FoAM - Entangling

Alternate Reality Games: tutorial

maja — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:52:30 +0000

Start: 2011-10-04 10:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2011-10-05 18:00 Europe/Brussels

FoAM in Brussels hosts a two-day tutorial on creating Alternate Reality Games, facilitated by Adrian Hon & Matt Wieteska of Six to Start.

Where: FoAM, Koolmijnenkaai 34, B-1080 Brussels, Belgium
When: 4th and 5th October 2011, 10:00 - 18:00
Costs: 30 EUR per person (contribution for 2 meals and materials)

As places are limited, if you'd like to participate please send a short bio and your motivation to info@fo.am by the 28th September 2011.

||||||||||||| About the tutorial:

This ARG tutorial explores the nuts and bolts of designing and running an Alternate Reality Game, with a specific focus on storytelling and real world interaction. The tutorial provides case studies of previous ARGs (including those Six to Start worked on) and includes exercises on developing story worlds, collaborative storytelling, and community formation.

"An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_reality_game

||||||||||||| About the facilitators:

Six to Start is an award-winning online games company, specialising in games that cross the boundary between the real world and the virtual world. They've worked with clients including Disney, Channel 4, Penguin Books, Warner Music, the BBC, and the National Maritime Museum to design, build and run online experiences.

Their games and experiences focus on play, storytelling, and social interaction. Six to Start believes that by combining them, they can create experiences that are more memorable, more powerful, and more accessible than anything that’s come before.

http://www.sixtostart.com/

This tutorial is part of the European project PARN:
http://x4.fo.am/parn

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

FOODPRINTS

lina — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 15:17:34 +0000

FOODPRINTS;
A biologically-centered toolkit for a resilient Stockholm

2010 has been declared ‘The year of International biodiversity’, and also a year in which Stockholm is ‘Europe’s green capital’. With these two celebrations, ‘Foodprints’ explores how the discipline of biomimicry can promote urban food resilience and opportunities for biodiversity to flourish in urban developments. There is an inherent relationship between the city and how food arrives on our plates. We want to investigate how to create ‘resilient’ cities that mimic nature’s ecosystems, where all the elements are interactive, abundant in feed-back loops, responsive, engaging, conducive to life, and always looking to reach the best use of resources. Our goal will be to bring forward a food culture, inspired by these ecosystems, through creation of a biologically-centered toolkit which we will apply on the urban visions for Norra Djurgarden area of Stockholm. Through creating such a tool, the project aims to be long term, continuous and inviting, applicable to other future schemes.

We will thread together both scientific, futuristic, artistic and sensory perspectives to review our urban ecology and the way we feed ourselves. Food will become our communication device, and we will present our explorations in a ‘maltid’ designed around the senses and experience. We hope that ‘reaction to the meal’ and proposals, can inspire invited guests involved in the development plans for the Norra Djurgarden scheme, to create food system resilience as part of the sustainable planning process. In turn, ‘Foodprints’ will collaborate with a variety of disciplines in a very creative process; science and biology with the built envi- ronment and experiential design, creating a multi-disciplinary cocktail of collaborations and introducing this strong ‘community’ of solutions to the city.

More information:
www.innovativkultur.se

This project is kindly made possible through Innovativ Kultur, City of Stockholm. The funding call focused on bio-inspired projects.

Contact Project Leaders:
Anna Maria Orru
Johan Zetterquist
E: info@scene-thinking.com

Splinterfields : re/touches

maja — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 10:03:11 +0000

Start: 2010-12-17 14:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2010-12-19 00:00 Europe/Brussels

workshop organised by Constant

In the weekend of the 17th-19th of December we will look at the act of repairing. We focus on textile and clothing, looking how something is woven, stitched together, consisting of threads and layers, and how these structures break, wear and tear with a body inside.

The Friday afternoon from 14 to 17h Abla who works as a volunteer in the Vaartkapoen repair and retouche atelier (http://www.vaartkapoen.be/socecnaai.htm) will show us the work they do. She will also show a technique for repairing.

In the weekend we will alternate looking at this wear and tear, share stories, exhibit images... If you want to enroll and for more details on this programme
please contact: wendy [attt] constantvzw.org

Repairing requires an understanding of the item you want to work on. How far would you go in repairing coveted item of clothing? What parts of clothes are fragile? Where does an item of clothing wear and tear? what are fragile points? What is the relationship with your body and your activity?

