FoAM - bitesize lectures

D+1

christina — Wed, 18 May 2011 12:27:37 +0000

Start: 2011-06-03 19:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2011-06-03 21:00 Europe/Brussels

D plus one
“the random movement of particles suspended in a fluid”
Lecture Performance with Fanny Zaman

What do we observe?

The setting is the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. ECX is the current centre of control of the newly installed Ethiopian market system. Ethiopia today ranks n°5 in the world list of emerging countries by producing primary physical goods (commodities).

Stories, rumours and attitudes

In Ethiopia we started a series of observations, encounters and dialogues with people connected in some way or another with the new founded ECX and the Ethiopian economy. We were looking for relations between macro statements (about a country, a population, a group) and micro experience.
The Lecture Performance travels 5 fragments. They are presented in a European context. The presentation challenges our self-awareness and our (in)capacity to critically evaluate the things we perceive.

What do we observe?

for the accompanying pdf please look here:
http://libarynth.org/d_1

Bite Size Lecture by Desire Machine Collective

maja — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 12:02:19 +0000

Start: 2010-07-16 17:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2010-07-16 20:00 Europe/Brussels

As a part of our AEGIS residency programme (http://x4.fo.am/aegis), Desire Machine Collective will spend some time at FoAM in Brussels this summer. This Bite Size Lecture will include a presentation of their work, spiced up with a taste of Assamese cuisine.

http://www.desiremachinecollective.net/

Collaborating since 2004 as Desire Machine Collective, Sonal Jain and Mriganka Madhukaillya work through film, video, photography, and multimedia installations. Assuming their name and theoretical disposition from Anti-Oedipus, a seminal text from 1972 by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, Desire Machine seeks to disrupt the neurotic symptoms that arise from constricting capitalist structures with healthier, schizophrenic cultural flows of desire and information. As the French philosopher Michel Foucault put it, Anti-Oedipus is an introduction to a non-fascist life. In similar fashion, through their practice Jain and Madhukaillya confront the many forms of fascism that lead to violence and injustice, both regionally in Guwahati, Assam and around the world.

Along with Desire Machine Collective, they have initiated Periferry 1.0, an alternative artist-led space situated on the M. V. Chandardinga, a ferry docked on the Brahmaputra River in Guwahati. Periferry1.0 serves as a laboratory in flux for generating innovative practices in contemporary film and video. The space and its activities also provide a connective platform
for dialogue across artistic, scientific, technological, and ecological modes of production and knowledge.

Sonal Jain is a fine arts graduate from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. She subsequently became faculty member in Communication Design at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad from 1999 to 2000. Mriganka Madhukaillya is a physics graduate from Fergusson College in Pune and completed his post graduate work in film and video at the National Institute of Design in 2003. Along with Desire Machine Collective, they have initiated Periferry 1.0, an alternative artist-led space situated on the M. V. Chandardinga, a ferry docked on the Brahmaputra River in Guwahati. Periferry1.0 serves as a laboratory in flux for generating innovative practices in contemporary film and video. The space and its activities also provide a connective platform for dialogue across artistic, scientific, technological, and ecological modes of production and knowledge.

Related: Residency of Bartaku & Christina Stadlbauer at Periferry: http://x4.fo.am/periferry

Food pairing & Molecular Gastronomy

maja — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 16:28:03 +0000

Start: 2008-11-14 19:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2008-11-14 21:30 Europe/Brussels

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/). The talk will be accompanied by a tasting of various examples of food-pairing, including pralines by Dominique Persoone (http://www.dominiquepersoone.be/).

There are limited places for this event so please RSVP before the 10th of November if you would like to attend. Best to contact us by email on bxl[at]fo[dot]am

2668001620_89cd48c46d_o

lina — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 12:31:25 +0000

Bitesize lecture with Brian Degger

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:31:30 +0000

Start: 2005-06-14 00:00 Europe/Brussels

Brian Degger's Stories from the flesh factory

Whilst building my art practice, i have been working at a fish factory, this has given me various inspirations for bioart projects Working with fish calls into question sustainability of harvesting
these organisms. In the case of Orange Roughy, a deepsea fish, we know more about how to catch them than their basic biology. My two drives are making the "barely visible obvious" and beauty through decay" I undertake this through re-purposing waste streams and utilizing fish as media. I am intrigued by the relationship between human and underwater ecosystems. This talk will cover past art visual art projects and further directions into bioart. In particular i will discuss a project BioOceanBalls that i wish to develop with Foam.

