

Bed, Bench and Breakfast

In the spirit of hospitality, FoAM Brussels offers accommodation and workspace for those in transit or in need of a short-term residence. In BBB residencies we share our facilities (sleeping quarters, workbenches, meeting spaces, library and kitchen) without a project or programme. The visitors can meet, work, eat, sleep and take a temporary refuge in our spacious studio.

Family in Residence

A residency programme for families of creatives, exploring the edges between transgenerational living and working environments. At FoAM we recognise the need and added value of hybrid forms of life and work to support artists. We make arrangements with the families in residence that give the parents the opportunity to focus on their work, while FoAM's collaborators become involved in looking after the children.

Advice Centre

We are keen to share a very broad and diverse base of knowledge, experience, and contacts accumulated during a decade of fruitful growth and expansion. Our fields of inquiry are highly transdisciplinary, so questions about how to connect anything to anything else can probably be answered by someone in FoAM's network. Our advice centre can offer anything from a short conversation to several mentoring sessions, and if we can’t answer questions ourselves we can draw on our network of partner organisations to connect people in Europe and beyond.

Macrotransiencies

Macrotransiencies are essentially long-form residencies for generalists in trasition periods in their lives. The transiencies invite their participants to embrace lightness, mobility and change as inevitable aspects of life and work.

Microresidencies

Micro Residencies are short, intensive working sessions where FoAM members work together with the resident generalists tackling one specific challenge or research question. Microresidencies vary in duration from a few hours to a week.

Transgenerational learning encounters

FoAM's transgenerational activities focus on complex cultural issues, emergent technologies, and traditional crafts by co-creating learning platforms for knowledge exchange. The aim is to broaden participants' understanding of the context in which they work, live and play, as well as to provide them with useful practical skills. We investigate different educational models to find new ways of alternative learning.

Residencies

At FoAM Kernow we offer residencies to generalists whose work, interests and lifestyles are aligned with FoAM's. Our motivation for this programme came from a perceived need of our peers for opportunities to pursue concentrated research and experimentation without the immediate pressures of production.

Borrowed Scenery

Borrowed Scenery is a story about an alternate reality (past, future or parallel) where plants are a central aspect of human society. Weaving through the physical spaces of everyday life, the story can be tangibly experienced wherever plants and humans interact. Borrowed Scenery encourages us to see urban plant life with fresh eyes and re-imagine our cities as places of sinuous interaction between humans and plants: where plants don’t just provide us with food and materials but become neighbours, teachers, and gateways to the planetary ‘Other’.

Luminous Green

Reflecting on the role of the arts, design and technology in an environment of turbulence, Luminous Green is a series of gatherings about a human world that is enlightened, imaginative, electrified and most importantly – living in a fertile symbiosis with the rest of the planet. The series was initiated in 2006 by FoAM in Brussels, with a call to the creative sector to enrich the public debate around environmental sustainability, ethical living and eco-design.

Euroaxacan Initiative of Transformative Cultures

The Euroaxacan Initiative of Transformative Cultures (EITC) investigates how to invigorate cultural economies by combining arts, crafts and technologies from the pre- and post-industrial eras. The initiative focuses on community workshops of the township of Zegache Sta Ana in Oaxaca, Mexico – renowned for its restoration of traditional artefacts, as well as contemporary artistic interventions.

Splinterfields Workshops

Splinterfields is an initiative of several Brussels-based organisations (Constant, FoAM, nadine and OKNO) active in the fields of technological and media arts to foster collaborative, agile and flexible learning. The programme of workshops, study groups and field-tests is open to artists, designers, technologists and other generalists curious to explore tools and mindware for experiments in contemporary culture and daily life.

Naked on Pluto

"an on line videogame that reflects on the invasive means used in the development of “social software”. The game starts when the user subscribes to the webpage of the project and accesses a city called “Elastic Versailles”, where a community of 57 animated bots interact with the player capturing the data of his/her Facebook account."

A project be Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Dave Griffiths, winner of the 2011 VIDA awards, and exhibited internationally including TEA/Super Connect — 2013 International Techno Art Exhibition, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts and Fundación Telefónica’s stand in ARCO 2012 Madrid.

Research Gatherings

FoAM in Brussels holds regular gatherings for collaborators and researchers in residence to present and discuss their work in progress, in an informal setting. The gatherings are also open to researchers who are not involved with FoAM, but are working in similar fields.

