By Maja Kuzmanovic and FoAM

Culture – in the sense of cultivation of minds and behaviors – is one of the most enduring phenomena through which humans shape the world (Brand 1999). Culture leaves persistent human hand-prints on the biological environment, both enhancing and depleting ecosystems. Some preindustrial cultures saw themselves as a part of ever-widening cycles of nature. We can still experience their silent memorials in the form of animist and Buddhist temples in Asian landscapes, or pagan sites scattered throughout Europe. With the advent of the industrial age, human culture became increasingly divorced from non-human nature, so that the two evolved in parallel for a while (with brief interjections of movements such as Romanticism or Art Nouveau). More recently, culture and nature have begun to converge again – in the unlikely sites of failed industrial experiments. The Chernobyl “involuntary park” is a marvel of biodiversity and adaptation to a technological disaster (Sterling, retrieved 2010). Abandoned factories in the German Rühr are now colonised by cultural initiatives, such as the Zollverein. Both culture and nature are slow but tenacious forces often marginalised in a world dominated by economic rationalism. They are messy tangles of emotional, spiritual and physical values, irreducible to simple graphs and statistical analysis, and as such are often ignored in our current fast-paced global society.

On the other hand, technology – another human contribution to the planetary ecosystem – is embraced by the same economic and political powers as a panacea to most contemporary challenges, from environmental turbulence to financial crises. From prehistoric seed-collecting and early agricultural ploughs through to nanotech, technology has become a persistent mark of humanity, in the shape of tools and techniques through which we analyse and interact with the world. Although technology has had a substantial influence on culture and nature (digital technology being the most recent example), it can never fill the cultural void left in the wake of the erosion of the grand narratives of the 20th century. Technology in isolation cannot provide truly encompassing visions of culture, even though humanity has attempted to understand culture (and the whole universe) in terms of technological models – as clockwork, steam machine, or computer. The limitations of these models have become gradually apparent as science (and common sense) has dug deeper into the fundaments of life. Now, after ages of superimposing technological worldviews on nature, perhaps it is time to superimpose a natural worldview on technology.

“The word ‘technology’ derives from technē, a Greek word that originally referred to the labours of the smith and other craftsmen. The analogous Greek word for the labours of the farmer is erga or ‘work’ … For the Greeks, the smith was a solitary figure, whose technē was a jealously guarded secret connecting him to the powers of the underworld through the god Hephaestus. In contrast, the erga, or work, of the farmer was public, involving the whole society and most of the gods. Both activities (smithing and farming) involved ritual, but in the case of technē the rituals were secret and individual, whereas erga are public and collective.”

– J. Stephen Lansing

In his essay “Plan/Plant/Planet,” Terrence McKenna proposed that plants could provide organisational principles for life in the 21st century. McKenna speculates about a society where humanity embraces the slowness and introspection of a vegetal culture, whole-systems design, atmosphere-based economy, symbiotic and interdependent collaboration, and other qualities of the “vegetal mind.” Plants are able both to sustain themselves and replenish their surroundings – photosynthesizing, detoxifying their environment and recycling waste. They are resilient and adaptive, while also elegant, fresh and beautiful. Plants might inspire a “new paradigm capable of offering hope of a path out of the cultural quicksand” (McKenna 1992).

Human culture needs non-human nature to evolve. As Hakim Bey says: “The elimination of the non-human invokes the elimination of the human: culture can only be defined in relation to what it is not” (Bey 1996). The interplay between culture and nature is beautifully embodied in the concept of “borrowed scenery” in Chinese and Japanese gardening. Shakkei or jiejing gardens borrow distant vistas (such as mountains or rivers) as elements of their design (Mehta and Tada, 2008). Even though the plants cultivated in the garden and the untamed formations of faraway landscapes are topographically separated entities, visitors experience them as part of one whole. The origins of borrowed scenery lie in Buddhist temples, where gardens were designed as meditative spaces, with a hint of geomancy. Early Buddhist temple gardens used shakkei to teach their visitors about humility and the interconnectedness of all beings in a layered reality. Several Buddhist meditation practices (such as mettā or tonglen) start with a focus on oneself which is gradually expanded, layer by layer, to include all sentient beings, the planet and the whole universe. Similarly, a shakkei garden includes its human visitors and their gaze, drawing them from the cultivated fore- and middle-ground towards the focusing frame of the garden's edge, and finally into the background – the wild, uncontrolled, borrowed scenery. Over the centuries the spiritual connotations faded, and shakkei became a design technique used to give the garden a painterly depth and let its edges humbly diffuse in the surroundings. Borrowed scenery gardens can be seen as miniatures of a botanically-inspired culture, with plants and humans as interconnected layers of a planetary ecology. Rather than seeing them as separate entities, we shift perspective and treat cultures of plants and humans as a part of the same picture, where they complement and enrich each other.

