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Winter Newsletter 2013 draft

While we contemplate slowing down and revaluing silence as the northern hemisphere turns inwards and descends into wintry hibernation, we'd like to look back on FoAM's bustling activities over the last six months while looking forward to a new year where distillation and transmutation are on the cards. Travels, talks, workshops, celebrations, residencies (punctuated by copious EC reporting and accounting) – there’s been much interesting ferment (and fermentation), some of it simmering down, more bubbling up, and much that is quite new to all of us.

At FoAM Brussels we continue deepening and broadening our work with food systems, speculative culture and synaesthetic experiences. FoAM Kernow has found its niche in blending science, technology and the arts and thereby benefiting both the scientific community and wider society. FoAM Amsterdam is touring the world with Sphaerae, and FoAM Nordica consolidates its work on Foodprints. So without further ado, here’s a guided tour of the highlights. We feel that some of these are peak experiences not only of the last few months, but indeed of our work at FoAM as a whole. We hope you’ll be inspired, and be in touch!

Food culture

A colourful congregation of artists, scientists, technologists and enthusiasts came together at FoAM in Brussels to explore the fuzzy edges between the craft of fermentation, the science of biochemistry and the interesting socio-technological developments surrounding the phenomenon known as bio-hacking, biopunk or DIY biology in the Biochymickal Arts workshop this September. Led by Maria Tarantino, Meredith L. Patterson and Brian Degger and facilitated by Maja Kuzmanovic, the group spent a weekend engaged in charged discussions about synthetic biology, biomimicry, sushi as a flattening of an older form of fermented rice, and other issues. The workshop adopted the form of a curated open space, with several parallel experiments taking place in FoAM's kitchen and makeshift wetlab. The wetlab will remain operational until further notice, as several of the participants (and collaborators from their networks) continue to perform experiments such as DNA extraction, growing bacterial colonies from ferments made during the workshop, and so forth. If you are interested in using the lab, feel free to contact bxl@fo.am for more information.

Biochymickal Arts workshop
Notes, summaries and references
Biochymickal Arts on Flickr

After weeks of planning, preparation, testing, tasting, listening and above all cooking, we hosted Smoke & Vapour, two etherial evenings and degustation dinners dedicated to smoke and vapour in their many forms. Maja Kuzmanovic, Stevie Wishart, Rasa Alksnyte, Nik Gaffney and Alkan Chipperfield composed a synaesthetic experience where food and sound melted and evaporated into one other. We first held a full dress rehearsal with guests from within the FoAM network, then hosted the wider public event two days afterwards. We’re happy that both evenings were well received by our guests, and also gave us such exhilarating pleasure to produce and perform. Read more about it in Maja’s blog post, and browse the collection of specially designed recipes for the event. Check out the photo documentation as well, covering the whole production from preparation to presentation and performance.

Nik Gaffney and Dave Griffiths are currently working on developing the Open Sauces website, where these and other of FoAM's recipes and food-related information will migrate in 2014.

Smoke & Vapour event
Documentation, process, inspirations and recipes
Smoke & Vapour photos on Flickr
Creating Smoke & Vapour

FoAM Nordica’s Foodprints publication by Anna Maria Orru, Johan Zetterquist and David Relan has made it onto printed paper, and looks great. Examining the role of food in urban renewal, it represents the nourishing culmination of many projects, people, networks and thinking in the field. Meanwhile, Anna Maria and David have been working on a prototype app and website of the Foodprints Ruler system discussed in the publication. Anna Maria talked about it recently at the Switched on Nature event at Shift in the Stockholm Resilience centre, where they've been hacking the space between nature and technology on themes of resilience.

Foodprints
Switched on nature
Foodprints Ruler

Speculative culture

In our previous newsletter we celebrated the closure of Resilients and PARN, two projects that put our work in speculative culture on the map. Since then the PARN publication has been printed and distributed (if you'd like a copy email us at bxl@fo.am), and we're full swing into Future Fabulators, a European project that combines our work with alternate reality narratives and future preparedness and continues our fertile collaboration with Time's Up in Linz.

In Future Fabulators we're extending our research in speculative culture, scenario building, future preenactments, physical narratives and other forms that embody possible futures today. We began by reflecting on our current work, first at the Improving Reality conference in Brighton, where Maja discussed using future preenactments and alternate reality narratives as ways to guide us through the swarm of possible futures. Following this Nik and Maja headed off to the Brionian islands in Croatia for the Summit of Practical Utopias, a four-day workshop where participants playfully designed and experimented with the seemingly paradoxical notion of creating a utopia that can be practical. We realised that creating and maintaining FoAM is an exercise of practical utopianism, always balancing on the fine edge of becoming impractical.

