foam

FoAM's views on futures, uncertainty, attunement and transformation. This article is adapted from FoAM's lecture-performance at the "Anticipation 2017".

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. 

A memoir of 'The Great Ephemeralisation of FoAM bxl', a conscious closure of 14 years of FoAM's studio on Koolmijnenkaai in Brussels.

Sometimes you stumble over a dusty collection of source code you haven't thought about for years and can't even really remember writing. This article is about a bit of software archaeology, Moore’s law and procedurally generating alien lifeforms.

 

Thriving in Uncertainty discusses the uses of idleness and inhabiting transitions in and beyond the world of arts and culture.

Een burn-out ontstaat wanneer de kloof tussen je eigen diepe overtuigingen en de overlevingspatronen van je dagelijkse praktijk te groot geworden is. Daar waar passie en onmacht elkaar ontmoeten. Elk tijdperk kent zijn valstrikken, en uitgeput zijn is van alle tijden. Wat echter telt, is hoe we ermee omgaan.

Resilience is a technical term, one which has spread along with the influence of systems thinking and come into use in a widening range of academic and professional fields. But it has no cultural roots; which is to say, it is not grounded in the experience of people’s lives and the ways in which people have made sense of that experience. Instead, with its aura of expert detachment, it belongs to that category of words by which we hold things at a distance. I doubt that anyone would joke about resilience in the way that Finns can joke about sisu, and for this reason I doubt that anyone can take it so seriously.

In many ways, media artists are uniquely qualified to frame a contemporary conversation about drones. Because today to have an interest in drone technologies, whether for military or civilian use, is to have a concern with, and interest in, the networked information space in which they belong. And that is the space that media artists, particularly artists who work from a tactical media perspective, are experts in.

At FoAM we wondered how we could “rehearse” a possible future before it came to pass. How we could experience living in different scenarios and observe our reactions to them. Would such an immersive experience change our views about which scenarios might be most desirable? Could we cultivate more resilient mindsets and behaviours (i.e. being able to adapt and respond to challenging conditions, without loosing the essence of who we are and what we want to do) by “rehearsing” a future scenario?

Inspired by shakkei and jiejing gardens, FoAM developed the alternate reality narrative Borrowed Scenery, a story without a narrator or explicit narration which unfolded through hints, suggestions and immersive ambiance. By 'borrowing' from sources as diverse as plant mythology, patabotany, Tarot, plant sciences, historical mysteries and the setting of the everyday, Borrowed Scenery became a place to experience an alternate reality (past, future or parallel) where plants are a central aspect of human society.

In the slow swarm of light they remain silent, luminous. Eyes in the place of eyes, Ears in the place of ears, tongues tasting chemical gradients across the fungal network of thread-like cells. A truly underground communications network, spreading through the vastness of earth substrate, acting with ecosystem intelligence to form interfaces across symbiotic networks of root chatter.

Tarot is a pack of cards used from mid-fifteenth century to play card games, and includes Tarocchi/Tarocchini in Italy, Tarot in France and Tarock in Germany. However, Tarot is best known as a divination tool, popularised in the eighteenth century by mystics and occultists of Europe, used for discovering and expanding mental and spiritual pathways. Since then, Tarot has developed into an elaborate fortune-telling system.

This is a step-by-step guide to holding prehearsals for home futurists, distributed collectives and people with complex life-changing questions. It is a work in progress which has been tested with individuals and small groups, and will be revised and refined as more prehearsals are realised.

Working on fashion with the potential to keep changing its appearance and behaviour years after it has been wrapped up and carried home by “end users” demands an algorithmic approach to clothing design. Garment makers will need to take into account a whole ecosystem in which their garments will be worn, and accept the fact that their responsibility stretches across and through the “four human skins” (biological skin, clothing, and indoor and outdoor “membranes”).

We describe a system we have developed called Mongoose 2000 for the study of multiple individuals in the wild over many years.

We compared gene expression of frogs with and without epidemic disease, and by chance also find differences in the frog microbiomes indicating an interaction between the microbiome and disease.

In this paper we present a cross-section of FoAM and Time’s Up’s work with physical narratives (PNs), which draw upon experiential futures and experience design.

