The AccessLab project has been a series of five workshops, aimed at decentralising research skills, encouraging open access, and building local communities. As the funding draws to a close, we ended by bringing participants back together for a scoping workshop to decide on possible future paths for the project. This is a brief write-up of the main outputs from the scoping workshop.

As part of our continuing mission to promote and celebrate all forms of administration, we are publishing our UK VAT accounting procedure. This is important if you are running an arts organisation, non-profit or independent research organisation (or all three in one glorious muddle, like we are) as this means your income is likely to be a mix of commercial and grant funding, making you partially exempt for VAT and ...

Invisible Worlds Residencies were developed in 2018 as a collaboration between FoAM and the Eden Project, to explore phenomena beyond our senses: too vast, too small, too fast, too slow or too far away in space or time.

A comprehensive description of the AccessLab format - a workshop to decentralise research skills and encourage open access publication of scientific research.

As part of our ongoing exploration of animist-inspired practices in the shadow of climate chaos, we'll spend a month in Japan to explore our strong resonances with its landscapes and (sub)cultures. We intend to follow old paths and new avenues alike, as a practice of listening, noticing and distilling our experience into soundscapes. Whether immersing ourselves in the buzz of metropolitan Tokyo, the sprawl of Keihanshin, or the ancient ...

Harden up, valuable advice from our arboreal neighbours for an autumn of increasing environmental and political turbulence. In this semi-seasonal digest, we take stock of the different ways we at FoAM respond to such turbulences, including economic experiments, citizen science games, artistic explorations and speculative forays into animist territories. If you're interested, there are various opportunities to get involved, from playing with the mechanisms of viral infection, to celebrating radical ...

If you are interested in contributing to the Dust & Shadow reader on attunement, please send your propositions, questions or suggestions to us by the end of 2018. Contributions can include short texts (max 500 words), drawings, monochrome photographs, quotes or relevant references.

nightly build is a tiny A7 sized photocopied zine that fits in the palm of your hand. This is an open call for contributions to the next issue themed the passage.

FoAM's first network-wide Open Studio happened during our international meeting in September 2018, this year hosted by FoAM Kernow in Falmouth, Flushing and Penryn. It brought together people from the network and facilitated connections between the FoAM members, local organisations, professionals and friends.

One of the strategies we've been exploring at FoAM Kernow is using our hardware projects to research different ways of building things. For example our approach of design assuming collapse (& brexit) has resulted in much higher awareness of our supply chains, and through this - potential dependance on manufacturing in places with less environmental and health regulation.

Autism is on the inside. It can be invisible. It can be present in another person without you noticing it. Nevertheless it is there, manifesting itself as a different understanding of one’s surroundings and perception of the world.

On the Penelope project, our plan was to develop technologies that could be useful in constructing a swarm of robots which could be livecoded by using the pattern matrix - a general purpose tangible programming system based on the Raspberry Pi. In order to make communication possible remotely, radio is the most obvious approach to get up and running quickly (other options that are intriguing are infra-red and audible sound).

Penelopean robotics are about rebuilding technology in the woven cosmos. You can read more about the theory in part 1, but roughly our aims are to:

Embody Penelopean technological practice - they should be easily undone (taken apart) so they can be understandable, self documenting and repairable.

They are not automated looms, but must eventually be capable of weaving in some form, maybe by interacting with ancient Greek weaving technology.

Capable ...

Environmental machine learning as artistic research practice: how does such a mix of ecology, technology and art make sense in today’s world?

an article by Michelle Geraerts, who took part in the Random Forests programme as part of her graduation in anthropology at University of Utrecht.

The Amstelpark became the setting for a series of artist residencies exploring how technology can engage with wild systems and organisms. The artists developed new robotic projects for specific ecosystems or species in the park in Amsterdam.

In July we ran an AccessLab in Penzance (UK), for people who work in marine and fishing sectors. This event was the first of three AccessLabs for 2018, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and in partnership with the British Science Association (BSA). This blog post is to document the format changes made, feedback received, and notes for future iterations.

The Penelope project is concerned with many things, pattern structures in ancient poetry, comparisons of Andean and Greek mathematics, and the role of liveness in thought processes - to name just a few. We can also add robotics to this list.