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Viruscraft hardware prototyping: etching PCBs

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?

Midimutant in MagPi Magazine

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.

Video excerpts from "In Anticipation..."

FoAM Earth published video excerpts from the audiovisual performance "In anticipation of things already present". They are available on FoAM's Vimeo channel. We selected seven excerpts that can be watched as standalone videos. While they have a backstory, they are not "about" anything in particular. Instead, they are meant as suggestive, associative and atmospheric meditations on attunement to a multiplicity of pasts, presents and futures.

Further attempts at untangling tablet weave

One of the great unknowns following the first weavecoding project was the nature of tablet weave. Other than a few primitive attempts that didn't work in all cases and lead us to further questions, modelling tablet weave fully was left as an undeciphered mystery. Tablet weave is a complex and particularly ancient form of weaving, while it's simple to do with easily found materials, it produces a kind of double weave with twisting, and you can create crazy higher level 3D structure as it is free from the constraints of fixed loom technology.

Futurecrafting in Cornwall with FoAM Earth

The future is in short supply at the moment, particularly in the UK - it is a constant surprise that there are so few ideas about where we could be headed. Scenarios are a new tool for us to gauge the relevance of what we are doing, and provide hints for how to make an idea useful regardless of how the future pans out.

Accesslab Pilot 2 Notes

Recently we ran the second trial of our AccessLab project. We are iteratively developing a workshop format that works across a wide range of audiences, helping people to access and use scientific information. This post covers some of the changes we made to the format, what worked and what didn’t, the feedback received, and what we’d like to change next time.

Viruscraft prototyping

How do viruses evolve and switch to new hosts? Using virus structure as our basis we're designing a new tangible interface to explore the evolution of viruses, together with a game world full of host species that are affected by how you shape your virus. This post outlines the prototyping to date.

How to design a tangible programming language – Pattern Matrix at Algomech (part 2)

Once we acknowledge that weaving and programming are part of the same technological timeline, we can begin to look at the history of weaving as a eight thousand year long tale of human relationship with digital technologies - and use this long view to research new approaches to software engineering, a field with a much less developed history and many interesting problems to solve.

Pattern Matrix at Algomech (part 1)

I'm writing this on the train with a slightly sleep deprived brain fizzing and popping from thoughts, ideas and conversations from this year's Algomech festival in Sheffield. The Penelope project took a significant role in the festival, with the group's participation in the Unmaking Symposium, the exhibition and also testing our latest weavecoding technology at the Algorave. I'll be writing more on the algorave in a subsequent post.

Periscopedune

The islands of the Wadden are situated in an intertidal zone in the southeastern part of the North Sea called Waddensea. The island of Terschelling is the setting for IMRAMA, an investigation initiated by Jan de Graaf and Jeroen van Westen into the nature of this UNESCO world heritage site. The fieldwork of IMRAMA sets out to "look at - looking at the Waddensea". Theun of FoAM Amsterdam has been ivited to participate in the fieldwork on the island.

In anticipation of things already present

FoAM published a new article by Maja Kuzmanovic & Nik Gaffney, In anticipation of things already present. The article is now available on Medium, adapted from FoAM's closing keynote of Anticipation 2017.

Artificial Ecologies Venice

Independent curator Roland Fischer and Artistic Director Paolo Rosso of MicroClima invited Theun Karelse, Alice Smith and Ivan Henriques for a presentation of their work, to explore the possibility of collaboration and the potential of the Venetian Lagoon for Machine Wilderness field-work. MicroClima is situated in a large greenhouse near the Biennial grounds in Venice.

Spectres in change. Fieldnotes #1

Seili, a tiny island in the Archipelago Sea. The island is a geologically young and interconnected ecosystem, historically laden with accounts of illness, death and isolation. It seems serene and benign yet harbours hidden disturbances, spectral hostilities. Plagues of ticks and microplastics overlaid with psychic memories of the oppressed and abandoned. Ecological monsters and anomalies hover on the edges of human perception, cunningly invasive even to a casual visitor.

Creative Design Informatics for Horticultural Awareness at the End of the World Garden

Thanks to Paul Chaney who runs The End of the World Garden, we had an opportunity to trial a short workshop based on our Farm Crap App and prototype Allotment Lab on his two-acre forest garden site in Cornwall. This was our contribution to the Bank Holiday Weekend Haymaking Extravaganza (along with a bit of hay-making too).

Pattern Matrix V2 report

We've been busy making a new tangible interface – the Pattern Matrix is part of the ERC Penelope project, which explores mathematical proofs embedded in (weaving) pattern, and how technology defines our relationship with the world. The new interface allows the user to play with weaving pattern quickly, and crucially allows mistakes – meaning we can start to understand the mathematics embedded in the patterns. As Margaret Wertheim says in her book about crocheting the foundations of geometry - 'Here, knowing emerges from hands performing mathematics: it is a kind of embodied figuring'The pattern matrix version 2 is now complete. This post outlines what we’ve done, why and how.

FoAM has left the building...

