FoAM - Viriditas

Physical and Alternate Reality Narratives (PARN)

maja — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 14:48:17 +0000

The central focus of the PARN project is dealing with the possibilities and problems of creating, presenting and representing narratives in physical space. Storytelling is a fundamental human capacity and is widespread in a variety of cultural forms as well as being one of the ways in which, according to many researchers of learning and awareness, we make sense of the world as we experience and reflect it. As the acclaimed poet Simon Ortiz puts it: „there are no truths, only stories.“

FoAM's role in PARN is research & design of an alternate reality narrative, an emerging story-scape inspired by Masanobu Fukuoka's creed "the ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings":

With the advent of massive urbanisation, labour specialisation and new forms of entertainment, our relationship with nature has become frayed. This relationship can be re-invigorated by straddling the places where nature and culture are most distanced - urban and online environments. With alternate reality narratives (ARN), we look at engaging people in a new kind of immersive story, where nature and culture interact. The story embraces the innovative and participatory capabilities of new technologies, adapted to today's turbulent eco-systems and grounded in the cultural traditions of the past. The ARNs combine a range of contemporary storytelling media with diverse European urban contexts, cultures and people, through a rich story and speculative history.

PARN is coordinated by Time's Up (AT), in collaboration with FoAM (BE), Lighthouse (UK) and Blast Theory (UK). FoAM's additional allies, partners & advisors in PARN are Six to Start (UK), Foamlab (NL), Synfonie (UK) and Tale of Tales (BE).

With the support of the Culture Programme (2007 - 2013) of the European Union and the Flemish Authorities.

groWorld HPI

maja — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:51:10 +0000

Greening

_pix — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:30:12 +0000

A long, long time ago, in the valley of the river Rhine, a young woman by the name of Hildegard von Bingen had a vision. She named it Viriditas. In one of her elated raptures, she experienced the power of a greening force, able to give life, offer solace and regenerate the world. Viriditas is a botanical, vegetative agency present in every being as the 'green side of the mind'. It enables deep connections between individual entities and the living environments around them. Viriditas binds all Earth-bound habitats into a single living system (aka Gaia), whose integral parts are the processes and structures of all beings in the Earth's biosphere.

In the 21st century, the age of climate chaos, wasteful consumerism and unstable political systems, Viriditas could become a guiding ethic for transforming and adapting our individual behaviours, social and economic structures. At FoAM, we began greening our minds by attempting to understand the complex relationships of robust and dynamic eco-systems. We look at morphology and evolution, collaboration and selection, and simulate them in digital eco-systems populated by artificial life-forms. We work with the physical materials and try to mimic the responsiveness of living tissues of plants and animals. Increasing in spatial scale, we began designing eco-systems in gardens on abandoned and unused urban sites. Inspired by holistic design systems such as permaculture and natural farming, we see these sites not only as places for cultivation of plants, but also of human beings.

Moving beyond biomimicry towards 'biokinesis', an activation of Viriditas, we are looking at ways in which human systems and societies could adopt some characteristics of plants - valuing diversity and collaboration over monocultures of competition; approaching problem-solving through whole systems thinking; redesigning industry and economics to adopt more cyclical, regenerative processes. Without forgetting that we live in a technological society, we are seeking to integrate the collectively imagined, organically grown and technologically assembled systems so that they could support, rather than threaten each other. In the process, increasing their robustness, as well as resilience. Oscillating between fiction and experimentation, speculation and actualisation, under the guiding viridian glow of Viriditas, we are slowly clearing the path towards a world that we call 'Luminous Green'. Hoping to end this story as a fairy tale - 'and they all lived happily ever after'.