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Penelope: a new 4 year weaving project

In 2015 the "Weaving Codes:Coding Weaves" project was a chance to investigate a whole bunch of new things: building new forms of hardware, make tangible programming interfaces, taking the long view on technology and investigating other digitally based societies, such as the Inca with their Quipu knot databases.This work has fed into so many new projects that it's great to be able to announce our participation in the new Penelope Project working with Ellen Harlizius-Kluck, Flavia Carraro, Giovanni Fanfani and Alex McLean and for a much longer, in depth development of this research until 2021.

FoAM digest - Spring 02017

The budding energy of early spring enticed us to bring out some vital news from across the FoAM network. The last year has been turbulent both within the microcosms of our studios and in the macrocosms around us. This has only strengthened our determination to continue evolving our network as a distributed, anti-fragile entity. In this aperiodic digest we weave together the threads of the various activities that our nodes are currently engaged in towards that end.

Shelly's sonification residency

During my week at FoAM I worked on the project Molecular Soundscape which I am developing with chemists at Newcastle University. The aim of the project is to develop sound based work which can accompany visualisations of protein dynamics both to communicate the process of drug design to non-specialists and to aid scientists in analysing the effects of experimental drugs on specific proteins. The scientists I am working with have a long term goal to develop drugs to tackle Alzheimer's disease. The data they are working with relates to proteins present in the human brain affected by the disease.

Tanglebots for young people with autism

An overview of our Tanglebots workshop, re-developed for young people with autism and their families, together with the Cultural Minds research group fromt he University of Exeter. What we did to adjust the workshop format, what worked and didn't work, and changes we'd recommend others make if they run similar events.

Dwelling in Liminality

A reflection of the macrotransiency at FoAM Brussels. A year when the organisation lay fallow, to explore the unknown and embrace the unexpected.

The Lab Approach

Improving the health of the ocean is one of the urgent, complex problems of our time. The threats to the marine environment and by extension to human wellbeing are too entangled for simple single-issue solutions. Another approach is to observe and interact with the ocean from multiple perspectives, to imagine, experiment and learn from failure. This is the essence of the "lab approach" – enabling accelerated systemic innovation while reducing risk. While there are many different types of labs, most share a few key aspects. Labs conduct experiments. Labs foster emergence. Labs evolve through collaborative creation and peer learning. Labs cultivate unique mindsets, values and cultures. This blogpost is a summary of a longer article, recently published on Medium and the Libarynth.

Jo's Sonic Kayak residency

Today is my final day of my week-long residency with FoAM Kernow. Amber and Dave had already developed a Sonic Kayak system which allows a paddler to listen to underwater sound, and sonified temperature changes, in realtime. I did my PhD on underwater noise in Falmouth Bay assessing the impact of a wave energy converter so when I heard about the Sonic Kayak I was pretty excited! The plan for the week was to get this system recording the underwater sound data for use in scientific data analysis.

Cultivating FoAM Kernow

Towards the end of last year we were struggling a bit at FoAM Kernow, a busy year with lots of media exposure and overlapping projects had left us excited and energised but it seemed at times as if the organisation had gained its own momentum and we were being carried along with it.We had a very timely chat with Jane Sutherland at Krowji in Redruth who told us about her new project called Cultivator - an EU/Arts Council England/Cornwall Council funded scheme to help creative organisations like us. We were chosen along with 4 other companies to take part in this 3 year scheme which is also working with Plymouth University.

Machine Wilderness at Transmediale

A write up of our workshop at Transmediale looking at the potential of animal behaviour for designing technology that is suited to that biome. We worked in the direct vicinity of the Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt under the experienced guidance of behavioural ecologist Matthew Creasey.

Enacting Futures (on Experiential Futures)

"Enacting futures in postnormal times", article by Nik Gaffney and Maja Kuzmanovic has now been published in a special edition of the Futures Journal, Volume 86 on Experiential Futures.

Dazzlebug in Alaska

Some photos of the our citizen science game Dazzlebug being exhibited at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska as part of their Camouflage: In Plain Sight Exhibition running from the 28th October 2016 to the 5th Febuary 2017.The bugs which have evolved throughout this exhibition and before have already been sent for processing by the researchers - more info on that here soon!

Report: Rethinking Diversity in a Rural Region Conference

FoAM Kernow is an organisation in one of the most disadvantaged parts of the UK. Many of the gaps in our society are particually obvious in Cornwall, the separation between those whom our social structures benefit and those who they do not are clear to see in the separation between the coastal and inland regions, and in many finer grained distinctions.

Allotment Crap App

We’re prototyping a system for behavioural change for sustainable planting and fertilising in allotments and smallholdings, based on the Farm Crap App.

Farm Crap App Pro Edition

This autumn we have been developing a new version of the Farm Crap App with the Duchy College and Rothamstead Research. This project is about tackling the difficulties farmers have using natural fertilisers while needing to report realistic figures the government agencies - and understanding the guidance they provide. The original version was a big success, but only contained information on a handful of manures and didn't deal with the nutrient content of the soil.

