xmedk

How to set up a rooftop garden...

The what, why and how of rooftop gardens: an introduction by ibic.be

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

Two FoAM & gRig presentations at the Data Ecologies workshop "On growing of worlds: whole systems in turbulent environments" by Maja Kuzmanovic and "What am I doing rendering fractals?" by Steven Pickles.

http://www.timesup.org/laboratory/DataEcologies/

FoAM and the Guild for Reality Integrators and Generators organised a talk by Adrian Hon, on Alternate Reality Games (ARG), collaborative fiction, puppetmasters, backstories and other tools for playful reality generation.

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/

Presentation of FoAM & gRig by Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney at the School of Art, Design and Media, Nanyang Technical University in Singapore

PhoEf is a research project exploring the essence, use and abuse of the photovoltaic effect - the conversion of light in electrical energy - in the realms of science, industry, technology and the arts. PhoEf emerged from a personal, transversal flight through the interconnected worlds behind and around photovoltaics; a technology based on A.E. Becquerel's 1839 observation of the photovoltaic effect. PhoEf is embedded in a rich, multidisciplinary, historical context.

In progress: http://libarynth.org/luminous/phoef

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

In a five day long hands-on workshop, we began building a 3D printer, based on the open source RepRap specifications, adapted to suit the needs of the participants. The week will consist of putting together a complex puzzle of several thousand components, calibrating the hardware and the software and towards the end of the week, hopefully experimenting with printing with different materials - from plastics, to sugar, to whatever else we can lay our hands on.

The Soft-wear symposium, workshop and open lab offered a glimpse into the world of active materials, that form the foundation of novel design paradigms. Soft-wear is a place where electronics meets the traditional crafts of weaving, dyeing and knitting fibres and threads, to produce materials that can respond to touch, temperature, light and other external stimuli. They are used as tangible interfaces and displays, where the edge between materials and media rapidly dissolves.

Learning what it means to make a dynamic and immersive responsive environment was the goal that this workshop attempted to achieve. The workshop took place in a lab setting, working with small groups of artists. The participants learned how to use and modify FoAM's responsive media systems (built with Max/MSP and PD), thereby developing their own responsive objects or environments. Particular attention was devoted to the translation between real-world input (acquired through sensing technologies) and the audiovisual media output.