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James Duffy joined FoAM Kernow for a 3 month secondment to develop the Sonic Kayak project. This is his blog post describing his time and his work with us.

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The 16th Venice Architecture Biennale opened its many and various doors on the 26th of May 2018. Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney (FoAM Earth) were involved as part of the team responsible for creating the Pavilion of Croatia, entitled Cloud Pergola / Architecture of Hospitality. The installation will remain in the Arsenale complex in Venice until the 25th of November.

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This post accompanies FoAM’s sound installation Ephemeral Garden presented at the Croatian pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018. The exhibition “Cloud Pergola / The Architecture of Hospitality” is conceived as a collaborative site-specific environment, crossing the boundaries of architecture, art, engineering, robotic fabrication and computational models.

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In this aperiodic newsletter we bring together current fragments from FoAM's various (and varied) outposts. Find out how we engage with our living environments and their multifarious inhabitants. Track us through arctic forests and botanic gardens, simulated courtrooms and repurposed armouries, in bright daylight and the darkest shadows. Read on to discover what we'll be up to in the coming months, and any possible confluences with your own journeys...

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In April, we held our second Viruscraft workshop to begin testing a game and tangible interface that we are making together with evolutionary biologist Dr. Ben Longdon. This post describes the development process to date, and the outcomes of the game testing workshop.

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We are launching a series of three new AccessLab events for 2018 - for those working in the fishing and marine sectors, journalism and blogging, and parliamentary, council and policy roles. The AccessLab project aims to improve access to and the judgement of scientific evidence, through pairing scientific researchers with people who are seeking reliable information. Our focus is on developing skills for finding scientific information and judging its reliability, rather than just transferring subject-specific knowledge.

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Thanksgiving. A convivial gathering around a long wooden table, laden with food and filled with laughter. The familiar cadences of a feast, yet one with unfamiliar origins. We were temporarily adopted into our collaborators’ lives and welcomed as returning family members. Kith and kin, ken or kin. Akin. Some rootless others uprooted, weathering the end-of-term academic storm. A temporary intensification of familiarity. Threads are picked up from conversations months old. Our relationships with members of FoAM’s distributed clan have begun to follow the rhythms of nomadic journeying. Deep and involved when we briefly occupy the same spatiotemporal dimension, loose and relaxed while we travel elsewhere. An irregular pulse of welcomes and farewells, of subsuming and letting go.

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In several FoAM studios we hold seasonal observances to celebrate yearly cycles. The beginning of February is one such feast. The inception of spring in the Northern hemisphere, autumn in the south. In some cultures this is considered auspicious time to review what has been done in the past year; to remember the achievements and let go of regrets, before moving into a new season. As if looking through a rearview mirror, or walking backwards into the future. To mark the occasion, we put together a collection of photographs in review of the last 12 months across the FoAM network.

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While we experiment with new fabrication techniques in order to shorten supply chains (with a philosophy of collapse in mind), electronics is problematic. Components can be salvaged and reclaimed but a particular problem is printed circuit board manufacture.

Like many we have tended to outsource this work to China, where the costs allow us to do short-run prototyping with our tiny budgets. Are these lower costs simply due to scale and the Communist support of the Maker community there? Or more worryingly, is this due to reduced regulations in the areas of employment rights and environmental protection?

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Here's an article on midimutant we did with Aphex Twin for MagPi Magazine, written by Sean McManus. Most of the work on this project recently has revolved around exploring custom hardware using old FM synth chips from games consoles, but there should be more evolved DX7 sounds around here soon.

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