A variety of activities will be served from FoAM's kitchen, including a workshop on scent extraction by Maki Ueda, presentation on food-pairing by Bernard Lahousse, Kitchen-radio by Constant, a conversation about 'public diets' of Brussels-based arts organisations, a tea-party & feral-trade hamper raffle by Kate Rich, ending on the 22nd of November with the grand "Open Sauces, On food and coding", where we will attempt to demystify the production, distribution, presentation and consumption of food in a degustation dinner, with matched artists, scientists and other trans-local food enthusiasts.

Narrative Strategies, workshop participation as a part of gRig, 28-29 June, Linz, Austria

Conference participation, including paper presentation "Cursory Speculations on HPI (Human Plant Interaction)" by Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney.

http://www.isea2008singapore.org/

Electronic Arts in Turbulent Weather

The Luminous Green panel is an open discussion forum, in which we will examine the five themes of ISEA2008 under the lens of environmental and social turbulence.

From Cyberpunk to Cyberbotany: After the Research Gathering with Angelo Vermeulen, FoAM and the Guild for Reality Integrators and Generators invite you to cultivate the vegetal side of your mind... From dystopia to heterotopia, from human-machine to human-plant interactions, a post-cyberpunk eve for retro-techno-pagans, archaic revivalists, lab-witches, eco-nomads, pre & post millenial cultists.

Recipes for Disaster
A feasibility dinner for sustained sustenance...

Artists, cultural organisations and members of the assorted cultural proletariat are invited to a potluck dinner and round table conversation on nutrition, catering and survival in the art world and the cultural sphere.

A hands-on workshop involving cranks, solar robots, citrus batteries and the nature of reality for students at the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

In a time when energy use and electronic waste production should be rapidly decreasing, can media artists comfortably use arsenals of computers and their peripherals in the name of art?

FoAM, Nadine and OKNO concluded the .x-med-k. series with a workshop exploring media and media technologies as an ecosystem, deeply networked.

Phase II of the Fabbing workshop. During the workshop we continued building the RepRap desktop fabricator. (Also see Fabbing I)

On the Mutamorphosis conference, FoAM presented the paper "groWorld HPI" and participated in the debates on "Synaesthesia", "Smart Materials" and "Art and Science in Media Education".

http://www.mutamorphosis.org/

A preliminary meeting to get a general sense of people's involvement and interests in the Guild's work.

Bartaku's 'PhoEf' exposé at the 23rd European Photovoltaic Solar Energy and Conference and Exhibition'

Session nr.: 5BO.
Feria de Valencia, Auditorium 3a - Valencia, Spain
http://www.photovoltaic-conference.com

PhoEf aims to provide insight about aims and aesthetics of converting solar radiation into electricity. More particularly, the opportunities that photovoltaic technologies provide to artistic creations, performances, and interventions that make use of electrical energy.

http://x4.fo.am/phoef/

Semiotics of the Kitchen Radio (Verbindingen/Jonctions 11.4)
by Constant

Saturday November 15, 15:00 (doors open: 14:30)
FoAM, Koolmijnenkaai 30-34 Brussels and on-line

With Martha Rosler’s classic performative alphabet 'Semiotics of the Kitchen' as a point of departure, Constants' design collective Open Source Publishing (OSP) presents a live radio broadcast from the FoAM kitchen. Experimenting with the displacement of multi sensory experiences, they reflect on the preparation and distribution of food as metaphor, structure, vocabulary and rhythm.

Edible Perfume is a hands-on workshop on extracting and composing aromas & flavours, inspired by the concept of flavour pairing.

The workshop is led by Maki Ueda (http://scent-lab.blogspot.com/), assisted by Nik Gaffney (FoAM).

A natural smell is often extracted from a material using chemistry techniques for retrieving essential oils, such as distillation, ethanol extraction, or oil maceration. In the Edible Perfume workshop, these techniques will be adopted in the kitchen.