Bitesize Lectures

Bitesize Lectures are periodic public events organised by FoAM in Brussels. The events consist of lectures and presentations by emerging and established practitioners in a variety of fields. The talks last for approximately one hour, with another two or three hours reserved for discussions moderated by one of FoAM's collaborators. The presentations are complemented by thematic foods and drinks, encouraging an informal and relaxed atmosphere. We designed this series to allow in-depth conversations with people who are great speakers and have interesting things to say, without being rushed.

Apprenticeships

Apprenticeships are a combination of volunteering, learning, assisting and growing. In addition to well-established student apprenticeships (also known as internships), people of all ages and backgrounds can become apprentices at FoAM, even if they are experts in another field. Through apprenticeships, we want to encourage a spirit of volunteering, of giving a helping hand to a cause, project or person you think is worth your support.

Workshops

At FoAM, we believe that learning doesn’t stop at the gates of established educational institutions. The joy of discovering new things and adopting new skills is shared by all ages, disciplines and cultures - so why should an official graduation ceremony put a stop to this? FoAM's workshops are designed to broaden participants’ understanding of the context in which they live and work, as well as provide them with useful transdisciplinary skills and knowledge.

Qfwfq

“The ubiquitous Qfwfq is emblematic of unity amidst the heteroglossic variety of possibilities offered by expanded degrees of perception made possible by scientific devices. In one story, Qfwfq is a dinosaur, but in other stories he is also a fish, a small mammal, a subatomic particle eternally plummeting through the void. Qfwfq is constantly shifting position in the universe, despite his consistent first-person narration, suggesting the extent to which his form accommodates his point of view.”

TGarden

TGarden is a responsive environment, inspired by calligraphy and scrying. In TGarden, players’ gestures are transformed into generative computer graphics and digital soundscapes, leaving marks and traces in much the same way as a calligrapher would with brushes and ink. When visitors approach the TGarden, they choose from a range of costumes, designed to encourage particular kinds of movement.

txOom

The word txOom is an amalgam of “texture” and “bloom.” As a part of txOom, we produced two environments which were thick, malleable and layered as a texture, elegant and responsive as a bloom. Designed as imaginary ecosystems, txOom spaces “feed” on the bodily movement of the players. The kinetic energy that players’ movement generates is “recycled” into sounds, light and visual textures, rendering effects of movement visible in the space in which the movement happens.

TRG

TRG is a responsive environment shaped by four fundamental forces made apparent on the human scale: the fictional equivalents of gravity, electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear interaction. It unfolds, expands and curls up based on the energy levels within its perimeters.

gRig

gRig (Guild for Reality Integrators and Generators) is a guild for European cultural and academic operators gathered around a mutual purpose: to mix separate realities, as well as bring whole new realities into existence. The Guild’s members are committed to research and create meaningful situations in hybrid (or mixed) reality, where digital media and physical materials, objects and spaces are increasingly intertwined. Most reality generation and integration tends to happen on the edges of knowledge-fields, where different perspectives and approaches can be synthesized into hybrid forms of creative expression.

LIREC

LIREC aims to establish a multi-faceted theory of artificial long-term companions (including memory, emotions, cognition, communication, learning, etc.), embody this theory in robust and innovative technology and experimentally verify both the theory and technology in real social environments.

FoAM Kernow

Based in Falmouth, Cornwall at the southwest tip of the UK, FoAM Kernow is a non-profit organisation inhabiting the spaces between society, research, education and policy. We enable people to develop creative and confident relationships with science and technology, merging our experience in science, programming and design in a broad range of transdisciplinary research and education projects.

.x-med-k.

.x-med-k. is a series of workshops and seminars investigating the changing faces of the fleeting field of experimental media arts. From 2004 to 2008, FoAM, nadine, OKNO – three Brussels-based organisations – joined forces to design and implement this heterogeneous series for artists, designers and technologists interested in the experimental use of digital media, new materials and technologies.

f0amfr0th

f0amfr0th is a series of events organised by FoAM and whoever happens to be visiting the organisation. The events have an open format that can range from a theoretical talk to chill out rooms, from improvised networked performances to orchestrated bio-chemical experiments. Spontaneity, improvisation and informality are keywords that will grant access to this programme to the public and anyone interested in the process of working in the field of art and technology.

Spiegelaer

Spiegelaer is a series of meetings at FoAM Lab in Amsterdam that started in October 2005. In these events the Lab is opened for an evening of visuals, sounds, tastes and discussions around a central theme. The participants are selected and invited to form a group of mixed professions and back-grounds but with a shared interest in the topic of the event. The name Spiegelaer indicates the cross-disciplinary nature of the series and comes from the old Dutch word for an alchemist.