“For planting ground is painting a landscape with living things and I hold that good gardening takes rank with bounds of the fine arts, so I hold that to plant well needs an artist of no mean capacity.”

– Gertrude Jekyll

The interconnectedness of the human and the vegetal has been a recurring, age-old theme in art, science and religion. Medieval healer and mystic Hildegard of Bingen wrote about plants radiating a greening life-force (Roth 2000), which she called viriditas. Any translation of viriditas into words and symbols would remain inadequate, but it is a phenomenon that can be viscerally experienced by most humans. Viriditas can be felt while walking through a lush forest, or picking leafy greens from a garden. It is the feeling of freshness and incomprehensible greenness, a quiet, elemental consciousness permeating all life. Sadly, the cultural values of our times seem to have strayed away from viriditas in favour of our animal attributes – speed, expansion, predation and consumption. The balance has tipped toward the bestial side of humanity at the expense of the vegetal. However, we can reacquaint ourselves with viriditas when we slow down, open our senses, become still but present, like a plant. We can witness viriditas in our own resilience, awareness, compassion and contemplation.

“Most noble

evergreen with your roots

in the sun:

you shine in the cloudless

sky of a sphere no earthly

eminence can grasp,

enfolded in the clasp

of ministries divine.”

– Hildegard Von Bingen

While viriditas can be an experiential and spiritual muse of a vegetal human culture, for the analytically inclined a more empirical approach to the idea of vegetal sentience is needed (aside from the well-known psychedelic and shamanistic perspectives). Justifiably, before encouraging development of a vegetal mind in humans, we’d like to understand the plant’s point of view first, rather than modelling our human existence on an incomplete interpretation. We might want to engage with the botanical kingdom directly, and grasp how plants perceive, feel and communicate. There are several examples from both mainstream and fringe science looking at plant communication and sentience. Plant neurobiology is a scientific discipline seeing plants as having a neurological system for signal transmission (Barlow, 2008). On the edges of scientific replicability, we find Clive Backster's biocommunication experiments with a specimen of Dracena Massengeana connected to a polygraph (Backster 2003), or the imaginative crescographs by Jagdish Chandra Bose and Randall Fontes (Theroux 1997). These experiments look at plant growth and movement in response to external stimuli, and attempt to understand plant perception and even communication.

Venturing to communicate with plants would require humans to grasp the logic of the “vegetal mind.” Plant consciousness would no doubt be considered alien and impossible to perceive without assistance. This is where knowledge of human-computer interaction might be informative. The field of computer science has developed a variety of methods to determine the nature of machine consciousness by comparing it to the human mind (the Turing test being the best known example). However, it is quite anthropocentrically arrogant to think that human sentience is the only possible expression of consciousness, so why measure sentience by how well it mirrors that of humans? Nature may contain a myriad of disparate consciousnesses, operating according to their own internally consistent, externally incomprehensible logic. Writer Karl Schroeder called the concept of post-scientific communication with non-human sentient beings “thalience” – “an attempt to give the physical world itself a voice so that rather than us asking what reality is, reality itself can tell you” (Schroeder, retrieved 2008). A plant-inspired culture could benefit from theoretical and practical observations of our verdant neighbours, moving away from teleological and reductionist analyses of human relationships with plants. Schroeder talks about “non-human intelligences who come to different conclusions about what the universe [is] like” (Schroeder, retrieved 2008). Plants are such “non-human intelligences” with whom we share the same universe, yet the way in which they experience the world remains beyond our grasp. What stories could plants tell us and how would we respond?

“We have nothing in common with the Geometers. No shared experiences, no common culture. Until that changes, we can't communicate with them. Why not? Because language is nothing more than a stream of symbols that are perfectly meaningless until we associate them, in our minds, with meaning; a process of acculturation. Until we share experiences with the Geometers, and thereby begin to develop a shared culture – in effect, to merge our culture with theirs – we cannot communicate with them, and their efforts to communicate with us will continue to be just as incomprehensible as the gestures they've made so far.”