Machine Wilderness at V&A museum

In a yearly festival called the Digital Design Weekend, the Victoria and Albert museum opens its doors to the public for a hands-on experience of emerging technologies and design. Machine Wilderness set up in the museum garden to show prototypes from our program to human and non-human visitors.

Machine Wilderness at Pixelache

Interfaces for Empathy is the brilliant theme of this year’s Pixelache festival. In many ways it also describes what we’re aiming for in Machine Wilderness. Here's what happened in our workshop during the festival.

NES/Famicom game programming discoveries

Working on a NES game you are treading in the footsteps of programmers from the 80's, and going back to modern development feels strangely bloated and inefficient in comparison. This is a log of some of the things I've encountered writing game code for the What Remains project.

Sonic Kayaks at the British Science Festival

Last week we launched our Sonic Kayaks for the first time at the British Science Festival in Swansea. Sonic Kayaks are scientific instruments for citizen-led marine microclimate data collection, as well as musical instruments for expanding our senses allowing exploration of the underwater environment in real-time through sound. The installation ran over two days, and was fully booked with 64 participants. This post forms our documentation of the practical lessons from the event.

Greenspace voxel models

A run through of physical models made from voxel data obtained from LiDAR flights through cities.

Change of location, brain scans, Mineways, OBJs, smiles

We have been notified of a particular place of interest within the data, this being in Luton – it feels good to have a central place of significance to work on now. The area is about 520msq, made up of four voxel ’tiles’, so I spent some time bringing other parts of the project up to date with that. Alas, four delicious cross section scans:

Exporting OBJs from Minecraft for 3D printing (spoiler, not so fabulous)

After rendering voxel data in Minecraft Pi, the next logical (and exciting) step was to export the blocks as a 3D file ready for 3D printing. Jo is the master of all things 3D and tangible, so I have been very excited to send this off to her – after a day of dallying around, we are definitely closer to that goal.

Voxels: Minecraft & surprising lack of immediate obstacles

So far in the ‘play’ stage of the project, I have rendered wonderful little sections of Milton Keynes in Fluxus with both practical and slightly more esoteric outcomes – firstly, we have a script that outputs .OBJ files using small sections of data, which can be used for both digital and tangible modelling (such as 3D printing). That’s the practical part. The latter made the primitive object performance ready, which I explored during livecoding events in Leeds and Newcastle by animating it – however the long rendering times made this difficult, and something that must be fine tuned in the future.

Fluxus and Voxels and long rendering times

Following on from previous Voxel Debut, it seemed a good idea to visualise the data using Fluxus, as a newbie to live coding visuals. Before this stint, I had never really worked with 3D and animation, so thinking this way has been an entirely new concept to me, alongside learning Fluxus (& Scheme, in general). With a couple of Algoraves coming up this week, an incubated week of intense livecoding and voxels is entirely necessary. I have found, so far, that focusing on either is in turn helping my understanding of the other.

Voxel Debut

Recently, we were approached by Dr Karen Anderson of the University of Exeter to visualise voxel data of Bedford, Luton and Milton Keynes. A natural place to start with the data would have been to interpret it in Python and recreate the cities in Minecraft, so of course I became distracted and found myself being led down a different, more Fluxus/3D/performative inspired path. However, the first port of call was to actually read the data, which requires a brief explanation of the data format.

Sonic Kayaks: how to build musical instruments for marine exploration

Here is a bit of a writeup of the gubbins going into the sonic kayaks project. We only have a few weeks to go until the kayaks' maiden voyages at the British Science Festival, so we are ramping things up, with a week of intense testing and production last week with Kirsty Kemp, Kaffe Matthews and Chris Yesson joining us at FoAM Kernow. You can read Amber's report on the week here.

Ars Bioarctica

A Machine Wilderness session at Kilpisjarvi biological research station some 300 km into the polar circle in northern Finland.As part of the Ars Bioarctica residency program we proposed a team residency consisting of L.A. based artist/maker Ian Ingram, Finnish artist Antti Tenetz and Theun Karelse of FoAM.

Sonic Kayaks open hacklab 2

We now have the full system working, with temperature sensors and a hydrophone logging and sonifying underwater data in real-time to the paddler. This lab session was to design the final build and sonification elements.

Symbiotic Systems workshop

Prototyping symbiotic sytems based on specific landscapes in Amstelpark. April 29-30, 2016 A two day workshop in the Machine Wilderness program led by Ivan Henriques, prototyping an artificial systems that is integrated into the landscape of the Amstelpark.

Data sonification for citizen science

We're working on two sonification projects at FoAM Kernow - Red King and Sonic Kayaks - so have started looking into how we can get the most out of sonification for citizen science.

Cricket Tales released

Cricket Tales is an ambitious citizen science project. 438 days of CCTV footage from the Wild Crickets Research group - the only record of wild behaviour of insects of it's kind. It turns out that insects have more complex lives and individuality than we thought, and the game is a way of helping uncover this more precisely. For Foam Kernow, this was also a significant project as the biggest production that all three of us have worked on together.