blog

Plant stories walk

Vanessa guided us through Gent with compiled anecdotes full of botanical, homeopathic, architectural and humorous information about Gent's trees. An interview with this chatty lady about her passion for trees and her city for the curious souls…

Hanging

With a big dose of energy and imagination, we reflected and improvised on the idea of "hanging" with several aspiring and ambitious young patabotanists, exploring new concepts and practices where movement, play, art and the unexpected came together. The stages of the workshop were tocreate hanging plants hang our plants in trees observe them carefully and in turn try to hang like plants ourselves - mimicking their movements and state of being in a chaotic choreography of climbing, clambering, jumping and dangling from ropes.

Seeker [DV1]

Angelo Vermeulen recently won the prestigious Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Award. For the exhibition Angelo created a community art project with engineers, artists and enthousiasts from Deventer called ‘Seeker’: an evolvable spaceship sculpture which operates as a nomadic framework enabling communities to reflect on the future of human survival and habitation.

Biomodd [NYC4]

The next-gen Biomodd: bigger, better, mutated, hacked, entangled, fully edible. Biomodd is a shifting global collective of artists, scientists, thinkers, and makers. Biomodd aims to build art installations that reimagine the relationship between nature and digital technology, and seeks to create symbiotic relationships between plant-based ecosystems and computers. The most recent iteration of the project, Biomodd [NYC4], takes advantage of a three-tiered international community. It does so by capitalizing on the experience of past members from around the world while forming a team of New York-based collaborators, as well as reaching out to the local community in Queens near the New York Hall of Science.

Interview with Christian Thornton

Christian Thornton is a glass artist and the artistic director of Studio Xaquixe in Oaxaca. For the Fiesta de Maguey y Maiz, he has been working with Bartaku (FoAM) to create Nube del Oro, a glass sculpture that will entwine with a maguey (or agave) plant in Oaxaca’s Ethnobotanical Garden. Shelbatra Jashari interviewed Christian during his visit to Brussels as one of the EITC’s artists in transience.

Doris: Lobster mapping

Doris is a new project that has emerged from the development of Borrowed Scenery's Zizim app, repurposed into a scientific research tool in collaboration with the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at Exeter University and Helsinki University. Doris – named after the sea nymph in Greek mythology – will be used for mapping lobster catches on fishing boats so researchers working at the National Lobster Hatchery in Padstow can easily build up a picture of how the condition of the lobsters relates to their location, sea conditions and tide.

Stadsfestivals: kunst of kermis?

Laura Herman discusses Borrowed Scenery and the Buratinas taxi service in an an insightful article linking "two festivals in two cities," appearing in Recto Verso as part of a series on "Het gat in de stad."

Hapstar graphs in the wild

Some examples of graphs that scientists have created and published using Hapstar, all these images were taken from the papers that cite our publication, with links to them below.

Rough Sloterdijk

After two years one of the Guerrilla Grafts in the FoAM Amsterdam garden has sprouted some extraordinary fruits. FoAM's first fruit species has been named: Rough Sloterdijk.

weather station

Legal Identity for Trees workshop

Our starting point: we are dependent on trees for our survival, even as the ongoing global process of rapid extinction continues apace. What does it mean to integrate trees as legal entities in our social systems, and how can we proceed with this?

Field Trip: New Mexico

Hat shop in Albuquerque. New Mexico is quite an odd place, as its associated symbols show: indians, cacti, aliens, gambling, balloons, missile tests and the atom bomb… After ISEA we take some time to investigate this machine wilderness further. Some key observations: a) In a landscape this vast, national politics are a distant abstraction. b) Geological processes can be very tangible. c) Deserts are amazingly biodiverse. d) Hamburgers can be haute cuisine. e) To indigenous peoples, research is ceremony.

Stevie Wishart performs in the Vatican

FoAM was prominently represented in the Vatican last Sunday, XXVII Sunday of Ordinary Time, when composer and performer Stevie Wishart, accompanied by her ensemble, Sinfonye, were invited to perform at Holy Mass in St Peter’s Square whilst His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI presided over the solemn concelebration of the XIII Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops on the New Evangelisation.

Aniziz and Zizim

The online component of the Borrowed Scenery project is an experiment in geotagging plants and plant-related locations via a website/app called Zizim (the Compass), combined with a multiplayer online game called Aniziz (the Soil) where you can interact with the plants people have found. Having spent the last couple of months developing them, they are now ready for a more open beta-testing phase.

ISEA 2012: Wild Edible Plants Walk

During the 'Block Party' which is the outdoor part of the ISEA 2012 festival, we host an expedition looking for edible urban plants. From the moment we arrive it's clear we overestimated the amount of plant life in the American desert. This is cactus country, folks!

Rocket Boat Day: the winning boat and its float towards victory

As it was lowered into the water, chants of ‘Courgette! Courgette!’ went up amongst the crowd...

Buratinas Taxi Service

Sailing down the canal in the silence of a solar-powered boat wasn’t something to shout about, I thought, preparing for a quiet day at Festival Kanal and trusting that the ever-so-slow rhythm of the ride would inadvertently impose a state of “still-being” on our hopefully receptive passengers.

Rocket Boat Day, or the deconstruction of Barbie's Castle

All it took was a few empty PET Bottles, a bricolage of assorted leftovers from kids' treasure chests and some chunks of styrofoam to conjure up this year's Rocket Boat Day.

Succulent Scenery

For two days in early September, from the uncharted mists of the recently opened patabotanist's laboratory, emerges a team of explorers carrying strange devices. Somehow they don't seem to belong to the streets of Ghent through which they wander: stopping at awkward places, staring into storm drains, scrutinizing the pavement… have these people lost a set of keys, a wallet?…

Aniziz: Keeping code local and independent

Chrysantemum Day at Borrowed Scenery

On 9 September we celebrate Chrysanthemum Day in the Borrowed Scenery Lab. It is a day to slow down and admire plant life, on site and online. FoAM will prepare a special afternoon tea in the Snoepwinkel with a menu of foods and plant walks. In the afternoon we will launch the Borrowed Scenery website, including the Zizim app – an evolving map of plant life in Ghent - and Aniziz, an online game where players can communicate with plants.

Mycorrhiza

A mycorrhiza is a symbiotic (generally mutualistic, but occasionally weakly pathogenic) association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular plant.

Unmanned RT phase 01 – notes from the wild

In sweltering heat, over mountaintops and through forgotten valleys a team of hikers make their way, powered only by aromatic herbs and the thrill of exploration, to touch, taste and smell the landscape we will get to see from unmanned vehicles – if we make it through this hike…

Aniziz (the soil)

Building a mobile patabotanical instrument

Borrowed Scenery – spacesuits for plants and full screen scrolling in HTML5 canvas

Borrowed Scenery tendrils reach out

Some serious connecting work going on with borrowed scenery for joining physical and imaginary worlds together. A new Boskoi database is up and running, giving us a place to put all kinds of story elements and plants found in the city. Boskoi uses the Ushahidi platform, which provides an API the game is now using to pull all items tagged in the map (which can come from the Android app or web app) into the game where they can interact with players or other entities.

Map rendering with OSM and HTML5 canvas

Clay mushrooms

More work on the Borrowed Scenery game project and a first screenshot, experimenting with different visual styles. I'm trying modelling clay to get a 3D look on the fungi and using Theun Karelse's mockup characters for player avatars. The floor is being built out of map tiles of Ghent pulled from OpenStreetMap, using the OpenLayers API which has been pretty fast to get running.

Borrowed Scenery - Joining imaginary and physical spaces