Mission to the Moon

A re-enactment of the Apollo 11 mission of 1969. Foamlab not only recycles this icon of technological confidence, but also the materials used to build it. At the exhibition Kunstvlaai/Art Pie International, two brave astronauts, Elias Tieleman and Johannes Sterk, can be seen jogging around in preparation for their mission. They exit the Lander accompanied by the original sound recordings from the Moon landing in ’69, for general exploration of the lunar-surface, the setting up of lunar cameras, collecting stone samples and planting the flag.

HapStar

Haplotype Networks and Minimum Spanning Networks are commonly used for representing associations between sequences. HapStar is a tool for viewing both types of networks, and is designed to directly use the output data generated from Arlequin. HapStar is unique in that it automatically lays out the network for optimal visualisation, and provides the option to calculate a Minimum Spanning Network from a list of alternative connections. HapStar provides a user-friendly interface, and publication-ready figures can be exported simply.

lyt_A

Lyt_A is an installation, an instrument and a translation medium in one. It is a mechatronic, semi-flexible structure that can transmit haptic information on a distance: when the structure is touched on one site, the touch will be visible and touchable on the other. Touch, the most intimate of our five senses, is often used as a reality-check; what I can touch is real. Touch is an ultimately interactive communication medium: the one who touches is being touched as well…

t* series

The environments of the t*series are immersive hybrid realities, or responsive “play spaces.” They are designed for full-body interaction of human participants with “irreal” responsive worlds. TGarden, txOom and TRG - the three distinct groups of environments within the series - are technologically enhanced spaces that encourage playful explorations of physical and digital surroundings, as well as fluid dialogues between people, materials and media.

Translucent Futures

Translucent Futures is an artistic/activist platform initiated by Angelo Vermeulen that deals with the increasing abrasion of civil liberties through ubiquitous, networked, miniaturized technology. Far-reaching use of techniques such as data mining, audiovisual surveillance, automated behavioural analysis, see-through body scanning, DNA profiling etc. is being legislated at a disturbing rate.

AEGIS Residencies

Asia-Europe Generalists in Sojourn (AEGIS) is a trans-local residency programme that focuses on encouraging collaborations between creative practitioners and cultural organisations from Asia and Europe, who address global cultural issues (such as adapting to climate change, loss of biodiversity, energy security, etc.) from a transdisciplinary perspective. The emergence of an open and diverse trans-local culture requires meaningful contacts and collaborations between creative practitioners across the globe.

Institute for Augmented Ecology

The Institute for Augmented Ecology (IforAE) is a temporary office within FoAM that investigates some issues that have been simmering within groWorld. Its an exploration of the field of AE before it actually gets to be defined and/or narrowed down by convention. For now it looks to be a one year research period starting January 2011 and focused on how the tagosphere is connecting to the biosphere.

groWorld Bazaar at Pixelache 2011

FoAM presented a groWorld Bazaar at the Pixelache festival, using the Aronia Melanocarpa (Chokeberry) as a common connection to bring together game designers, gardeners, electronics experimenters and urban foragers with a set of hands-on-workshops, discussions and experiments.

Al Jazari

Al-Jazari was an influential scholar and engineer who lived at the beginning of the 13th century, this project was inspired by his robot musicians who were designed to play at royal drinking parties.

Al-Jazari is also an audience participatory livecoding performance/installation. Originally created for 15 minute livecoding gigs for art students in south London alongside punk bands, it uses robot characters in order to make livecoding more tangible for wide audiences.

Doris

DORIS is a research tool designed for sampling and mapping European lobsters (Homarus gammarus) in the marine environment. DORIS exists as an Android smartphone app, database and public website, and is designed for researchers to use in the challenging conditions of small fishing boats at sea.

Betablocker

BetaBlocker is a livecoding performance and a piece of software. It's a virtual acid techno machine which is live coded with a gamepad or touchscreen to create code and processes which modify and destroy each other in 256 bytes of memory. The machine's memory and processes are projected and integral to the performance.

Teaching with Minecraft

We have developed a free software programming environment and set of teaching projects based on Raspberry Pi and its freely available version of Minecraft. This is used as part of an initiative to provide short programming courses and taster days for young people in Cornwall.

more info

Egglab

Egglab is an online computer game in which players search for hidden eggs against different backgrounds to help scientists make new discoveries concerning camouflage and its evolution. The game has been featured in The Economist, The Guardian and Popular Science and has been played by over 40,000 people.

more info

Bibliotecha

a temporary digital library accessible within the radius of it's ad-hoc network

Bumper Crop

Bumper Crop is is a social impact board game based on the experiences and challenges of being a smallholding farmer in India. The game is now up on the play store with the source code here.

more info

Biohacking

We are interesting in forging more effective links between science and society - so far much of this has happened through citizen science projects, which are designed to allow broader participation in scientific research through online games, apps, or field-projects. One alternative is to give people the chance to access a lab and learn to do the science themselves.