Wildlife diseases are emerging at a higher rate than ever before meaning that understanding their potential impacts is essential, especially for those species and populations that may already be of conservation concern.

The Sonic Kayak is a musical instrument used to investigate nature and developed during open hacklab events. The kayaks are rigged with underwater environmental sensors, which allow paddlers to hear real-time water temperature sonifications and underwater sounds, generating live music from the marine world. Sensor data is also logged every second with location, time and date, which allows for fine-scale mapping of water temperatures and underwater noise that was previously unattainable using standard research equipment. The system can be used as a citizen science data collection device, research equipment for professional scientists, or a sound art installation in its own right.

In this paper we explore new ways to approach understanding of the mysterious Precolumbian quipus, using both visual and sonic interpretations. We base our investigation on the Harvard Quipu Archive, starting with graphical visualisation techniques that give us an overall view so we can compare textile structures and perform basic cryptanalysis. We use listening and sonification in order to filter and compare the different modes of data representation (knot type, colour, twist and material). This provides new ways to explore both currently understood and unknown patterns of meaning in quipus.

This article presents a series of informal experiments in software and weaving, most of which were conducted as part of the Weaving Codes, Coding Weaves project. Different aspects of weaving, including plain weave, a four-shaft loom, tablet weaving and warp-weighted weaving are simulated, in order to gain greater understanding of the craft from the perspective of computer science. The production rules of L-Systems are employed to begin to explore the expansive possibilities offered even by our simple simulations. In order to test our models and gain deeper understanding, the languages we produce are interpreted both as computer simulations and by our human selves, through the weaving of textile by hand. Physical user interfaces are introduced, in order to help communicate the structures and thought processes of weaving. Finally, we share our approach to representing a weave from the point of view of a thread. Throughout, our aim is not to simulate a weave in its entirety, but to gain and share insights into its complexity, and begin see how the long history of weaving, as a fundamentally digital yet ancient craft, can inform the younger fields  of computer science and engineering.

In this paper we use genetics to see if lobsters form separate populations around the coast of Cornwall in the UK. This information is useful for conservation organisations which release hatchery reared young lobsters into the wild in an effort to replenish lobster numbers. If separate populations exist, they would need to be much more careful when choosing release sites. This research contributes towards evidence-based policy that is essential for improving the sustainability of fisheries.

At the intersections of culture, gardening and technology we can start to see how plants can become organisational principles for human society in the turbulent times of the 21st century. How do we encourage broader, longer-term cultural changes? What varieties of culture would be capable of forging symbiotic relationships between postindustrial human societies and the rest of the earth? How do we compost bitterness to grow beauty?

This manuscript describes the development of an android-based smartphone application for capturing aerial photographs and spatial metadata automatically, for use in grassroots mapping applications.

This paper discusses why working with futures is particularly relevant in times of social and environmental turbulence and suggests that a more widespread futures literacy can increase agency in uncertain conditions. We provide examples of FoAM’s works with experiential futures, to illustrate our experimental approach, aiming to bridge the gap between future visions and everyday life.

This publication is part of Charlie Ellis' PhD, which was co-supervised by FoAM Kernow. Here we assess lobster population structure at a fine scale in Cornwall, southwestern UK, where a hatchery-stocking operation introduces cultured individuals into the wild stock, and at a broader European level, in order to compare the spatial scale of hatchery releases with that of population connectivity.
 

A bodily and digital cartography exploration for foodscapes

A paper on the use of smartphone software in citizen science and reserch tools published in Ecology and Evolution.

Luminous Green is a series of gatherings about possible futures; about a human world that is enlightened, imaginative, electrified and most importantly – living in a fertile symbiosis with the planet. Luminous Green encourages transdisciplinary discussions and collaborations between people from all walks of life, including artists, designers, academics, activists, social entrepreneurs, economists and policy-makers.

FoAM’s work in responsive environments focuses on how human movement can influence and shape media environments. In a sense, we “recycle” the residual energy of a body’s motion into a resource for media generation and output. We’re particularly interested in participants’ untrained, habitual movements such as touching, caressing, grabbing, bending, walking, and jumping, and how responsive media might raise participants’ awareness of their effect on the surroundings.

