FoAM - drift

Vlaamse Overheid

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:24:36 +0000

Alkan Chipperfield: Field work at FoAM

maja — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 19:07:20 +0000

"Most of you must have been puzzled on occasion as to what i have been doing here: but I assure you that the most puzzled one has surely been myself..."

More of Alkan's research notes: http://libarynth.org/research_report_alkan

Kate Rich: Fair Trade

maja — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:43:39 +0000

The research takes place at the intersection of several networks: art, information and food. Its express intention is to use tools of art (production/curation) to investigate how our daily grocery products are articulated, packaged, distributed and delivered.

The first aim is to take a sample grocery item or items into deeper investigation, to better understand its provenance. To explore the opposition of Commons to Commodity proposed by transatlantic historian Peter Linebaugh: that the commodity is the opposite of the commons as it conceals human relations except for the money relation, while the product of the commons is filled with human relations including possibly unpleasant ones. The second interest is with the public diet of cultural entities: to assess how food and drink is considered and served in art and cultural organisations, including their relationships with local and international food suppliers and how these relate to the other activities and core concerns of the organisation. Thirdly, the nomad/resident diet: design prescriptions for survival in the art world via nutritional suggestions for the travelling artist - to promote a continuity between knowledge work and the immediate environment it takes place in. In presenting the research in the context of art, the aim is to redraw the coordinates of the common global grocery product - normally rendered invisible in its background role on supermarket or refrigerator shelves - to restore its essential foreignness and its potential as a conduit for other experience.

Related: http://www.feraltrade.org/

Steven Pickles (Pix): An Aesthetic Exploration of Multivariate Polynomial Maps

maja — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:15:44 +0000

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. When I read this I was curious to see what would be the outcome of making small changes to the equations. I made a simple program which did this, and the result was clouds of points which would morph between many different shapes. The program would move through the parameter space randomly and automatically, and so it only showed that there was some kind of continuity to the parameter space which the strange attractors occupied, but it did not provide any useful way of visualising this space. In this research I explore this space, and map it to some degree.

In progress: http://libarynth.org/pix_research_report

drift

nik — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:11:57 +0000

Inspired by Situationists' dérive, drift stands for urban wanderings, psychogeography, alternative mappings, location specific media and other forms of contemporary nomadism. On the ground, in the air, or suspended between the two.

drift

lina — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 16:49:08 +0000