Repairing prolongs the life of a manufactured item, something not really stimulated in these times of fast consumption. This workshop is meant to let us learn repairing techniques from each other coming together is a way of transmitting knowledge. Techniques which were previously more taught in a family context, because clothes were rare thus making them precious because. We would like to talk about this subject and work together. Bring your favourite reparations How did you learn to repair? Do you have favourite methods? Did you learn specific techniques for particular items of clothing?

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipe...

images:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/foam/sets/72157625897643550/

— -

Splinter Fields is an initiative of Brussels based organizations active within the fields of technological and media arts (Constant, FoAM, nadine and OKNO) to foster collaborative, agile and flexible learning. The programme of workshops, study-groups and field-tests is open to artists, designers, technologists and other generalists curious to explore tools and mindware for experiments in contemporary culture and daily life.

Tipping Point

nik — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 17:55:39 +0000

Start: 2010-01-25 09:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2010-01-26 20:00 Europe/Brussels

FoAM will take part in the TippingPoint event held at the EESC.

"TippingPoint aims to ‘harness the power of the imagination to help stabilise the climate’. We offer a range of activities centred on exposing creative artists to the enormous challenges of climate change; at the heart of this lies a series of meetings involving very high quality, intense dialogue between artists, scientists and others close to the heart of the issue. These encounters provide a chance to explore the broader cultural challenges precipitated by climate change."

http://www.tippingpoint.org.uk/

AIA lecture Betwixt Realities

maja — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:32:35 +0000

Start: 2010-04-19 18:30 Europe/London

End: 2010-04-19 20:30 Europe/London

As a part of the Spring Lecture Series of the American Institute of Architects, Maja Kuzmanovic is invited by Anna-Maria Orru to give a lecture about FoAM's work in the field of sustainability and ecologically inspired creative practices.

The aim of this lecture series is to expose architects and designers to the field of multi-disciplinary sustainable practice through innovative thinking and solutions to our environmental and social challenges. What makes 2010 particularly appropriate for this topic is that there is a heightened necessity towards sustainable design and ecological responsibility post the recent COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
http://www.aiauk.org/

The lecture series is organised by Anna Maria Orru, creator of SCENE - thinking, whose aim is to bring together various disciplines around all the innovation on sustainability and systems thinking. http://www.scene-thinking.com/

gRig at Pecha Kucha

maja — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 16:53:12 +0000

Start: 2009-11-06 20:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2009-11-06 23:00 Europe/Brussels

A group of 6 representatives from FoAM and nadine present the Guild for Reality Integrators and Generators, its people & activities and announces the birth of Resilients.

http://pechakucha.architempo.net/

Corrupted C#n#m#

maja — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:25:09 +0000

Start: 2009-11-20 00:00 US/Eastern

End: 2009-12-20 00:00 US/Eastern

Corrupted C#n#m# is Angelo Vermeulen's new solo exhibition in the US after his Biomodd [ATH1] project at the Aesthetic Technologies Lab in Athens, Ohio in 2007. Corrupted C#n#m# is an experimental cinema project that explores the physicality of digital media, and draws upon the phenomena of data corruption and data forensics. It's an artistic inquiry into the notion of the material 'body’ in both the digital and the biological realm. Video images stored on different types of digital media are manipulated and disrupted through various biological processes. In a series of highly aggressive setups, storage media such as hard drives, memory cards and digital tape are exposed to bacteria, fungi, algae, insects etc. The damaged video data are then meticulously recovered by data forensic techniques, and by transplanting affected components such as hard drive platters into ‘uninfected’ hardware units. In an iterative process, the retrieved data are exposed over and over again to the disruptive biological processes. During this 'degradation' process, data errors emerge as faulty lines and pixels, broken images, color shifts and other artefacts.

Source material is surgical footage stored on former generation media such as VHS, Betamax and CD-ROM. Using and (re-)digitizing found footage is integral to the project and draws upon notions of instability and conservation. The use of surgical video creates a layered narrative of shifting embodiments and translations: the dissected human body ‘contained’ on older and analog media is digitized on magnetic hard drive platters, and subsequently reworked by other biological bodies in a non-linear, dialectic process. The end result is a reconfigured and mutated body.

The exhibition consists of an ongoing installation setup surrounded by projections and video screens. In the installation, work benches with sequential series of hacked hard drives are the central focus. Biological experimentation takes place in the same installation, and is an ongoing process during the exhibit. In essence, the project debunks the myth of the so-called immaterial nature of digital art production.

Corrupted C#n#m# is a co-production of FLUXspace (Philadelphia), Sound Image Culture (Brussels), and FoAM (Brussels).