Improving Reality conference and Transcript of Maja's talk
Practical Utopias

A few days afterwards, Maja and Nik welcomed the residency of Sarah Neville and her daughter Florence in Castelletto Parenzana, FoAM's temporary residence in Istria, Croatia. These residents spent a couple of intensive weeks exploring the past, present and future of weather lore in a time of turbulent climate change.This residency will continue at our mobile studio in Adelaide, Australia during February 2014, and may involve Sarah's return to Europe as part of a Future Fabulators public event.

Sarah Neville and family in residence
Parenzana residency notes, in Progress

Since commencing Future Fabulators in September, we've facilitated several scenario planning workshops, fine-tuning the method for different audiences and subject matter. We worked with the Vooruit to design the future of the Possible Futures festival. At the Future Fabulators kick-off in Linz, we investigated what we'd like the legacy of the project to be.and more widely – what will happen to fear in about thirty years. With Timelab and Lisa Ma we focused on the future of invasive species in Ghent and beyond. Nik Gaffney participated in AltArt's version of forecasting in Cluj, Romania, looking at the future of the city.

We're currently designing a series of scenario workshops with the Madeira Institute of Technology to assist their staff, students and sponsors in designing technologies and programmes that could be used for some of Future Fabulators' physical narratives and preenactments. We're also plotting and scheming workshops and seminars for the spring, summer and autumn of 2014 – but first we'll take a couple of months for research into the philosophy, ethics, aesthetics and methodology of speculative culture that will inform most of our activities in 2014. Keep your eyes on the Future Fabulators wiki to find out more as the project develops.

Future Fabulators
Human Invasive Interaction
Future Fabulators work in progress

Live coding and citizen science: FoAM Kernow

Over the autumn FoAM Kernow has been investigating the future of live coding, and working on citizen science games and apps with a number of new collaborators. Highlights include: the release of ‘The Farm Crap App’ with Cornwall’s Duchy College, part of a scheme to highlight the value of organic fertilisers compared to costly and unsustainable synthetic ones, and ‘Where is that Nest?’ – a citizen science game measuring egg pattern camouflage, developed in collaboration with the Sensory Ecology group at Exeter University. It is a followup to ‘Where is that Nightjar?’, which has been played over 10,000 times.

In September Dave Griffiths attended ‘Collaboration and learning through live coding’, a seminar in Schloss Dagstuhl that explored live coding with experts in the fields of education and software engineering, leading to some exciting new collaborations (watch this space). He has also co-authored a new publication featured in the Ecology and Evolution Journal: ‘Smartphones in ecology and evolution: a guide for the app-rehensive’. It includes discussions of the DORIS lobster mapper, Boskoi and Ushahidi.

And finally, CodeClub at Troon Primary School broke up for the holidays last week by making lots of Christmas games. Next year we're moving on to Raspberry Pi thanks to a donation from a rather large internet company!

The Farm Crap App
Where Is that Nest?
Collaboration and learning through Live Coding
Smartphones in ecology and evolution

Synaesthetic experiences

Sphaerae is a portable multidome performance space designed by Cocky Eek of FoAM Amsterdam. It featured outside the Ars Electronica building during this year's festival, and in association with Synergetica Lab and ArtScience interfaculty hosted a diverse program of performances and compositions. During TodaysArt festival in The Hague the inflatable was set up at the city hall, attracting huge crowds of Hagenezen (locals) intrigued by the large, strange object emitting weird sounds. Future plans for Sphaerae include performances in South America and other continents, in collaboration with Synergetica and ArtScience.

Meanwhile, Theun Karelse has been traversing across the Iberian peninsula on a foldable bike for the second instalment of Default, which is focussing on the Shifting Baseline syndrome. Some of the biotic samples taken from the expedition were transplanted to on the Neringa peninsula in Lithuania during the Nida Art Colony Techno-Ecologies residency program, as a demonstration of assisted migration.

Sphaerae
Default#1
Sphaerae Blog
Techno-Ecologies

Unfolding under the gently coordinating hand of Perfoming Pictures of Sweden, the Euroaxacan Initiative of Transformative Cultures was a project in which European and Mexican artists spent two years working in urban and rural areas of Oaxaca, Mexico, as well as in Belgium, Sweden and the UK, combining traditional crafts with new technologies, bringing together Europeans and Mexicans in participatory workshops and multisensory exhibitions. The early beginnings of this project were seeded at a FoAM workshop in 2009, and this October the project 'came home' to Brussels for Fiesta del EITC – The Homecoming, where we celebrated the project's closure. Designed and co-ordinated by Christina Stadlbauer, Loes Jacobs, Bart Vandeput, Pacome Beru and others, the event was an opportunity for dispersed collaborators to reunite and harvest two years of intercontinental travels, co-creations and discussions that emerged from the project.

