Open Sauces

Open Sauces is a collection of projects, writings and events related to sharing of food, food culture and food systems.

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.

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?

Physical and Alternate Reality Narratives (PARN)

Creating immersive stories in physical spaces and mixed realities.

Play, Learn & Discover

Here are all our free educational games and online citizen science projects together in one place! You can play these to learn about biology, evolution and other scientific topics, as well as helping researchers carry out scientific experiments and discover more about how the world works.

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.

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.

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.”

Random Forests

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?

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?

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.

Residencies

Residencies for generalists to pursue concentrated research and experimentation without the immediate pressures of production.

Residencies Illumine (Loop.ph, Edwin van der Heide, Karmen Franinovic, Isabel Rocamora, Camila Valenzuela)

Exercises in Colloquial Luminescence was a series of residencies exploring the relationship between light, luminescence and communication. Subtle ambient changes of illumination that can extend gestures, make invisible visible and respond to weather patterns. How can we play light as a musical instrument? Can we use light to make our bodies lighter, even weightless? Can we extend our gestures and paint with light while dancing? What can we learn from bioluminescent organisms so that we can design our environments in a more lifelike way?

Residencies Tension (Heath Bunting, Kayle Brandon, Ana Rewakowicz)

Self-sustaining, lightweight structures for temporary, mobile and wearable architectures. Surface tension, tensegrity, bends, twists, knots, inflation, elasticity; all of these phenomena play with physical forces to create structures that are lighter, more mobile and adaptive than conventional brick-and-mortar buildings. How are these structures designed and used by artists and designers?This activity consisted of two residencies, one with Ana Rewakowicz and  another with Heath Bunting and Kayle Brandon, leading to the Tension Workshop and The Inflatable Meeting Room performance.

Residency Angelo Vermeulen

Angelo Vermeulen is a visual artist working with photography, video, new media and installations. His bio installations, experimental setups incorporating living cells, organisms and sci-fi references are his most well-known works. During his research residency in 2008 and 2009, Angelo worked on two projects: Translucent Futures and Corrupted C#n#m#. The latter is developed into a movie in 2011.

Residency Bartaku

PhoEf is a research project exploring the essence, use and abuse of the photovoltaic effect - the conversion of light in electrical energy - in the realms of science, industry, technology and the arts. PhoEf emerged from a personal, transversal flight through the interconnected worlds behind and around photovoltaics: a technology based on A. E. Becquerel’s 1839 observation of the photovoltaic effect. PhoEf is embedded in a rich, multidisciplinary, historical context.

Residency Catherine Watling

UK artist Catherine Watling was a resident at FoAM Brussels for a few weeks at the end of 2003. Catherine prototyped an exhbition on paleobiology and explored possibilities of turning her work into a responsive environment. Catherine specializes in interdisciplinary work with a special focus on art/science-based research. Her work examines alternative and sensual uses of digital tools to create interactive and immersive experiential environments.

Residency Cat Jones

Cat Jones was a resident at FoAM in Brussels in February 2013, as part of her Transcontinental Garden Exchange. Cat is investigating the idea of plant sentience and an alternative view of the relationship and communication that exists between humans and plants.

Residency Christian Thornton

Christian Thornton worked with Bartaku on designing and prototyping glass sculptures as part of the EITC project.

Residency Cocky Eek

When confronted with contemporary environmental questions, one thing became very clear: out of fear or guilt we can’t create anything. In view of this, Cocky chose the theme of “lightness” as a topic for her research residency. Italo Calvino emphasises this quality in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, where he describes a scene from Cernavantes’ novel in which Don Quixote drives his lance through the sail of a windmill and is hoisted up into the air. Cocky wondered whether we could begin to construct our worlds from this lightness.

Residency Dave Griffiths

Dave’s residency in 2008 and 2009 focused on prototyping a groWorld game. groWorld is concerned with exploring people’s relationship with plants. Computer games are a powerful medium for suspending one’s disbelief in other, imaginary worlds. The focus of the groWorld game was to explore the use of computer games to allow players to become closer to the plant world.

Residency Desire Machine Collective

Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya initiated Periferry1.0, an alternative artist-led space situated on the M.V. Chandardinga, a ferry docked on the Brahmaputra River in Guwahati. Periferry1.0 serves as a laboratory in flux for generating innovative practices in contemporary film and video.

Residency Eisa Jocson

Eisa Jocson, an artist from the Philippines, explored the potential of pole dancing in questioning power relationships within the sexual, private and public realm. During her AEGIS residency at FoAM, she probed themes such as sexuality and space, sexualization of culture, sociology of the body, normalisation and surveillance. Study, research and exploration on the subject of pole dancing has been limited. It is a global phenomenon indicative of wider shifts occurring in society, and Eisa believes that the pole dance has far-reaching potential as a medium for artistic production and discourse.

Residency Jack Anderson

During his residency in 2008, Jack focused on the market for new media arts and created a tool called the FoAM Valuator: a qualitative analysis safari into the wilds of economic value construction in the arts. Valuator is a study of the contemporary art market, focusing on marketing strategies for new media art sales. The most innovative and challenging of contemporary art practices are not transacted in the mainstream market for current art.

Residency Kaffe Matthews

Kaffe Matthews is a prime guest of FoAM's bed-bench-and-breakfast residency programme. She uses FoAM as her temporary Brussels hub from where she develops her 'Sonic bikes' and their site-specific piece performed in Brussels, supported by Q-O2 and La Monnaie. The sonic bikes carry speakers and a GPS triggered system enabling cyclists to enjoy composed pieces play and change around them dependent on where they cycle.

Residency Kate Rich

Kate Rich's research takes place at the intersection of several networks: art, information and food. Its express intention is to use artistic tools to investigate how our daily grocery products are articulated, packaged, distributed and delivered. The first aim is to investigate a sample grocery item more deeply to better understand its provenance. To explore the opposition of Commons to Commodity: that the commodity is the opposite of the commons as it conceals human relations except for the money relation, while the product of the commons is filled with human relations – including possibly unpleasant ones.

Residency King Librero

During his two-week residency at FoAM Brussels in October 2011, King buried himself in the library, sifting through a range of books on green building and permaculture design. He had several conversations with the team and the visitors, as well as finding a quiet space to distil some of his early ideas about combining local traditions with environmental design.

Residency Kiran Ganghadaran

Kiran was in AEGIS residency between January and February 2011 with his ongoing research, Project Decode. The research looks at the existence of geometrical structures in living and non-living beings, and potentially seeks to find and explore a new generation of interactive systems within science, art and architecture that could form new relationships or interconnections between nature and human beings.

Residency Lina Kusaite

The aim of this research project was to create a place for a materials library, on-site and online, where interested parties could find information, observe, touch, create, discover, enjoy, and exchange materials. Lina is a textile designer and illustrator, who worked with FoAM on several responsive environments. In the process, she collected and co-created hundreds of samples of materials - ranging from metal to smart fabrics. During her residency - on and off from 2006 to 2011 – she catalogued and (semi)organised the samples into a materials archive that is housed at the FoAM lab in Brussels.

Residency Maggie Buxton

The core question of this research is: by what mechanisms can humanity become more conscious of and potentially change its relationship to reality? This question potentially connects numerous disciplines including neuroscience, quantum physics, art, developmental psychology, adult education theory, political science, philosophy, to name just a few.