More information:
FLUXspace
3000 North Hope Street
Philadelphia, PA 19133, US
November 20 – December 20, 2009
Official opening: November 20, 2009
http://www.thefluxspace.org

gRig future directions workshop

maja — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 18:33:20 +0000

Start: 2009-08-28 17:00 GMT+2

End: 2009-08-31 10:00 GMT+2

A workshop looking at various future directions of gRig & gRiggers in Europe and beyond.

Transmediale 2010

nik — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 16:11:06 +0000

Start: 2010-02-05 13:00 GMT+2

End: 2010-02-05 22:00 GMT+2

Maja Kuzmanovic will be taking part in the "Long Conversation" during Transmediale 2010.

http://www.transmediale.de/en/futurity-long-conversation

The Hub Bruxel Co-creation meeting

maja — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:10:53 +0000

Start: 2008-10-20 18:30 Europe/Brussels

End: 2008-10-20 21:30 Europe/Brussels

FoAM is hosting a Co-creation meeting organised by The Hub Bruxel...

Dear friends of the Hub,

We invite you for an evening of open space for meaningful conversations at our next Co-creation meeting, Monday October 20, 18.30 - 21.30.

Will it be your first Co-creation meeting and you are curious to learn more about the Hub? Or have you been with us more often and want to know what the Hub team is doing on finance, space, community building, business development...? Are you interested in meeting people of the Hub Network and want to learn about their projects? Or do you want to share your idea/project with others, brainstorm, get input, develop new ideas...?

If you can answer at least one of these questions with a big YES then you should join us :)

Start: 6.30 pm with snacks and drinks, check-in at 7 with the whole group and then we will open the space for smaller group conversations around around questions and projects that matter to you and to us. We will converge with the whole group around 9pm. End: 9.30 pm

Please let us know if you come by signing up here

Angelo Vermeulen: Translucent Futures

maja — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 13:51:01 +0000

Ubiquitous technology and the attrition of civil rights and privacy

Translucent Futures is an artistic/activist platform initiated by Angelo Vermeulen that deals with the increasing abrasion of civil liberties through ubiquitous, networked, miniaturized technology. Far-reaching use of techniques such as data mining, audiovisual surveillance, automated behavioural analysis, see-through body scanning, DNA profiling etc. is being legislated at a disturbing rate. While governmental and corporate use of these technologies is consistently pushed further into the realms of daily life, the opposite seems to be the case for civilians: technologies can only be used under firm restrictions, or are simply not accessible. Data mining for example is widely used by corporations, while the same activity when carried out by an individual is too easily labelled ‘hacking’.

Regardless of activist groups continuously questioning these issues, the larger public does not appear well-informed. The complexity, diversity and speed of current technological developments can be daunting. Moreover, many of these developments and techniques are applied in secrecy and can hardly be discerned by an untrained eye. This automatically raises vital questions about contemporary civil liberties and the relation between civilians and government. If most techniques only become visible after we transgress the law (e.g. introduced as evidence), should we be worried at all? Or should we rather strive for a fully transparent society based on accountability, where the ‘watchers’ can also be watched, at all times?

Translucent Futures hopes to keep the attention to the imperative problem of eroding civil liberties in modern hi-tech society. The project is set up in close collaboration with FoAM in Brussels and the support of a growing list of other cultural organisations (Nadine, Brussels; The Hub Brussels; Arteconomy etc.). The objective is to combine open collaborative research, multidisciplinary dialogue, artistic practice and activism.

See also:
In progress: http://libarynth.org/translucent_futures
[nadine] research residency: http://212.68.196.116/e/4965
Baudelaire in Cyberspace publication: http://www.angelovermeulen.net/specials.php
Artist's website and blog: http://www.angelovermeulen.net

Bitesize lecture with Catherine Watling and Angelo Vermeulen

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:26:48 +0000

Start: 2005-12-01 20:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2005-12-01 23:00 Europe/Brussels

Our two guests in the last 'bite-size-lecture' for 2005 are experts in artistically grown ecologies and ecologically inspired arts. They talked to us about what happens when you depend on living (or recently living) organisms to become cooperative partners in your artistic process...

Angelo Vermeulen, a visual artist and biologist will present both a recent and an upcoming project, dealing with art and ecology. "Blue Shift [LOG. 1]" is a Darwinian art project that was conceived for the exhibition "Hot ReStrike" earlier this year in De Warande in Turnhout (B). The project was realised together with biologist Luc De Meester from the University of Leuven and engineers from Philips. "Blue Shift [LOG. 1]" is an interactive installation with a living model ecosystem at its core. Using single-cell algae, water fleas, fish and water snails, a compact biological community is set up in the exhibition space. The whole system is designed in such a way that the visitor automatically induces a gradual microevolution of the light-responsive behaviour of the water fleas. Video footage, photos and biological data was used to demonstrate the working process of the project. The concept and first preparations of a new project for the upcoming exhibition "Bruegel Revisited" in 2006 was also presented. It’s a site-specific installation and video project conceived for the Belgian National Botanical Garden in Meise. The projects aims to link historical notions of overconsumption, decadence and diversity to a contemporary ecological and artistic context.