nadine and FoAM hosted the event and the subsequent consortium meeting. We saw old friends like Dougald Hine, Geska and Robert Brecevic, and met some of the project partners for the first time. Daniela Porras and Luis Conseco, together with their child Dante, spent a month at FoAM working with elements of Oaxacan and European culture to create their playful pieces for the EITC exhibition. Luis shared an old machete – a family heirloom – to create a piece of participatory 'action drawing', while Daniela hand painted beer coasters as a memory game of things that surprised, delighted and puzzled her about the meeting between Belgium and Oaxaca. Aside from the exhibition that displayed several of the multidisciplinary artworks emerging from the project, the gallery event featured presentations by participating artists and a screening of Dougald Hine's movie Memories of Development, a long conversation with Gustavo Esteva. With teary eyes our Mexican residents made us promise that we will come to Oaxaca after the project ends, and maybe even set up a FoAM studio in their home.

Fiesta del EITC
Porras and Conceco

Supporting FoAM's community

FoAM Brussels continues to be involved in the facilitation and support of a wider community of generalists – th transdisciplinary and speculative cultural proletariat. We call this work our 'services' to the cultural sector and beyond. Firstly we're delighted to let you know that the digital catalogue of our physical library is now online. Alkan has been hamstering in the library cataloguing the publications and sorting them on shelves, so it is much easier to find what you're looking for in our humble but exciting collection of more than thousand books, magazines, grey literature and other ephemera informing and emerging from FoAM's activities. From 2014 we're planning to hold Open Library Days and Salons, giving not just our audiences but also ourselves a chance to spend time in the library and peruse its materials.

Soon after the library was catalogued, our first residents after the summer recess in 2013 used it in the most creative manner. Lies Declerck and her two-year-old son Adi spent a week in FoAM cooking from recipes found in FoAM's food-related books. This was one of the most unique and generous residencies we have ever experienced. Lies experimented with the fine line between work and life, art and housework and took care of FoAM and our guests for a week. In exchange we took care of Adi and involved both of them in the daily life of an arts lab.

Aside from short-form residencies, the library is being used extensively by our two current macrotransients, Luea Ritter and Michka Melo. Luea is working on how to deal with transitions on personal, organisational and even societal scales, and Michka (having just started a few weeks ago) has wallpapered a loft in Post-Its outlining plans to disentangle from a scientific career and explore the boundaries between self-sufficiency and interdependence. Their transiencies will continue well into 2014, so you can expect further updates in coming newsletters. Both Luea and Michka are supported through FoAM's coaching programme, lead by executive coach and FoAM board member Vali Lalioti. There are still a few places left for cultural workers in Flanders and Brussels who feel the need for coaching, so if you're interested, drop us an email at bxl@fo.am.

Services offered at FoAM bxl
Macrotransiencies
Lies and Adi Declerck's microresidency
Coaching with Vali Lalioti
Zotero digital catalogue of the FoAM library

hosting craft http://lib.fo.am/hosting_craft –> i don't know how to fit this in… maybe leave it out until the next newsletter?

Finally – you might laugh after reading all of the above – we're working hard on a new project: Doing Nothing. In view of the malaise fuelled by stress, overwork, financial and social uncertainty and other well-known pain points pervading the cultural sector but also the wider society of Europe and beyond, FoAM has initiated a practice-based research programme on how to do nothing: creating space and time to decompress amidst our hectic lives. So far the research has looked at how how to do this on a daily basis at a microcosmic scale, in FoAM and our networks, but in 2014–2015 the programme will be extended. In the spirit of Doing Nothing, we may not document it explicitly or extensively, but we do encourage you to browse some of the exercises and inspirations have begun to amass on the project's dedicated Libarynth page.

Doing Nothing
Idleness in progress

To conclude this newsletter, we'd like to wish you a wonderful Yuletide and a beautiful 2014, with much space for speculation, experimentation, good food, fun, games and inspiring culture, and above all else plentiful time to do nothing and enjoy the abundance of life, whatever it may bring. See you on the other side of the holidays, in person or online…

Outline

Intro, summarising 'topics', looking back and forward.

Food culture

Speculative culture

Citizen Science – FoAM Kernow

  • Future of Live coding (Kernow)
  • The Farm Crap App (Kernow)
  • “Where is that Nest? (Kernow)
  • Smartphones in ecology and evolution: a guide for the app-rehensive (Kernow)

Synaesthetic experiences – FoAM Amsterdam

Supporting a community of generalists

  • hosting craft http://lib.fo.am/hosting_craft
  • doing nothing
  • residencies
    • 3 families (lies, sarah, mexicans)
    • macro: luea, michka
  • coaching (available spots in 2014)

Misc

  • EITC Homecoming

for orientation and/or comparison here is last winter's edition: http://fo.am/blog/2012/12/22/foam-newsletter-winter-2012/

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  • Last modified: 2013-12-11 11:10
  • by alkan