– Neal Stephenson

At the epicentre of culture, gardening and technology we might be able to see how plants can become organisational principles for human society in the turbulent times of the 21st century. Although we have to scavenge the fringes of contemporary society, we can observe many healing effects that humans can have on their surroundings through a symbiotic collaboration with plants. People offer a helping hand to a struggling habitat through “natural farming” (Fukuoka 1990). Others design whole lifecycle systems inspired by natural processes, based on the art and science of biomimicry. However, on a systemic level, we still don’t know how to overhaul wasteful human behaviours en masse. How do we encourage a more resilient culture, so that humans and non-humans can continue living, preferably together? How do we stimulate a fertile entanglement of culture, gardening and technology that can give the rise to diverse and holistic communities of practice? Communities capable of forging symbiotic relationships between postindustrial human societies and the rest of the earth. Composting bitterness to grow beauty.

From these questions and assertions sprouted the groWorld initiative, a long-term inquiry into human-plant interactions and their effect on the longevity of human culture. The people of FoAM (a transdisciplinary laboratory for speculative culture) initiated groWorld to minimise borders and maximise edges between the man-made and the vegetal. In these zones of liminality and ambiguity, groWorld abets “unholy alliances” between contemporary culture and cultivation, building and growing, botany and technology. Inspired by the way in which plant species propagate – spanning multiple temporal layers – the initiative encompasses both long- and short-term activities. The slow processes of cultural adaptation and plant cultivation are researched across several decades, through observation and interaction. At the same time, quick technological and social changes are incorporated through techno-artistic experiments. groWorld's inquiries span three interconnected branches: {sym}, {bio} and {sys}. The {sym} branch looks at how human culture can be infused with vegetal characteristics: in botanical fiction, plant games, active materials, and responsive environments. The {bio} branch is about a direct collaboration with plants, using age-old techniques of foraging and gardening, seeing cities as edible landscapes for humans and non-humans. Finally, {sys} deals with botanically-inspired technologies that can help humans engage with plants beyond the physical level, through sensing, perception and perhaps even communication.

Through a cross-fertilisation of {sym}{bio}{sys}, groWorld merges digital culture with environmental resilience. Both approaches promote empowerment of trans-local communities and are rooted in self-reliant maker-cultures, yet they don’t often mingle. groWorld encourages their interaction by bringing programmers and gardeners, gamers and botanists together on the common ground of the arts. Together, they create hybrids of gardening and technology, or narrative realities where human and vegetal can merge into a unified, hybrid culture.

groWorld sprouted from conversations between artists, engineers and activists at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada in 1999. In the heat of the scorched desert, under the shade of the looming millennium, our futures seemed riddled with insurmountable dilemmas. What should we carry over into the next century? Would we still be the guardians of our own skin, or would we fall under a portfolio of patents, together with rice and ancient medicinal plants? Who will be around for the next ten thousand years – and if humans are, will we be able to walk through jungles, alpine forests and colourful meadows, or will we all live underground as the earth’s surface cracks under uniformly dry deserts and musty swamps? Will the world’s climate become too turbulent and chaotic for humans to survive? Should we be allowed to escape to outer space and if yes, will we reach the stars? All of these questions were about events on a planetary scale that spanned glacial time, and made several of us feel insignificant and helpless: how could any of our individual contributions make a difference? Who isn’t tired of being chastised for not doing enough for the environment, or apathetic when one doesn’t perceive any desired effects in one’s own lifetime? People are thirsty for an experience of positive feedback – a sense that our presence in the world matters and that the effects of our actions can be shared with others, as proposed in the theory of consilience (Wilson 1998) and the practice of urban gardening (Wilson 1999).

It was time to bring conversations down to the human scale and offer participants a direct experience of the effects we can have on our immediate surroundings (in real time and in a circumscribed space). FoAM's collaborators Maja Kuzmanovic, David Tonnessen, Chris Salter and Anke Burger designed a forest of phantasmagoric robo-botanical trees that surrounded a responsive domed shelter – the “growth bunker.” In the warmth of the bunker, visitors were immersed in electro-luminescent light and generative sound, an environment designed to respond to people’s voices and movement. Within this space, the environmental effects of their conscious and unconscious actions became instantly apparent. People could perceive their individual and collective impact on the ambient surroundings directly through their own senses. As in Wim Wenders’ movie Until the End of the World, people became intoxicated by the experience of their actions rippling through the growth and decay of biomorphic light and soundscapes. The interplay between people’s actions and environmental responses encouraged deceleration and engagement. Meditative explorations of ambient changes were substituted for instant gratification.