Transcript of Angelo's lecture

Interdisciplinary artist Catherine Watling is working in collaboration with Professor Paul Pearson, Head of the Palaeoclimatology Group at the University of Cardiff Department of Earth, Ocean and Planetary Sciences where she is Artist in Residence. Together they have been working on the development of a series of 3d movies imaged using the Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM), a microscope that allows you to view objects that are no more than one million of a millimetre in size. They have been exploring the possibility of using microscopic foraminifera, imaged using the (ESEM), to explore themes of environmental change and evolution in a series of artworks. These artworks have so far taken the form of 2d stop-frame animations and very short 3d films, some of which were showcased at Fo.am in December 2003. Catherine will be presenting their collaborative work to date and discussing their desires to allow people to experience the wonder of scientific discovery. The work attempts to re-create the hyper-real moment when you view, for the first time, an object that is incomprehensibly small and breathtakingly beautiful under the eye of an Electron Microscope and is also an exploration of the use of the Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope as an artistic tool.

Bitesize symposium On Borders and Edges

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:20:26 +0000

Start: 2004-05-29 00:00 Europe/Brussels

Panel presentations and discussion with Kristina Andersen, Vali Lalioti, Alok Nandi and Sha Xin Wei

What do cocktail-gowns have in common with musical instruments? television with a table-top? Telephones with panoramic views?, topology with sensuality and crocheting with lighting? In our everyday life, probably nothing. In ‘mixed reality’ spaces, a fibre in a dress composes music, a TV screen shines through a table top, a telephone ‘teleports’ players between panoramic landscapes, a topological surface changes dimensions when touched and luminescent wires are crocheted into a wearable wall. Familiar items and conventional gestures function as interfaces between human participants and digital media, where static objects become responsive, alive. In this space, where new media leak from the edges of the screens into the physical world, FoAM and IAK organised an event to bring the emergent field of Mixed Reality (MR) into focus.

Bitesize lecture with Tina Gonsalves and Tom Donaldson

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:06:17 +0000

Start: 2004-10-01 13:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2004-10-01 17:00 Europe/Brussels

Tina Gonsalves and Tom Donaldson, founders of Clutch have created ‘Medulla Intimata’, responsive video jewelery. While wearing the jewelery, software monitors the tone and intonation in the wearer’s voice. These measurements help the software select video sequences appropriate to the emotional state of the wearer. Once selected, the
appropriate piece of video is broadcast to the jewellery using wi-fi technology in real time. This work aims to extend the traditions of video portraiture through embedding video in a worn object of self-expression, namely a necklace, a portrait continuously subject to the wearer’s emotional state. It subverts straight-forward self expression by disclosing intimate details of the wearer,
providing an interpretative rather than a representational commentary. As conversations become more intimate, the jewelery acts less like a shield and more as a wound. The overall character and content of the piece and the video content reflects the overall character and content of the wearer and thus portrays a true living portrait. Medulla Intimata is a subtle public intervention with Tom and Tina wearing the jewellery with in public spaces such as galleries, bars and clubs. As you chat with Tom or Tina, Medulla Intimata distracts, leads and confuses the conversation, leaving both you and the wearer discomforted by its playful but intimate voyeurism. To add to the sense of voyeurism, the video output will also be projected on the walls of the space, allowing others in the room to look-in, judge and resolve that their conversations will be more interesting or more intimate. Despite the informality of the intervention, everyone in the room becomes very aware that they are watching and being watched, judging and being judged, in the process of simply making friends and flirting with strangers.

Over a decade Tina Gonsalves has been using the fluid and malleable medium of video to explore complex emotional landscapes. Works by Tina have been screened at many prestigious international and national festivals and events, and her music videos for labels BMG, EMI, and Festival Mushroom Records have been frequently televised worldwide.

Tom Donaldson is an engineer and inventor. He graduated from Cambridge with a Bachelors in Engineering and Masters in Information Theory. He has worked professionally creating new technologies for a wide variety of corporations. He set up and ran Escape Velocity, an artificial inteligence software company delivering deep personalisation to the mobile industry. He also launched Sessami, the UK’s first mobile entertainment channel, nominated for a WAP award.

entangling

nik — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 15:04:56 +0000