Publications

Notes from FoAM Earth's field trip to the Desertscapes of Arizona and Utah, marked by stark contrasts between heat and chill, adoration and dread, escape and extraction.

A commonplace book about living in the desert. The Dust & Shadow Readers are self-published collections of writings and bibliographic wandering designed to accompany our speculative experiments with the Laboratory for Critical Technics in and around the deserts of Arizona.

The swamp doesn’t allow for a cartesian way of mapping, it doesn't allow to figurate it and give it a fixed identity. Connected bodies of water push their way into ever new sinks and streams. New spots of land are revealed, through drought or human intervention, while other parts flood and hide the pathways and places that were there before. Where the swamp starts and where it ends is processual. It doesn’t have clear borders but rather transient zones. As such, it is a liminal being, always becoming, always in-between.

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. We introduce PNs as explorable, multisensory spaces before discussing the importance of enabling social interaction. We describe a series of creative experiments with PNs to illustrate our approach to futures in an artistic context, including installations, exhibitions and festivals. We do not intend to provide a critical analysis of the design process, methods or implications, rather, the article offers a reflection on our motivations and insights. As an invitation to further dialogue between transdisciplinary fields, we conclude with a call for futurecrafting at a human scale.

This paper shows for the first time that Ranavirus truncates the age structure of amphibian populations, and that this increase in adult mortality could heighten the vulnerability of frog populations to stochastic environmental challenges.

Using waveform LiDAR data to measure the three-dimensional nature of the urban greenspace, we explore different ways of virtually, and tangibly engaging with volumetric models describing the 3D distribution of urban vegetation.

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.

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

The work of care in the Anthropocene is a struggle with scale and scope and sentience. Maybe in order to care across spatial and temporal scales — to care for a loved one as much as for an eroding hill or decaying infrastructure — we need alternatives to the current cultural imaginaries. We need new stories to live by. New or alternative myths, drawn from ever more diverse mythologies. Terraforming, for example, can be understood as planetary engineering, composting or home making. Humankind has been terraforming earth for millennia, and before leaving the planet to terraform the solar system and beyond, it might be wise to focus on terraforming our internal landscapes first...

The Ephemeral Garden evokes the sense of convivial gatherings under a pergola. The murmur of conversation, complemented with the sound of animate matter. Recorded and composed in Istria during May 2018, this piece is part of FoAM’s sound installation presented at the Croatian pavilion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2018.