The empowering effect of interactive media encouraged groWorld collaborators to deepen their investigations into human-computer-plant interactions that would allow people to perceive the effects of their actions in real-time, using their naked senses. After a winding path through gardens and forests, the investigation led to experiments with computer games. Games in which humans could play a plant. The challenge here was to move away from instrumentalising plants to empathising with them – experiencing the sensations of “being” a plant, rather than “doing” things to plants (as gardeners or designers). As there are no definitive translation mechanisms (yet) to ask a tree or a herb what being a plant really means, the game designers relied on their own observations and imagination. Being a plant meant reaching a state of mind where stillness, slowness and beauty provided energy and incentive to playfully explore, give up control, grow and decay, create and destroy, perhaps even experience viriditas through human fingertips. Games could become a way for humans to exercise their forgotten vegetal reflexes and experience the delight of patience, growth, diffusion, ambient perception, chemical communication, and a continuous quest for light and moisture.

Making the inward-oriented beauty of plant growth compelling in the context of computer games is challenging. FoAM members Dave Griffiths, Nik Gaffney, Theun Karelse and Lina Kusaite collaborated with game designers Tale of Tales to explore what it means to play a plant on a computer screen. To investigate whether there could be consilience between game design, botany and permaculture, the team prototyped a series of mini-games. One approach involved connecting physical plants to sensors so that information about their physical environment would influence the “weather” in a digital garden. In another prototype, plant collaboration (as understood in permaculture) was used as a starting point for developing game mechanics.

Having experimented with the “first-plant perspective” in a range of prototypes, attention shifted back to “playing with plants,” this time in the collaborative spaces of online social networks. Germination X is groWorld's attempt to introduce plants as guides in creating self-sustaining digital gardens. Dave Griffiths and Lina Kusaite designed a prototype in which players are guided by autonomous “plant spirits” to design virtual permaculture guilds, where diverse plants work together to grow and propagate.

Besides serious games with an educational purpose, other promising avenues for plant gaming might include the aesthetics and poetics of plant communication, sensing, growth and movement. Until we are able to convince a plant to design a game about its own life, the number of possible viewpoints, backstories and gameplay is limited only by our imagination.

“I effuse my flesh in eddies

and drift in lacy jags

I bequeath myself in the dirt

to grow from the grass I love

If you want me again, look for me

under your boot-soles”

– Walt Whitman

Designing games where humans play a plant based on a human understanding of plants can sound rather paradoxical. To take this incongruity to its extremes, groWorld devised a creative experiment which folds human interpretation of plants back on itself. Patabotany is a hybrid between ethnobotany (the study of cultural, spiritual and medical uses of plants) and pataphysics, the science of imaginary solutions (Jarry, 2001). Patabotany poses the question: what if the metaphors, cultural rituals and myths associated with plants could be discovered in their physical properties – in their shapes, colours and functions? What if mushrooms were in fact aliens attempting to communicate with humans, what organs could mushrooms and human grow, to improve reciprocal communication? If red roses were able not just to symbolise love, but write love letters through chemotropism, guided by lovers’ pheromones? Patabotany is a cross-pollination between myth and reality: it is an interpretation of interpretation, an abstraction of abstraction, emerging at the edges of poetry, magic and biology. Patabotany subverts the contemporary drive to instrumentalise culture and nature in economic or utilitarian constructs. It describes a world where the believable is grafted onto the improbable, where logic is pollinated with a hybrid of sensuality and paradox, where botany and permaculture mutate into an epic of nurturing and seduction in relentless cycles of living and dying.

Pataplants and their worlds are described in the evolving Codex Patabotanicus. In addition to a patabotanical taxonomy, the Codex includes attempts to decipher and translate plants’ atmospheric communication protocols, and describes the pataecology in which the plants exist. Codex Patabotanicus builds on a peculiar and mysterious history of plant books, which includes such curiosities as The Voynich Manuscript (Kennedy 2005, Voynich, Retreived 2011), Parallel Botany (Lionni 1978), Codex Seraphinianus (Serafini 1981) and Tolkien’s plants of Middle Earth (Hazell 2007). The Voynich Manuscript, for example, allegedly written in the 15th or 16th century, contains hundreds of herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological and pharmaceutical drawings and recipes. The manuscript is not written in any known language, and has resisted all attempts at translation; many believe it is a hoax. The plants detailed in this strange manuscript do not match any known species. In a way, the Voynich Manuscript represents a “secret knowledge” of a possibly fictional, possibly alchemical universe, and as such it has engaged and fascinated scholars for hundreds of years. Parallel Botany, a more recent example by a known author, is a collection of faux scientific descriptions of plants, backed by invented mythologies and folktales from around the globe. Parallel plants have the ability to defy perspective, exist as music, or evaporate when touched. There is so much that we don’t know about our vegetal neighbours that even the most scientifically-minded among us have been unsure how much of this work is fact and how much fiction. Patabotany is a similarly entangled milieu, where botanical truths are questioned through juxtapositions with traditional myths and popular beliefs, interspersed with personal dreams and collective speculations.

