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Germination X: Player activity timelapse animation

FoAM Newsletter Summer 02012

The summer season is a time for us at FoAM to take a few steps back from our busy routines to engage in uninterrupted creative endeavours, including some revitalising fieldwork. Two broad and eclectic questions will be taking centre stage in the coming months: how do we prepare for uncertain futures, and what would a plant-inspired culture look like?

Patabotany

‘Patabotany’ describes a hybrid between ethnobotany (the study of cultural, spiritual and medical uses of plants) and Alfred Jarry’s 'pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions.

Agave sculpture

Christian Thornton's summer residency at FoAM, to prototype an agave-and-glass sculpture.

Inner Garden

A new composition by Stevie Wishart, for human and vegetal voices, as a tribute to Hildegard von Bingen's Viriditas.

Arboreal identity

FoAM and Z33 invite Heath Bunting and An Mertens to discover how to create a legal identity for trees

Human-Plant Interactions in Borrowed Scenery

In his essay ‘Plan/Plant/Planet’ Terrence McKenna suggests that plants should become organisational principles for human society in the 21st century. At FoAM we’d like to test this premise through an Alternate Reality Narrative (ARN). In Borrowed Scenery we will conduct experiments with an alternate reality (past, future or parallel) where plants are a central aspect of human society. We hold up the magnifying glass to reveal vegetation where we would usually overlook it: in cracks between buildings, on our plates, in emerging technologies and age-old stories.

Resilients Travels

Resilients field trips as alternative modes of cultural travel

Artist transiency

FoAM’s ‘artist in transience’ Dougald Hine will set out this summer to wander Europe as a guild journeyman: collecting stories, learning, connecting and contributing to resilient cultural initiatives along the way.

Future Preparedness: pre-enacting possible futures

FoAM's Future Preparedness case study for the Resilients project: on re-imagining and experiencing possible futures as artistic experiments.

Eating Grass, Crunching Code

FoAM Amsterdam and Wilfried Houjebek of Cryptoforestry began their annual psychogeographic drifts combined with foraging for edible plants in cities.

Medieval tart so loved by women

The story of a white dessert for the opening of Borrowed Scenery.

Patabotanical Tarot sketches

Continuing the design of the patabotanical tarot…

Resilients Salon at "Burning Ice"

As the closing session of the Burning Ice festival, FoAM organised a Resilients Salon on vegetal culture. We wanted to explore the complexity of relationships between culture and nature today, focusing on human-plant interactions. The core question of the evening was 'what possible futures can we envision emerging at the edges between culture, gardening and technology?'

Hortus prehearsal

As a part of the Burning Ice presentation of Hortus, Patricia Portela and Christoph De Boeck invited FoAM to converse about possible futures.

Experimenting with Prehearsals

Our first scenario building and prehearsal exercise involved the core team of FoAM. We began by asking a question that is sufficiently 'burning' for all of us: how do we work together on interesting things?

Talking about food

Two public presentations of FoAM's approaches to food and food culture, one in Croatia, another in Belgium. Video and text of the Croatian presentation are now online.

Scenario planning. Food and Architecture

Open House

Twenty-four artistic laboratories and alternative management offices in Brussels came together for the first time to showcase their research and practice in an event dedicated both to public and professionals for "Open House".

Future Preparedness – the art of the long view

With future prehearsals, we aim to model possible futures as participatory performances that grow out of scenario building exercises. We hypothesize that prehearsals can make us more aware of our habitual behaviours and challenge us to envision more imaginative futures, firmly grounded in the influences of the present and the past.

Germination X: Player characters

After another code sprint on Germination X, I've added player characters (avatars) to the game.

Act Otherwise

A short yet insightful wander through contemporary modes of storytelling, physical naration location based games, identity, automation and spoon making.

Hapstar version 0.7

Hapstar has achieved some popularity in the genetics community, the paper has currently racked up 13 citations, including one for it's use to create a figure for a Nature paper. This version addresses some requests from users, including the ability to save graphs midway though balancing. This means it's easier to run them for long periods of time. 

I+C+i // Debat "Reptes i necessitats de l'educació actual"

Video of the debate "Reptes i necessitats de l'educació actual" is now online (original version in Catalan, Spanish and English)

The Guild and the Garret

The recording of the inspiring conversation between Dougald Hine and Ben Vickers, "The Guild and the Garret" at Timelab last weekend is now available from the internet archive. 

Germination X at Loading Bar, Falmouth, UK

Where better for doing a game focus group test than in a games cafe? We had a fantastic turn out last night - we actually ran out of space! This was the third Lirec focus test using Germination X, but the first I've been physically involved in, and the biggest public event about this game I've done since last year's draw your own plant spirit at Pixelache, way back at the start of the project.

Kunst in de keuken 3

Edible pictures at de Wimpel.

FoAM in Kwintessens "Food Design"

FoAM's approach to food, design and social interfaces with Open Sauces, the Dream Team dinners and Cinédélices, featured in "Kwintessens", the magazine pubished by Design Vlaanderen.

GerminationX: soil conditions, glowing plants and empathic spirits

The last week has been a fairly intense code sprint on Germination X, based on feedback from the second focus study by SICS/mobile life in Stockholm. In order to get a more interesting world, and shake things up a little, soil conditions now vary quite dramatically. Some areas are friendlier to plants, and some very much harder to grow in than before. We've talked a lot in the design process about having different types of plants for different soil types or whole regions, this is a step in that direction.

ArtBots Gent 2011

A dazzling if quirky outpouring of robot talent transformed the University of Gent into an experimental playground and dating agency for robot-human encounters.