I am a formally trained biotechnologist, achieving a PhD(2002) in the production of recombinant fish growth factors. I have became intrigued by the growing synergies between art and science, have developing a practice in time-based video art, and am moving towards realization of a number of bio-art projects. In 2004 I undertook an attachment with Blast Theory (UK) being involved in the production of a mixed reality game/performance titled 'I like Frank' for the Adelaide Fringe Festival. I also attended a master classes by video artist Craig Walsh (Au) and, John Cleater of the Builders Republic(US). Although not formally trained in new media I have become familiar with this area through attendance of a number of international Art&Science events including the Biennale of Perth 2002&2004, Converge, Adelaide 2002, and Transmediale, Berlin 2005. My video/ image based work has been exhibited in Adelaide (SALA 2003, 2004 and Downtown Arts Space, 2004), Melbourne (Drivers Lane, 2004)
and Dublin (Epoch, Meeting Square Temple Bar, 2005). The current project, BioOceanBalls, draws on my fascination for fish, and the possibility of reseeding underwater environments.

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 Bert Schiettecatte

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 18:12:14 +0000

Start: 2004-07-09 13:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2004-07-09 15:00 Europe/Brussels

Lunch, presentation and discussion about Bert's project 'Audiocubes'.

http://www-ccrma.stanford.edu/~bschiett/audiocubes/index.html

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.

Bitesize lecture with Sha Xin Wei and Harry Smoak

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:59:05 +0000

Start: 2004-11-11 17:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2004-11-11 18:00 Europe/Brussels

A lecture on Media Choreography and responsive architectures at the Topological Media Lab in Atlanta and Montreal.

Bitesize lecture with Joost Rekveld

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:53:41 +0000

Start: 2004-11-26 18:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2004-11-26 19:00 Europe/Brussels

Joost Rekveld (1970) has been making abstract films and kinetic installations since 1991, originally inspired by the idea of a music for the eye. Through his invention of various animation techniques he became interested in the prehistory of moving image media, especially the technological history of perspective, optics, motion capture and scanning. These themes became the basis for a number of films and installations. His recent work is moving away from film towards more architectural and theatrical forms of articulated light.
His side activities include teaching at Artscience (formerly known as the Interfaculty Image and Sound) in The Hague, and at the masters programme MediaTechnology at Leiden University. Incidentally he is active as a curator, most notably he curated the conference and film programme of Sonic Light 2003, a festival dedicated to light art in various media.

Last fall he organized the event '4D in the filmmuseum' in response to an open invitation from the Dutch Filmmuseum in Amsterdam. Taking as a point of departure the body of scientific and technological in the collections of the Dutch Filmmuseum, he put together a programme consisting of an extensive selection of scientific and experimental films, a series of six artists presentations (including historical figures such as Otto Piene and Yona Friedman), and an exhibition which was being updated weekly.
This programme was an investigation into the heritage of the utopic, modernist body of ideas that was developed at the time when film was still a new medium. For Joost Rekveld putting together this event was a kind of 'public research' triggered by the recent shift in his work towards more spatial forms and scientific sources of inspiration.
He wil present some of the backgrounds to '4D in the Filmmuseum', referring to the development of his own work and he will explain the continuity between his abstract films, his light installations and recent theatrical collaborations. He will show some of his sources of inspiration such as the history of optics, crystallography and biology, and discuss his embryonic future projects.

www.lumen.nu/rekveld

Bitesize lecture with Sonia Cillari

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:50:22 +0000

Start: 2004-11-05 17:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2004-11-05 18:00 Europe/Brussels

Investigation of spatial learning: 3D Modeling Theory applied to Real-time Systems

Sonia Cillari, a digital architect currently based in the Netherlands, presented her electronic environments and discussed theoretical investigations into human perception, non-linear movement and participatory architecture. At the same time, FoAM influenced the sensory perception of the lecture, by subtly stimulating the visitors' taste buds.

Sonia investigates the use of evolutionary and interactive digital processes in the design of dynamic and real-time systems for 'Performance Space Expression'. 'Against the rationalist notion of objective space' includes the experimental study of alternative sensory and perceptual mechanisms in immersive and electronically augmented environments for performance and collaborative design.

Quantum Mechanics Principle: An objective reality of matter doesn't exist. What exists is a reality continuously created by presence and observations of man.

