blog

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.

Memory Practice

How did pre-literate cultures store the vast amounts of information their cultures needed to thrive; the knowledge about their environment, the beings that surround them and how to live there as a people?

FoAM digest - Autumn 02019

Hello Earthlings, and welcome to another of FoAM's semi-seasonal digests, composed with beings, places and things we care about. We write as humans (mostly) in a beyond-human world, continuing to seek alternatives to the tenacious (yet crumbling) status quo, engaging with people, cultures and technologies across the fickle currents of time. 

Spectres in Change. Fieldnotes #2

Reflections on landing and leaving as artistic practices, based on our fieldnotes from the island of Seili in the Archipelago sea. How to land in a place is a perpetual question for those of us who live and work nomadically or trans-locally. Landing could be seen as a ritual beginning with a place and those who call it home.

Composing with birds

Looking back at my recent compositions where I attempt to combine birdsong with contemporary music.

Open call: /nightly build - the current/ zine #13

This is an open call for 13th edition of the smart-zine nightly build — the current

Invisible Worlds residency 2019 - The Intergalactic Estate Agency

Austin Houldsworth's words, images and video from his 2019 Eden Project/FoAM Invisible Worlds residency - the Intergalactic Space Agency.

How to walk like something is around you

Artist Catherine Harris has called for ‘unconditional hospitality’ towards the natural world. I think what I experience in the rainforest in Kerala, the wetlands in Coorg and among the clouds in the Nilgiris is that, for some of us, this unconditional hospitality may take some getting used to.

De quel entrepreneuriat avons-nous besoin ?

In the mind of many social & environmental justice activists, entrepreneurship is seen as part of the problem. In this article, we define better what kind of entrepreneurship we would need, and which kind of ventures would be supporting such social movements.

Sonic Kayaks - after a summer of Sonic Kayaking with Access Lizard Adventure

Following our workshop with visually impaired people at Trevassack we were left with mixed feelings, on the one hand the participants were very happy and seemed inspired by the day - but on the other hand we experienced plenty of technical difficulties with the new GPS system, and we didn't have enough time to really get into sonic mapping.The important thing was that the participants gave us so much feedback and lots of insights - and luckily our partners Access Lizard Adventure had planned an event at Clowance Estate near Camborne to showcase accessible kayaking for visually impaired people, which included the Sonic Kayaks. This gave us a chance to incorporate their feedback into a full system with a couple of different sound maps.

Notes on potential new sensors for Sonic Kayaks - turbidity and air quality

As part of our Sonic Kayak project, we have been looking at adding new sensors to the system. These are our notes from our research and prototyping.

Sonic Kayak sound mapping workshop

Notes from a sound mapping workshop for the Sonic Kayaks, with participants with visual impairments.

Viruscraft at Science in the Square 2019

After two workshops and the testing day at the Eden Project we took the final version of Viruscraft out to Science in the Square: a big event run by Exeter university with around 3,000 visitors. It was a fantastically rainy day, which meant lots of budding virus builders of all ages took shelter in the big tent in the middle of Falmouth during peak holiday season. The installation turned out to be very popular, at one point 8 small children were simultaneously mutating the wooden virus under instructions from a couple of older kids.

AccessLab for Extinction Rebellion

Last week we ran an AccessLab for anyone interested in climate change or involved with Extinction Rebellion. This is to document how it went and what our next steps could be.

Teaching technology in 2019

For the last couple of years I've been doing sporadic teaching of electronics and programming for undergraduates and masters students across a couple of courses in my local university. This has taken the form of one on one teaching a day a week in the spring term, in a basement cupboard sized room with a soldering iron and piles of components. Students book up half an hour blocks of time to get help with their projects, find new directions or assistance developing new ideas they continually come up with.