blog

A Gathering of Ghosts

A repetition is only interesting if it is a rehearsal.

Dust & Shadow in The Future of Print

How can immersive experiences stimulate engagement with printed books in a library? Here's what the experience looked like from a librarian's point of view.

"Fungi make worlds..."

"...They also unmake them"

Open call for a non-executive director

We are looking to appoint a Non-Executive Director for the FoAM Kernow studio for one year, to build our new advisory team.

Delta Casus

First results from the field exploration of the multi-species futures in the Dutch river delta region, on invitation by the Embassy of the North-sea.

FoAM digest - Autumn 02020

Some of our attempts at sensemaking while navigating uncertainty and the "turbulent times" also known as 2020.

Voicing the dawn

Reflections on rewilding my professional life through experiments with birdsong, on living and working with nature, linking sound, habitat and physiology of the time and place.

Plotting a path

Reflecting on the pandemic as a transitional process, including phases of separation, liminality and re-integration.

Step by step: building tangible livecoded braid robots

Robots as a potential tangible interface for thinking with.

Building a new Pattern Matrix with conductive thread

While processor speeds and the use of computation in our society have increased enormously, it is significant that the materials of electronics construction itself (discrete components soldered on to resin printed circuit boards) has been broadly consistent for well over fifty years.

Sonic Kayak update - new sensors, sonifications, and visualisations

An update on the Sonic Kayak project, including a chance to give us some feedback.

1000 portals

In the past few weeks I went to the park everyday, and pretend it's a beautiful forest.I found some interesting insertion points to re-connect with this environment.

Gardening in Isolation

This post is an homage to the seeding done during the pandemic and the harvest from these seeds of hope.

Sonic Kayak environmental data sonification

Results from our survey - an attempt at developing our environmental data sonification approach to be both enjoyable but also interpretable.

As systems crumble...

Ever since the Yugoslav war in the 1990s, I've got border issues. When the borders began closing in response to the Covid-19 pandemic I had a strong sense of déjà vu. Will the pandemic become yet another catalyst for violence and fragmentation? Just another reason to solidify borders and create distance from the other, the foreign, the uncanny and the unknown?

Some practices for uncertainty

Some practices that contribute to my overall well being in the midst of high levels of uncertainty.

FoAM Zenne - co-working with plants and ghosts

On the verge of it’s 20th anniversary, a regenerated FoAM Brussels reveals its future plans as FoAM Zenne. We cultivate regenerative cultural practices with humans and other-than-humans, questioning how to live (well) in times of loss and shifting cultural values.

Moving in a pandemic

A few experiential criteria for moving house during a pandemic

Will this burn down my house?

Tracing our paths in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic led us to challenge what or where is considered 'home', and what our homes could become.

Memory Practice #2

How did pre-literate cultures store the vast amounts of information their cultures needed to thrive? I'm trying out some hands-on experiments and this is how its been unfolding this spring.

Feral MBA Inception - Breaking Ground

Report gleaned from the pilot run of the Feral MBA, a radically different training course in business for artists and others.

AccessLab pandemic style

Making an AccessLab event work online. This post covers changes we made to the workshop format, what worked and what didn't, and what we'd do differently next time.

Off-grid micro scale manufacturing – part of a COVID-19 response in Cornwall

For some time we have been prioritising tools and processes that can be reused for different purposes in times where infrastructure is failing. Part of our COVID-19 response to the above problems has been to refit a small garden shed with a solar power setup (from our Sonic Kayak workshops) so we can run one of our CNC machines more or less unsupervised*, slowly churning out small parts for our projects.

Neuf pistes de tarification équitable

This article invites to think beyond a fixed universal price for products/services. It lists 9 ways you can play on pricing to shift the relationship between provider and customer, and possibly make your offer accessible to a broader and more diverse audience.

S'auto-former à l'ingénierie engagée

In many engineering schools, the divide is growing between students and staff about the room left to sustainability in the curriculum. At EPFL, a small group of students and alumni organized a self-training on appropriate technologies. This article details how we proceeded... and links to the replay of our self-training sessions, if you are interested!

Sonic Kayak progress – new pollution sensors for citizen science

Notes on our new turbidity and air quality sensor designs for the Sonic Kayak project, to allow fine scale mapping of above and below water pollution.

6 minutes, 40 secondes, et 9 auteurs pour le futur

This article mentions a Pecha Kucha presentation, in which I interconnected 9 authors which develop inspiring ideas for the future.

To care, to cure, to comfort (pandemic remix)

A condensed remix of some our thinking around care and uncertainty. Dedicated to all the carers near and far. To all those providing essential services and all those in isolation or lockdown. To all who care. To all...

Viruscraft 2.0

We're redesigning Viruscraft for a new project on virus and host co-evolution with Dr. Ben Ashby at the University of Bath. This post explores the options we're considering and why.

Comment je collecte et traite l'information

As a FoAMy generalist, I tend to focus on edges between fields rather than focusing on a single one. This means that I collect a lot of information from many different sources, and then weave it together. But how can one manage this variety of information and sources? This is a question many generalists have at heart.