Residency Maki Ueda

Maki Ueda's residency focuses on the combination of scent and food. She researches edible perfume, memories of scents from grandmother's kitchen and the incorporation of foodstuffs into scent palettes. The challenge she sets herself is to use scents and smell as an artistic medium. In the exhibition context Maki creates spatial expressions with scent. She holds workshops on extracting scents from a range of materials: from food to cloth, flowers to ink.

Residency Maria Lucia Cruz Correia

Maria Lucia was in residence between January and February 2011, looking at the idea of space as a living organism. She researched sustainable strategies to build a “wounded house” – where the surrounding environment is presented as the main entrance for a “wounded social sculpture.” The idea of a wounded house was the result of two years’ research on the theme of wounded spaces. The idea is to construct an architectural body whose metabolism is internally dysfunctional. It is a body that emerges from an alienation with its own species and the environment in which it grows.

Residency Nicolas Y Galeazzi

Nicolas Y Galeazzi has transformed FoAM's bed-bench-and-breakfast residency programme into a bench-only residency in autumn 2015, exploring his changing relationships with time.

Residency Sanjeev Shankar

As an artist, architect and designer who explores the edge of reality, Sanjeev Shankar uses his training in design, architecture and science to merge traditional crafts-based knowledge with contemporary cultural trends. A recipient of the British Chevening and the DAAD fellowship from Germany, his work has been featured at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London; Centre for Architecture in New York; Smart Lab in Paris; Doors of Perception in Delhi and the Craft Nouveau session in Brussels. During his residency at FoAM Brussels, Sanjeev worked on two projects: WC Cafe and RUrban Permaculture.

Residency Simone Poutnik and Hendrik Tiesinga

Simone Poutnik and Hendrik Tiesinga are long-term collaborators and members of FoAM Brussels. In October 2011 they weighed anchor to become journeyers – nomads traversing the cultural landscape to learn and develop themselves as resilient creative practitioners and researchers, and share their skills and interests for the benefit of the local communities through which they pass.

Residency softBomb (Rachael Tempest, Lucas Chirnside)

During their residency in 2004, Lucas Chirnside and Rachael Tempest prototyped softBomb. softBomb takes the classical museological trope of the glass display cabinet and reinvents it as a plastic and dynamic virtual interface; all the edges and planes of the case become multimodal “lenses” for examining the many hidden lives of an object. The project aims to apply a “topological media” approach to virtual interfaces that privilege transformation and play.

Residency Steven Pickles (Pix)

In 2001 Pix found a book by mathematician Julien C. Sprott called Strange Attractors: Creating Patterns in Chaos. The book described the mathematics behind a class of fractals called strange attractors. In the book, Sprott presents a computer program which can search for strange attractors by trying many randomly generated equations until one is discovered which meets certain criteria. The results are clouds of points which form interesting organic shapes. each set of equations created a unique set of points.

Residency Tale of Tales

In their day-to-day artistic practice at Tale of Tales, Auriea and Michael research the potential of games as a means to communicate, convey meaning, evoke emotions. They do this by creating games and releasing them to the audience. The themes they choose to work with are highly personal, although they often interpret existing stories such as fairy tales, myths, legends and religious texts. As artists, they are more interested in the diversity of meanings that players can derive from their work than in transmitting any particular message.

Residency Theun Karelse

How do you relate to global crises in a way that is not demotivating? The discussion about our future is dominated by appeals for austerity and reduction. This is not a very inspiring message as it focuses on negative aspects of society. It is hard to see a positive revolution on a global scale based on negative arguments. Instead we should focus on positive changes that inspire everyone. Theun Karelse took on this challenge through storytelling. He created a character, Martin Brolin, who – among other things - invented Tsunami Pants, a piece of inflatable clothing to be used in times of disaster.

Residency Thomas Jellis

As a doctoral student in the School of Geography at the University of Oxford, Thomas Jellis joined FoAM in Brussels for a “geographer in residence” experiment, looking at FoAM as a “site of aesthetic activity and non scientific experimentation.” His research attends to sites of aesthetic activity and interrogates the emergence of distinctive hybrid spaces of alternative, or non-scientific, experimentation.

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.

Rooted Hauntology Lab

Rooted Hauntology Co-working Lab is a research trajectory looking at the (im)possibility of collaboration between humans and plants.

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.

Sonic Kayaks

The Sonic Kayak is a musical and scientific 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.

Space rental

Until the end of May 2017 in FoAM bxl we offer a range of spaces for meetings, workshops and events. Our unique studio is situated on the top floor of a centuries old mill and warehouse in the Canal district of Brussels. The studio has several open-plan areas that can be used for participatory processes, screenings, dinners, symposia and any other special events. There are also several smaller rooms (including our eclectic library), that can be used for meetings and round table discussions. We are delighted to be able to offer some of our most inspiring spaces spaces as memorable settings for your events.

Spiegelaer

Spiegelaer is a series of events at FoAM Lab in Amsterdam, including visuals, sounds, tastes and discussions around a central theme.

Splinterfields Workshops

FoAM's Splinterfields workshops explore emerging technological arts through the lens of preindustrial crafts and contemporary sciences.

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.

Swamp Studies

Something is fermenting in between the swamps of Brussels and Estonia.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

The Farm Crap App

A sustainable agriculture project designed to help farmers make the most of their manure.

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.

The Great Bower Building Experiment

Bower birds are known for building ornate and impressive structures. We're running an experiment to see how people would build these bowers, given limited materials.

The #wasplove game

Together with Seirian Sumner at University College London, we made an open source game to 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.

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.