Open Sauces Notebook

The Open Sauces Notebook is...

Library Salons

Library Salons are informal occasions hosted at FoAM Brussels to celebrate the pleasure of the written and spoken word, where we gather to read short passages from texts found in FoAM's library or elsewhere. Surprising connections between words and voices provide an experience of high delectation, while thematic afternoon tea is served to refresh the vocal chords.

Dazzle Bug

Dazzlebug is an open source citizen science game made with Laura Kelley and Anna Hughes at Cambridge University to see what patterns are most effective at evading capture from predators. We can then use these results to look at what visual effects these patterns have, and to see whether these patterns match up with those found on real animals in the wild.

UAV toolkit

The UAV toolkit is an experimental application for making use of your smartphone's sensors for airborne science. It's main purpose is using time or space based triggers to capture images with associated sensor data for further processing. We've designed it with the help of the Westcountry Rivers Trust (http://wrt.org.uk) and Exeter University (http://www.exeter.ac.uk/esi) for creating maps using drones, rc aircraft and kites.

Cricket Tales

Cricket Tales is a citizen science project developed with the Wild Crickets research group at the University of Exeter. The Wild Cricket project is a long-term study aimed at understanding cricket behaviour, personalities and ageing. The researchers have rigged up hundreds of CCTV cameras in a secret field in Spain, each trained onto an individual cricket burrow. This means thousands of videos showcasing the intricate personal lives of the crickets.

The General Opinion

The General Opinion offers a place to share and discuss the role of art in each of our lives. It is a dumping ground for opinions, thoughts, feelings and emotions about, or provoked by, art. Utilising the frenzied, sharing world of the internet and the opportunities of a democratic election, The General Opinion is a forum on art for anyone with an internet connection.

Red King

Turning information into sound can be a way to experience patterns in data differently in order to gain new insights. We're working with researchers at the University of Exeter to understand host-parasite evolution through sonification. When hosts and parasites are pitted against each other in simulations - and certain parameters are changed - what happens?

Viruscraft

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.

Integrative Process Facilitation

As process facilitators, we guide groups of people to effectively work together. Facilitation is particularly valuable for tackling complex issues through dialogue and co-creation in participatory settings, such as workshops, meetings or collaborative projects. We take care of the "how" so you can focus on the "what" and "why" of a collaborative pursuit.

AccessLab

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 launched in Spring 2017 with a workshop pairing artists with early career science researchers.

What Remains

What remains is a time capsule and multi-layered archive of a small part of our history, seen through the lens of an already much warmer planet. A collaboration with Marloes de Valk, Aymeric Mansoux and Arnaud Guillon.

Tanglebots

Tanglebots is a workshop format for children and their families, forming a messy introduction into weaving, robotics and coding. Tanglebots are prototype/failed weaving robots (weaving is quite hard, so we start with tangles and seeing what patterns emerge). We combine harvesting components from e-waste toys (motors, gears, electronics), and using visual programming (Scratch) to control these components, to create robots that make tangles.

Penelope

How can we make tools that help understand the ancient weaver's mind? How she calculated and solved the first recorded mathematical proofs, embedding them in pattern. How do certain forms of technology define our relationship with the world? For the Greeks of antiquity, weaving was the fundamental link to the cosmos. Today we use computational structures to reason about ourselves and our society, our CPUs replicating the pattern manipulating circuits that link them with the textile technology they were originally built from.

midimutant

Made in collaboration with Aphex Twin, the midimutant learns how to program your DX7 synth so you don't have to.

TidalCycles

A mini-language for live coding pattern, tidalcycles is for making music (among other patterned experiences) in terms of repetition, symmetry, interference and deviation. It's a free/open source and is used by people around the world to make music from text.

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Allotment Lab

The Allotment Lab is designed to help people with allotments or gardens to get the best from them. The app has easy to follow experiments you can follow through to give you an analysis of your soil type and work through common problems with compost heaps. In the future there will be advice given on planting based on these experiments.

Carnivore Mapper

A free, open source tool for recording incidents of livestock being attacked in Kenya.