Haplotype Networks and Minimum Spanning Networks are commonly used for representing associations between sequences. HapStar is a tool for viewing both types of networks, and is designed to directly use the output data generated from Arlequin. HapStar is unique in that it automatically lays out the network for optimal visualisation, and provides the option to calculate a Minimum Spanning Network from a list of alternative connections. HapStar provides a user-friendly interface, and publication-ready figures can be exported simply.

artistic method of butoh dance for an urban ecology

A Futurist's Fieldguide is a workbook and manual for people interested in experimenting with futures techniques in practice. The guide presents a range of approaches to thinking and talking about as well as prototyping the future. In particular, we focus on participatory and experiential methods that can be used in unpredictable settings. One of the central concerns is how and why 'futures' can provide useful methods for increasing agency, developing a futures literacy, improving understanding of complex issues, encouraging co-creation of our collective futures, or becoming more insightful inhabitants of the long now.

On these pages you can find the reflections and working notes of the Resilients, people who imagine possible futures and prototype them as artistic experiments in living and working environments. We transform the concept of resilience into concrete practice by designing experimental social structures and situations and stress-testing them in real-life labs – our case studies in possible futures.

The central focus of the PARN project is on creating, presenting and representing narratives in physical space. Storytelling is a fundamental human capacity and is widespread in a variety of cultural forms as well as being one of the ways in which, according to many researchers of learning and awareness, we make sense of the world as we experience and reflect it. As the acclaimed poet Simon Ortiz puts it: “there are no truths, only stories.”

grig container

This conference paper describes the development, testing and deployment of a free-to-use, open-source, android-based smartphone application for capturing geo-tagged aerial photographs for grass-roots remote sensing (RS) and mapping applications.

Transcription of FoAM's talk at Improving Reality 2013 conference

Transcription of FoAM's talk at Design March 2013 in Iceland

As a botanical parallel to the oft misunderstood field of HCI – Human Computer Interaction, HPI – Human Plant Interaction, explores the nature of surfaces and processes required to facilitate mutually beneficial interaction between humans and plants.

With the understanding that we are a part of an interconnected and interdependent planetary eco-system, contemporary human culture moves slowly from a culture of consumption and segregation to a culture of participation, integration and generation.

Grid independence, silent electrical energy generation without emissions, harmless low-DC power, mobility and new materials with new aesthetics are key characteristics of photovoltaic technologies. Together with new scientific tropes that are emerging in this highly vibrant multidisciplinary field, they have attracted a first generation of “early adapters” in the arts.

Anything living or growing – from spore, to fruit, to soil, to compost – experiences constant pressure to transform. Similarly, the will to improve our living conditions, extend our lives, or even create a piece of music, involves coercing certain changes in the environment. Technology currently meets this pressure through a pattern of obsolescence and incremental upgrades, guided by a logic of novelty and reinvention. In contrast to living systems, our technological growth rarely involves cyclical processes; new technologies don’t often feed on the detritus of the obsolete.

The process of globalization is causing a rapid decrease of diversity in the social, biological and cultural habitats, due to the dominant economic powers, such as proprietary communication technologies and transnational “life industries.” Physical public spaces, as arenas for a wide range of interaction and social change are losing their importance, as the global marketplace has shifted its locus from the accessible public markets to the dispersed and abstract global networks.

The GroWorld initiative originated in FoAM, a laboratory researching multidisciplinary models of cultural production, as a proposal for a research strategy, anchored in a one broad interest field: the Evolution and Interaction of Dynamic Systems.

Particle systems can be thought of as a general technique within the field of computer graphics for creating a wide range of effects. To illustrate the range of effects, this paper begins by quickly reviewing the existing research on particle systems in the field of computer graphics. It then discusses in more detail two particular areas of particle systems research: first a technique for sculpting surfaces, and second a work in progress for an interactive art installation. A common goal of both projects is to provide flexible tools to aid in personal expression. The focus is to move away from the analytical and point and click style of interface, and towards a more humanistic interface which re-embodies the user in the physical world.

