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Themes, stories, worlds
As a possible way of structuring the Grow Your Own Worlds publication, we organised its themes and content into several “worlds” that broadly represent our foci of interest and serve, loosely, as the book’s “chapters” (at the moment).
Reality Generation
… where we talk about FoAM's experiments with immersive, responsive, transmedia environments, and our explorations of the edges between the digital and the physical worlds
- The *t-series: http://fo.am/t-series/
Behind the Algorithms
… in which we trace a path through computational worlds, beginning with Glitch Art and generative media, through to live coding, tangible media, mini-games and augmented reality apps.
Human-Plant Interaction
… where we investigate the many possible relationships between plants and humans, including urban gardening, citizen science plant games, speculative experiments with human-plant communication and a reintroduction of seasonal rituals
Towards Luminous Green
… in which we look at FoAM's environmental and technosocial worldviews; combining technology and sustainability; electricity with green; augmentation with foraging
Affordable Mysticism
… is the small niche of all things meta and pata, the esoteric, mystical and spiritual dimensions that though often occulted, are like dark matter interspersed as background radiation behind everything we do.
Alternate Realities and Possible Futures
… balancing on the edges of fiction and reality, futurology and fortunetelling, delving deep into FoAM's explorations of speculative culture, looking at what emerges when we dare ask “what if?” and prototype the answers as artistic experiments and daily rituals; here we also explore several perspectives on surviving and thriving in turbulent times, and ask what cultural resilience might be like, today and in the future
Grow your own
Aside from being a well-known creed in the countercultural movement, Grow Your Own is a philosophy that we apply across different disciplines, through hands-on workshops and co-creation sessions. In the book we look back at the people, stories and methods we developed to encourage participatory learning and open knowledge sharing
FoAM Food
is one of the pillars of our transdisciplinary culture. In this chapter we reveal the secrets of FoAM's experimental kitchen and include recipes and menus from some of our most beloved meals
Hosting Craft
where we talk about the foundation of a FoAM culture, based on hosting and nurturing its collaborators and participants, in intergenerational residencies and transiencies, coaching, mentoring and even matchmaking
Institutional Hacking
where we talk about the nuts and bolts of experimenting with an organisation as an artform, about FoAM as an extended clan blurring the boundaries between life and work, and discuss the many pros and cons that we experienced in the flesh during this process
- FoAM Manual
Who is who
where we talk about FoAM's extended family, all the various people involved, devolved and in partial orbit or comet-rendevous flyby. We want to surface the manifold links between people, places, projects and studios. We also want to take time to find out what happened to people who worked with us as emerging artists, scientists and other generalists with whom we share(d) many things but have lost touch through temporal, spatial or philosophical distance…
- Data, metadata, pata- and para- data
We have began collating relevant material from our archives in the surfacing_stuff node.