If patabotany can inject stories and other products of human imagination into botany, could it not also inspire the development of a vegetal mind in humans? FoAM and Six to Start (designers of alternate reality games) are inquiring about what would happen were patabotany to seep back into the reality of everyday life. Can patabotany infuse our habitual routes and routines with a hint of floral imagination? What if patabotany could sprout through email clients and cracks in pavements? People would encounter it online, through games and websites, and in the real world – in gardens, farms, parks and green spaces in cities. Each encounter would serve a different purpose; a game might get players to think about what it is to be a plant, whereas a garden might teach visitors how to grow their own food. By straddling the online and offline world, the realms of gamers and of gardeners, patabotany could engage people in an immersive story and reinvigorate the relationship between people and plants. The story could invoke an alternate reality, infusing everyday life with a possible future in which human and vegetal cultures are each other’s symbionts. Could this symbiosis allow us to viscerally experience ourselves as inseparable from the world, with our feet connected to tangles of roots and soil?

“If the light is sufficient to disclose to us the way of contemplation that lies within ourselves, we may by pursuing it to the end. We may know – not as a mere static dictum but as a winged intuition, carrying an infinitude of significance both for mind and heart – that the One IS the Manifold, and the Manifold IS the One.”

– Agnes Arber

Speculations on human-plant interaction cannot but begin and end in gardens. Gardening can be seen as one of the earliest collaborative efforts between humans and plants, and has been commonly regarded as the cornerstone of early human civilisations. Michael Pollan even considers farming to be a human service to plants, assisting a few species (such as corn or orchids) to dominate over others (Pollan 2002, 2007). Regardless of who is serving whom, gardening can be seen as a mutually beneficial interaction between plants and humans. Natural farming (Fukuoka, 1990) provides valuable exercises in human-plant interdependence: living proof that it is possible to feed humans by feeding the environment. To cultivate a vegetal human culture, gardening should be seen as a cultural phenomenon. Permaculture principles (Holmgren 2002), for example, can be applicable in urban regeneration, economic development and creative endeavours in art, design and technology.

“Horticulture is next to music the most sensitive of fine arts. Properly allied to Architecture, garden making is as near as a man may get o the Divine function…”

– Maurice Hewlet

Gardening can be a purposeful cultivation of plants as food and medicine. It can also be a meditative activity that allows us to contemplate the effects of our actions on our immediate surroundings. Alternatively, gardening can become a collective endeavour that brings communities together to resist monocultural hegemony. Gardening is humanity’s most direct hand-to-leaf interaction with living plants. In groWorld, gardening has taken on all of these dimensions – growing food, meditating, and building a community; whether through growing plants on windowsills, rooftops, back-yards, church yards, unused lots or public parks. To create urban gardens groWorld follows permaculture principles, specifically focusing on the techniques of permaculture guilds and companion planting (Holmgren, 2002). These techniques are based on creating permanent, self-sustaining gardens through “collaborations” between individual plants. Guild gardening is advantageous in urban settings, where it is often needed to grow a variety of species in small spaces and keep scarce soil fertile for as long as possible. In Brussels, Lina Kusaite's experiments focused on medicinal plant guilds that can thrive on roofs and balconies, including native fennel, wormwood and nasturtium. In Amsterdam, Cocky Eek and Theun Karelse have engaged local communities in redesigning church gardens to form edible parks, centred around hardy native plants – the guilds of raspberries, marigolds, garlic and many other common edibles.

groWorld’s vision of urban gardening doesn’t stop at fenced-off back-yards and allotments, but sees cities as continuous green passages from industrial to vegetal culture. For nearly ten years, groWorld’s gardeners have been spreading and harvesting native flora in industrial zones, city centres and abandoned lots – in Belgium, the Netherlands, UK and Australia. We share the views of Urbanibalism that “the city should become a natural source of food and a place for diverse forms of life that grow autonomously from any planned city ecology. The city becomes a spontaneous convivium” (Maas and Pasquinelli, Retrieved 2010).