In the past few years, the development of digital experiences increasingly stumbles across rigid paradigms used in industry and academia to describe the processes and products of digital art and design. The distinction between the “container” and the “contained” might in some cases be an obstacle for true interaction of different media.

The world behind the screen is suffocating under the burden of the interface. And the interface has nested itself on the surface of the screen, and appears to be paralysed in that position, not allowing the general user to discover the layers behind it. The interface must be violated. Scratched and cracked or pulled out of the screen into the physical space so that its borders become elastic and transparent, revealing the world behind.

T-Garden is a responsive environment where visitors can put on sound, dance with images and play with media together in a tangible way, constructing musical and visual worlds 'on the fly'. The performance dissolves the lines between performer and spectator by creating a social, computational and media architecture that allows the visitor-players to sculpt and shape the overall environment. All media (clothing, image, sound) in the T-Garden environment follow one central theme: transmutation. 

Overall, our paper has three threads. In the first thread we concisely review some of the common terms of the debate about cyberspace and the public sphere. In the second thread, we provide a few evocative descriptions of social spaces and events whose roots precede the industrial age.

This paper focuses on the potential applications of hybrid reality in the cultural sphere, where media and technologies can be used for multisensory stimulation and interaction. We investigate the capacity of hybrid spaces to incite alternative states of consciousness, similar to what mystics, alchemists and shamans describe as a journey towards rapture (a state of overwhelming emotion).

Keep it Simple: Langeafstandsknuffelmachine wordt persoonlijke nachtmerrie, an article by Kira Van Den Ende based on an interview with Maja Kuzmanovic about one of FoAM's biggest failures: lyt_A

We ask for the theoretical points where weaving and computer programming connect and develop codes and code machines to pursue these questions.

Multimodal design can be applied in manifold interdisciplinary fields, from developing Web sites to planning dinner parties. This part of the book focuses on applying multimodal design within the context of “new” media education and practice, from the perspectives of both the design process and the users’ engagement with the works.

Biomodd is a collaborative art project in which an ecosystem of different organisms coexists with a networked computer system. The Challenge is to bring biological life as physically close to electronics as possible, and create functional hybridity.

This distributed, interdisciplinary project explores the resilient aspects of European culture, which can improve quality of life in the turbulent conditions of the 21st century. The project stimulates the development of a resilient culture by researching and producing cultural forms that fuse tradition and innovation (e.g. alternate reality games, biomimetic designs, urban gardening initiatives) and by creating opportunities for participation by a wide public in interactive events and experiments.

Southeast from the river with the highest power of all rivers, the kind that conceives its force by keeping up a slow flow appearance, the kind that ciaries ancient myths and mighty memories, the kind that provides spiritual and electrical energy, it is there, in the jungled urban sprawl, in the plains beneath the mightiest mountains, the case of Edmond A.

A "glitch" usually fixes itself in the amount of time it takes for it to be noticed in the first place, whether as a scrambled cable television delay, a page-loading error on an internet browser or a jumble of pixels on an ATM interface. Glitch: Designing Imperfection consists of over 200 glitch images grabbed, composed and provoked by artists who present these complex fragments of color and lines as thought-provoking mistakes that merit being considered in an aesthetic sense, no matter if as art or as advertising.

Mongrels spawn from the amalgamation of “things that are grown” with “things that are built,” resulting in “things that are built that grow things that are grown.” Growth underlies both biological life and economic progress, being a focus of many emerging sciences, technologies and art forms.

Open space events enable the participants themselves to shape the agenda, allowing everyone involved to present and discuss issues that are most important to them. There is no passive consumption of knowledge, only proactive participation, learning and sharing. Open space events may not be suitable for all workshops, but its principles can be applied in a broad range of situations, regardless of topic or teaching method.

Mixed Reality design at FoAM is motivated by the conviction that living spaces (including materials, clothing, built or grown artifacts, and architectures) should not be designed as static or predefined structures. Rather, we approach them as malleable, alive entities able to be influenced and shaped by the activities occurring within and around them.