Just shy of midday on the 1st of August 2017 we closed the door of the FoAM studio on Koolmijnenkaai in Brussels, one last time. In light of the changing nature of our activities we decided that we no longer needed such a large space, and that we would move out of the Koolmijnenkaai studio, no matter how beautiful and unique it may be. We remain grateful to have been able to inhabit the space for as long as we did, but it had become time to move on. This post looks back at the process of moving out, from 1st of June - 1st of August 2017.

Viruscraft: Genetic model connected to a tree visualisation

The genetic model we were working on previously has now been ported into a browser compatible form and connected to a new tree visualisation that displays the species that emerge as the host population adapts to a virus infection. It's still a prototype with rough edges, but have a play with it here, some example pics:

Getting a feel for tangible interfaces

We have two projects where we’re building tangible interfaces – Penelope and Viruscraft. This blog is an exploration of tangible interfaces, harvesting thoughts from the worlds of neuroscience, choreograhy, cognitive science and education to see what we can learn to guide our research and design directions.

Technology after Collapse

The philosophy underlying contemporary 'seamless' technology production seems to be one of endless energy, bountiful resources and waste being someone else's problem. Naive working assumptions of some form are a requirement when designing for the future, but do we believe in these enough now to make them useful? Flashy 'aspirational' tech videos of ever thinning devices disappearing into the 'cloud' seem to be less common than they once were, so perhaps not.

Pattern Matrix PCBs arrived & first tests

After triple checking the schematics and design files and ordering 80 PCBs (50 sensors and 30 i2c boards) there was an anxious wait for them to arrive and do some initial tests to find out if there were any mistakes. We now have enough boards to make two new pattern matrix devices, one 4X4 and one 5X5 - the plan is to evaluate the design and refine it for future builds.

Terra2

On Thursday june 29 a kick-off meeting was held at the Iona Stichting in Amsterdam to bring together Dutch initiatives that are active in restoration ecology, environmental agriculture and finance. Theun joined the meeting entitled Terra2. The discussions explored two main topics: dilemmas - what are the main obstacles you encounter in your work to restore natural processes and landscapes? opportunities - what would be needed to up-scale current practices?

Viruscraft: building a ‘reasonably accurate’ genetic game world simulation

The concept for the viruscraft game is to have a realtime genetic model or simulation of the host evolution which is adapting to the properties of a virus you are building (either on screen or via a tangible interface as part of an exhibit). This model needs to be realistic, but only up to a point - it can be more of a caricature of biology than a research model would need to be, as our intentions are educational rather than biological research.

Dust and shadow. Fieldnotes #1

We had arrived in the Sonoran desert. A place of desiccated time, layered time, geological, vegetal, human time. Time kneads the Earth's crust into deep folds, cracks and canyons. Plants lay dormant through cycles of drought or grow slowly for centuries, bursting into blossom after the first rains. Humans come and go. Blown through the ages like tumbleweeds. Things don't really decay here. They shrivel, dry up or slowly rust, yet remain present, as they gradually erode into dust. A thick, dusty atmosphere of things that were, things that are and things that might be. Densities and intensities coagulating on a larger than human scale, illuminated by stark light or lurking in the deep shadow.  

Accesslab Pilot 1 Notes

We launched the accesslab project last week with two pilot workshops. This is a write-up of how the workshops were run and why, together with some of the feedback and modifications we will make in future.

Pattern Matrix 2

A few weeks ago we kicked off the new Penelope project, one of our first jobs was to deliver the prototype pattern matrix (built with the help of Makernow) to the Museum of Casts of Classical sculpture in Munich for exhibition over the summer as part of our Penelopean lab. Our next mission in Cornwall is to design new pattern matrix hardware so we can start manufacturing a small run of alternative versions with more sensors to try new experiments with them. Some of them will be used for public exhibition, others for the researchers to use in talks and seminars, others for musical livecoding performances where we want to try tangible programming.

Viruscraft next steps

Following on from the first viruscraft workshop, we can now start planning the viruscraft game. The field of virology from genetics and interactions on the microscopic scale to the spread of disease and it's effects on the ecosystem is huge, so we used the workshop primarily to identify the core things that are the most important to convey, and promising ways we can use to explain them. Getting high quality feedback so early on has allowed us to get a good sense of what is important with a diverse mix of people - the things that they picked up on (and just as importantly the things that they didn't) saves a lot of time - and sharpens our focus right from the start.

Thoughts on mongoose data moving

Moving Mongoose data from Uganda to the UK is a problem as the current Mongoose2000 system has no automatic data transfer step. Dave and I sat down and tried to think of some stratagies.

Accesslab Ingredients Research

For the Accesslab workshops this week, Hoon has devised a menu with a mix of cultivated and foraged ingredients. The workshop is all about helping people to access peer-reviewed scientific literature to benefit their work and artistic practices. We've spent a bit of time applying the same process to the ingredients that Hoon has chosen for the food he will make for the events.

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?" We searched for answers in the mapping of interesting food initiatives, through designing divergent scenarios and prototyping speculative dishes and artefacts. Since all futures are rooted in the present, we wondered what was currently emerging or changing in Maltese food culture. How could these changes propagate in a range of possible futures?

Viruscraft Workshop 1

The first workshop for Viruscraft is now complete – merging biologists with craft practitioners and researchers, we began to prototype a tangible interface game to understand why viruses infect some hosts but not others. This blog covers the event and our notes for future events.