blog

Exploring and Designing our Future Robot Companions

John Paul Bichard's just-completed LIREC documentary 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.

Kunst in de keuken 2

Why one bread is spongy like a mattress and the other thin like a paper? What makes one bread sweet and the other sour? Where does flour comes from? What story can you tell with making bread? To find answers to these questions that was our goal for the yeast and bread workshop at De Wimpel.

Kunst in de keuken

On 24 January we held our first day at De Wimpel with a class of 5th-graders and their teacher Myrte, on the topic of mushrooms.

Autumn appearances of FoAM and its members

Diverse, miscellaneous, wide-ranging and intrepid adventures of FoAM participants.

Resilients

FoAM and partners explore the potential for resilience through meditative inner development using the Naikan technique and by celebrating the role of temporary generalists with Resilients Journeyer Simone Poutnik and the Simsons Family-in-Residence. Several workshops also explore resilient practices and thinking in the Mathematikal Arts workshop with Carole Collet and Tim Boykett, the making and remaking of Saints and Venerative Places workshop organised by Performing Pictures, nadine, FoAM Amsterdam and FoAM Nordica, and Textile Futures at Central Saint Martins Textile Futures lab with Bartaku and Carole.

Vegetal Culture

Several ongoing events and projects – often far-flung across the globe – represent FoAM's continued exploration of biology, ecology, culture, art and science. FoAM Amsterdam host a talk by Suprabha Seshan, spokesperson for the Gurukula Botanic Sanctuary in India, collaborator Angelo Vermeulen terraforms a volcano in Indonesia with a biological sculpture, and Lionel Billiet turns the studio at FoAM Brussels into a DIY lab for plant communication and neurobiology. Meanwhile, bees, mushrooms, and power plants feature prominently with Christina Stadlbauer and Bartaku visiting Latvia to make beeswax-inspired installations and coordinate Aronia berry harvesting, and last but not least, Martin Howse leads workshop participants into the arcane realms of mycelium-radio communications.

Food and Sustainability

FoAM Brussels facilitates a lunch conversation on the future of food for the Sustainability Days of the Flemish government’s Department of Environment, Energy and Nature, while FoAM Nordica collaborate with the Stockholm Resilience Centre to develop a food-related exhibition at the Kulturhuset in Stockholm.

Play and Games

Quirky and thought-provoking robot talent shows; how to build your own alternate reality game; hacking, bioluminescent algae, and emotional plant spirits; our ongoing exploration of all things ludic remains a strong theme through several of FoAM's events and activities. Most recent in the lineup are Artbots 2011 at Gent, an alternate reality games workshop with Adrian Hon and Matt Wieteska of Six to Start, and Germination X, a peculiar plant game with a novel premise.

Cultural economies for social change: Euroaxacan Initiative of Transformative Cultures

We are happy to announce the launch of the Euroaxacan Initiative of Transformative Cultures (EITC). FoAM joins Performing Pictures, Raketa and David Cuartielles (SE), Spacemakers (UK), nadine (BE), alongside a consortium of Mexican partners supported by the Culture Programme of the European Union. EITC investigates how to enliven cultural economies by combining arts, crafts and technologies from the pre- and post-industrial eras.

Ethnobotany and Tarot

What do Tarot and plants have in common? Beyond the floral motifs that appear on almost every card, perhaps it is stories that are the connective tissue between them: stories of divination, oral histories and ethnobotanical writings on human-plant relationships; recipes, myths and science fiction.

ARG tutorial notes online

Notes from the Alternate Reality Games Tutorial are now on the Libarnyth: http://lib.fo.am/arg_tutorial

Living Paint for Living Buildings

Lionel is excited to announce that he is one of four contestants to have won this year's Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award. The €25,000 award will allow him to pursue a personal art-science project in collaboration with the Kluyver Centre for Genomics and Industrial Fermentation, investigating the possibilities for decorating concrete buildings with a "living paint" made of lichen.