This paper describes the situations that have given rise to the formation of FoAM, a cultural laboratory based in Brussels and Amsterdam, and looks at the issues around public perception and reflection on multidisciplinary projects. Since the challenges and successes of collaborative projects can be best illustrated through case studies, due to a lack of conclusive “how to” manuals, I will discuss TGarden, a research and production project for responsive environments in mixed reality.

luminous green in mediated environments

Stillness is a visual wandering, a series of stills from a world in incessant motion. Nik Gaffney's photographs, taken over the course of one lunar year, are observations on materiality and time at turns ethereal, evocative and timeless. In Stillness, organic abstraction emerges from algorithmic concreteness. Page after page, a non-linear filmic sequence appears through juxtaposition and transitions, a flow punctuated with meticulous effortlessness. Somewhere between a documentary, a study or an artwork, the book itself is a fleetingly material object, a simple call to partake in the radical act of noticing.

stillness is a collection of ambient photobooks, a year long series of experiments with ethereality, materiality and time. Each issue is published by FoAM on or near the new moons of the lunar year 2015/2016.

There are always reasons why some one writes and dis tributes abook. The "why" of this book can be an swered in at least as many voices as those that have contributed to writing it. The main motivation was to document the Data Ecologies Symposium 2014 organised by Time's Up in Linz, Austria. The subtitle of the symposium was "Tools and Lan guage to think out loud about futures", so Time's invited a range of practitioners to share their thoughts, efforts and expertise on the topic of how futures thinking and every day life intersect. The Book Sprint methodology, described as a "self-documenting conference", seemed like an appropriate way to gather the participants' excitement around thinking out loud about futures. Futurish is a product of this booksprint. It is a rough-and-ready collection of throughts and propositions related to futures, everyday life, experience and storytelling.

The central focus of the project PARN (Physical and Alternate Reality Narratives) has ben dealing with the possibilities and problems of creating, presenting and representing narratives in physical space. This volume is intended to summarise the experiences of the project partners in the wide range of activites that took place during the PARN project.

FOODPRINTS is about defining the possibilities and mapping the territory for urban renewal. Our premise is that food plays a central role in the functioning of society. Viewing the city as an organism rather than a collection of fragmented parts, this project aims to explore innovative practices and methods relevant to the Stockholm cityscape and its urban planning policy. Biomimicry, future scenario building and systems thinking can help map the behaviour of citizens as a species and compare it to the workings of other organisms capable of resiliently sustaining themselves in their environments.

Food, culture and the environment – the three pillars of this book – have an intricate relationship that extends back to the origin of humans as a social species. To survive, we eat; to eat, we feed the environment that feeds us – food is a product of the reciprocal connection to our ecological habitats.

This publication represents the distillation of one intensive year’s work on the Transient Reality Generators project, a distillation built of several angled slices through the events, projects and inspirations that made this project possible. From philosophical underpinnings to anthropological analysis, from recipes for good food through to abstracted ponderings of the fundamental structure of the universe, all these aspects and many more can be found here.

The review originated from a series of technically and artistically diverse workshops, organised by four independent technological arts initiatives in Brussels: FoAM, nadine, okno, and iMAL. The workshops responded to the need for a place where continuous learning and dialogue between peers is encouraged, with the objective of sharing of experience, skills and knowledge among diverse groups interested in emerging ideas, media and technologies.

Borrowed Scenery is a story about an alternate reality (past, future or parallel) where plants are a central aspect of human society. Weaving through the physical spaces of everyday life, the story can be tangibly experienced wherever plants and humans interact. This film provides an insight into the physical narrative of the project – a visual taste of the space and place as the camera weaves through Ghent's parks and urban vegetation.

John Paul Bichard's documentary on the LIREC project deftly rises to the challenge of outlining the project's sometimes bewildering complexity and diversity while at the same time tracing the underlying connections between its many facets. Wrapped in beautiful graphics and pleasing production values, it will surely appeal to those with no prior knowledge of the LIREC project or its background, even while it conveys some of its technical breadth and depth.

This DVD transforms natural sounds and images through digital technologies. Vocals, music, organic image and computer-generated designs are digitally grafted together, creating an intriguing and intensely evolving reality.

What happens to life in our embodied actual, when the object of our investigation becomes a virtual replicator?