Even though postindustrial cities have the potential to become spontaneous conviviums, consumer culture, privatisation of public spaces and propagation of indoor entertainment have taken many a citizen away from the nurturing freshness of urban gardens and parks. Some city-grown children don’t know that meat was once the living flesh of animals; many urbanite adults don’t recognise edible plants growing under their feet. To assist these people with spotting and sharing information about food sources that surround them, FoAM in Amsterdam developed Boskoi, an interactive survival guide for urban foragers equipped with mobile phones. The Boskoi app displays edible species in an area, accompanied by expert advice from seasoned gardeners and botanists. With the assistance of Boskoi, even a novice forager can stroll through the city after work and casually collect herbs, fruits or vegetables to add to their dinner.

For more dedicated plant enthusiasts, interested not just in foraging but also seeding edible urban landscapes, groWorld’s collaborators organise workshops in seed-balling (or seed bombing), urban gardening and guerrilla grafting. Seed-balls, so named by Masanobu Fukuoka (Fukuoka 1990), are small balls made of red or brown clay, vegetal compost, and a carefully picked mixture of seeds. Planting the balls does not require digging, which makes them perfect vehicles for spreading in the city. groWorld’s seedballs contain seeds that can become “weedscapes” of native plants: able to replenish and purify the soil in urban and industrial zones, and edible for urban dwellers – both humans and animals. A step further in plant propagation is the ancient skill of grafting, which involves interchanging parts of related or similar plant species. In orchards, grafting is nowadays rarely applied on adult plants, but all young fruit trees are grafts of a good fruit-bearing type onto a plant selected for its roots, which results in a hybrid that combines the best of both. FoAM in Amsterdam began experiments with grafting wild and domesticated apples in the city, aiming to increase urban biodiversity and opportunities for pollination. Not so long ago urban gardening was an activity relegated to marginalised subcultures and immigrant communities. Nowadays, large numbers of the urban population grow at least some herbs in their kitchens. Since the financial crisis of 2008 and increasingly unpredictable environmental upheavals, there is much demand for and attention to growing food in cities. Some of groWorld's gardening activities that were ignored by cultural institutions in the early 2000s have recently become mainstream culture. Avant Gardening prophesied that “Gardening will emerge as one of the major economic forces of resistance” (Wilson 1999). A little over a decade later, urban gardening is practiced not just by the members of the “cultural resistance” but by people from all walks of life – ranging from the American first lady, uprooted people in European refugee centres, to school children in Australia and overpopulated favelas in South America. There is hope at the bottom of Pandora's Box…

“Arranging flowers is arranging ourselves. We're all flowers.”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

From digging for gnarly sprouts in parched deserts to battling vigorous tangles in dense forests, from building huts on mountain peaks to hoisting vertical gardens in sprawling urban jungles; humans have always had curious relationships with plants. Plants are so familiar, yet so alien. Entangling, entwining and emerging through cracks in pavements and doors blown open by turbulent weather. The uncertainty of our times maximises the porous edges and minimises rigid borders between humans and plants, enabling us to compost overstressed social and economic systems and to cultivate fresh, budding moments of life.

“Suddenly I realise

That if I stepped out of my body I would break

Into blossom”

– James Wright

With thanks for the contributions from Alkan Chipperfield, Nik Gaffney, Dave Griffiths, Adrian Hon, Theun Karelse, Lionel Billiet and Lina Kusaite.

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• groWorld is an initiative of FoAM. http://fo.am/groworld
• PARN. http://fo.am/parn
• LIREC. http://lirec.org
• gRig. http://fo.am/grig
• Six to Start. http://www.sixtostart.com
• Tale of Tales. http://www.taleoftales.com
• Stevie Wishart. http://www.steviewishart.com
• Urbanibalism. http://www.urbanibalism.org
• Loop.ph. http://loop.ph
• Metabolicity. http://www.metabolicity.com
• Biomodd. http://www.biomodd.net
• Phoef. http://fo.am/phoef
• Un-Fiction. http://un-fiction.blogspot.com
• Art in the Biotech Era. http://www.eaf.asn.au/biotech/biotech.html
• fluxus. http://www.pawfal.org/fluxus
• The Game is Up! http://vooruit.be/en/serie/44
• Maki Ueda. http://ueda.nl