Germination X: Intelligent butterflies etc

Over the last couple of weeks Germination X has managed to attract 70 players picking and planting in a permaculture world, with plants now covering 92 5x5 tiles - watch out Zynga :) This week has seen some more additions, firstly giving gifts to spirits has a large effect on their emotions positive and negative, and while it needs a bit more work - the wording of messages is modified according to the spirit's emotional state at the time they send them.

FoAM interview in MCD #65

An interview with Maja and Nik is featured in the recent issue of MCD – "L’INTERNET VOIT VERT / THE CULTURE OF GREEN TECH" – in which they discuss groworld, resilience and facing uncertainty.

A week in Stockholm

The Mobile Life Centre in Stockholm is an interdisciplinary lab that does serious research on unserious activities and comprises computer scientists, interaction designers, sociologists, psychologists and game designers. They are also part of SICS, and are partners with FoAM on the Lirec project. Last week I was lucky enough to work with them for 5 days focused on Germination X. The main objective was to start designing a user study to discover people's feelings about their relationships in the game. We started off with a talk and a workshop, inviting the other researchers to help us decide the best ways of doing this - using interviews, online questionnaires, in game surveys or raw data from the game.

Finding Our Way Home

A company of artists from Europe and a company of artisans from Oaxaca set out to meet each other and experience the transforming power of culture.

Germination X: player progression and surprises

Slowly Germination X gets less like a prototype and more like a full game, lots of new stuff this week - as this is the first online release of the work done over the past month. Players can now pass items of fruit to each other or spirits as gifts (by dragging fruit over messages and dropping them). There is some limited player development with some small surprises to prolong the gameplay a bit (spot the new plants). There is now a new mechanism to introduce players to the game and get feedback from them and also navigation to quickly locate plants - click on a message to teleport to the plant it concerns.

Serious Play at FoAM

Last weekend it was the annual FoAM gathering to discuss long term ideas, some self reflection and consideration of external perceptions. We were guided on this mission by Simone Poutnik and Hendrik Tiesinga, members of FoAM and founders of Natural Innovation. They decided to trial a new method on us all, Lego Serious Play. Now, I'm a bit battle hardened when it comes to alternative business management strategies as I've been exposed to quite a few in various places over the years, but despite Lego's high scoring buzzword bingo website, I can independently verify this approach as very much a success.

Introduction to Voedsel 2.0

Welkom bij Voedsel 2.0, een thematische lunch over duurzaam eten. De bedoeling van deze lunch is om ideeën over de toekomst van voedsel uit te wisselen, terwijl je zintuigen met – voor vandaag ontworpen – gerechten geprikkeld worden. De oude Grieken wisten het al: Tijdens Griekse 'symposia' kon het samen eten, drinken en praten met onbekenden leiden tot baanbrekende filosofieën. En het doorbreken van sociale grenzen.

Groworld Games

During 2008 and 2009 a small group of groworlders including members of FoAM and invited participants Tale of Tales and Six to Start worked on designs and prototypes for games that would strengthen the connection between plants and people.

Resilients Naikan

“Naikan is a method of intensive self-reflection that can lead to more inner freedom and joy. A week of Naikan allows you to examine your view on life by observing your inner world, calmly, in a completely safe space. The silence and withdrawal enable a deep, meditative and emotionally intense experience, by which self-perception can be re-calibrated and a fresh view on our life story can take place.”– From Christina Stadlbauer’s page: http://shiatsubrussel.be/index.php?/english/naikan---looking-inside/

A timeline of events

events (and periods) in a timeline, http://delta.fo.am/timeline/events

Cycland video

“FoAM's burgeoning intergenerational residency programme, combined with Alex Davies and Alexandra Crosby's experiment in parenting, has produced some interesting results. Alex Davies is a Sydney artist, until recently based in Austria working with Time’s Up.”

Fieldwork at FoAM

“Most of you must have been puzzled on occasion as to what i have been doing here: but I assure you that the most puzzled one has surely been myself...” More of Alkan’s research notes:http://libarynth.org/research_report_alkan