Bernard Lahousse, an internationally renown food scientist, one of the founders of CREAX Food (http://creaxfood.com/) & consultant to creative chefs worldwide (in Belgium: L'air du temps, Oud Sluis, In de wulf, Kasteel Withof,...) will prepare a nutritious lecture on food pairing, molecular gastronomy and new kitchen techiques. Bernard will talk about the concepts of coupling and replacing ingredients based on their chemical components. He will explain how to use his food pairing website (http://www.foodpairing.be) and introduce "The Flemish Primitives" (http://www.theflemishprimitives.com/).

Kate Rich will introduce Feral Trade (http://feraltrade.org), serve ferally traded tea & coffee & conduct a raffle of the Feral Trade Hamper, a seasonal selection of goods sourced and transported over social networks.

FoAM and the Guild for Reality Integrators and Generators invite you to a synaesthetic dinner, to jointly sample, celebrate and debate the future of food.

Food is a nutritious and delectable product of our reciprocal, sustaining relationship with the environment. It is also one of the oldest cultural expressions, rooted in hospitality and sharing. As the gastronome Brilliat-Savarin noted three centuries ago, “the discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.”

Rethinking Food #2

FoAM, a cross-disciplinary, trans-local laboratory and the artist Kate Rich complicate the equation of food miles. This meal is prepared with products and ingredients freighted in from around the globe, in the spare luggage space of social and cultural travellers.

Feral Trade is a grocery business trading outside commercial systems. Goods hitchhike on other sources of movement, often using the art world as an energy source, harnessing the surplus freight potential of the many journeys logged by artists, curators and audiences to move grocery items intercity.

A supper for pathologic appetites will be served 19:00h on 18 October 2009 in the W.G kunst, a former sanatorium as part of the Wilhelmina Gasthuis hospital complex, Amsterdam.

As a guest of the international gastronomic event The Flemish Primitives, FoAM will present a sneak preview of the Open Sauces book.

http://www.theflemishprimitives.com/

Launch of the long awaited Open Sauces book & the Open Sauces Cooking Club.

Design the Future for (Art)Craft

Does craft have a future? Craft sounds old-fashioned, but is getting hip at the same time! Numerous initiatives put handmade design in the spotlight, young talents go for old techniques and traditions.

On the 8th of December, thriving cases shall inspire policy makers, education institutions, organisations and designers to reflect and discuss, in a cross over of cultural heritage, design, education and creative economies.

Delicious kitchen gems by FoAM will accompany the participants through the day and inspire through the taste buds.

The workshop organized by Filemon at the youth center " A place to live" in Laeken and guided by Bram (Aifoon) and Rasa (FoAM)
was introducing different tastes and sounds by association methods.
The children involved created visual expressions of different edible ingredients and sounds that surround us. They correlated tastes and sounds in order to create an imaginary edible neighborhood.

The 7 young participants kids started their first session blind folded, smelling and tasting different vegetable extracts and ingredients.

During the Days of Sustainability (10-14 October 2011), the Flemish Government invites FoAM to host a debate lunch about the future of food - Voedsel 2.0.

The format of this "open sauce world cafe lunch", is an exploration of a facilitated discussion paired with the open sauce concept.
After an introductory talk by Maja Kuzmanovich on alternative food, a three course menu will be served to the participants. The dishes are created to match the discussions, using taste, texture, scent, temperature and colour to encourage the conversations.

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How do you relate to global crises in a way that is not demotivating? The discussion about our future is dominated by appeals for austerity and reduction. This is not a very inspiring message as it focuses on negative aspects of society. It is hard to see a positive revolution on a global scale, based on negative arguments. Instead we should focus on positive changes that inspire everyone. This debate should be dominated by the possibility of increasing the quality of life.

In 2001 I found a book by mathematician Julien C. Sprott called “Strange attractors: creating patterns in chaos”. The book described the mathematics behind a class of fractals called strange attractors. In the book, Sprott presents a computer program which can search for strange attractors by trying many randomly generated equations until one was discovered which met certain criteria. The results were clouds of points which formed interesting organic shapes. each set of equations created a unique set of points.

The core question of this research is: by what mechanisms can humanity become more conscious of and potentially change, it’s relationship to reality?