Bitesize lecture with Danica Kuzmanovic

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 17:08:37 +0000

Start: 2004-12-17 12:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2004-12-17 20:00 Europe/Brussels

Psychological needs, behaviours and communicative co-existence

Danica Kuzmanovic, a psychologist from Croatia closed FoAM's public programming for 2004, with an informal workshop on issues of communication in diverse collaborative groups and social settings. In many transdisciplinary artistic projects, during intense and stressful working periods, it often happens that people's personal and psychological issues can become closely entangled with the working process and strongly impact the final results. Quite commonly, these issues can be resolved without too much effort, if at least one person in the team is aware of different techniques to channel negative stimuli towards more positive and constructive actions. At FoAM, Danica gave an overview of the 'theory of choice', focusing on ways in which people tend to satisfy their four fundamental psychological needs and how their choices produce different social behaviours. She conducted a set of exercises regarding verbal and non-verbal communication, based on principles of tolerance and serendipity in collaborative settings.

In FoAM's experience, whatever communication problems arise in a collaborative setting, food has never failed to provide a stimulus for an out-of-the-box problem solving. To end the lecture, we cooked up a banquet with tested and certified foods used in FoAM's previous crisis situations, that have managed to glue the team back together when everything else seemed to be failing...

Bite Size Lecture 2007 03 22: SymbioticA

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 14:56:14 +0000

Start: 2007-03-22 18:30 Europe/Brussels

End: 2007-03-22 20:30 Europe/Brussels

SymbioticA is an artistic laboratory dedicated to the research, learning and critique of the life sciences. Operating since 2000, SymbioticA is the first research laboratory of its kind, enabling artists to engage in wet biology practices in a biological science department. SymbioticA's artists have exhibited their pioneering works world wide, best known for their work on Stelarc's Extra Ear and the Welcome Trust awarded Pig Wings. It is FoAM's pleasure to bring these renowned artists and researchers to Brussels and Belgium for the first time.

Rapid developments in the life sciences and its applied technologies have created new ways for beings to come into the world, and new categories of existence that are challenging the order of the world. This requires us humans to rethink our understandings and our relationships with our own identity/body, other animals and the environment, as well as the concept of life itself.

Modern biology is a branch/offshoot of the discipline of Natural History which originally constructed its knowledge by collections, classification and observation. In some respects the shift from the Cabinet of Curiosity to the Natural History Museum display embodies this transformation. Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) developed one of the most widely known and still widely used biological taxonomies which is based on the gathering and interpretation of phenotypic information; the discovery of DNA created a reductionist system based on the genotypic classification of the living world. Both systems carry their advantages as well as biases and ideologies and both systems are being even more severely challenged by recent developments in biotechnology. Ironically, a new cabinet of curiosities, containing living and partially living entities that do no confirm to any of these classifications, is being created/constructed in the scientific laboratories.

The growing number of ‘labmade’ life forms, either modified living organisms or different combinations of modified living fragments such as cell-lines and tissue (which we refer to as sub-life or sub-organisms), requires special attention. In pharmacological factories, research universities, and other technologically driven institutions there already exists a mass of disassociated living cells and tissues (sub-life) in the thousands of tons. These fragments do not fall under current biological or cultural classifications. We created the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) in 1996 mainly as a way to define this category of life and, at the same time, as an attempt to destabilize some of the rooted perceptions of the classification of living beings. We see TC&A, and our other attempts to grow aspects of the extended body, as an amalgamation of the extended human phenotype – a disembodied body that is unified in living fragments, and an ontological device for re-examining current taxonomies and hierarchical perceptions of life. These ideas will be illustrated through our recent proposed artistic
project "NoArk: A vessel for neo/sub life". NoArk is an attempt to
develop this idea further by collecting and growing into one ‘blob’ a collection of these sub-lives and neo-lives while engaging with the notion of the collection of parts that constitutes a whole.

Oron Catts is the Artistic director of SymbioticA, the Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory in the School of Anatomy and Human Biology, the University of Western Australia.

Ionat Zurr is the Academic Coordinator of SymbioticA.

Both, Oron and Ionat are artists, researchers and curators who have exhibited and published internationally. They specialize in using tissues as a medium for artistic investigation.

More information:
Website SymbioticA: http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/

Bitesize Lecture with Adrian Hon

maja — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:41:24 +0000

Start: 2007-10-16 19:00 Europe/Brussels

End: 2007-10-16 21:00 Europe/Brussels

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.

Adrian Hon is one of the world's leading alternate reality game designers and the Chief Creative Officer at Six to Start. Previously, Adrian was Director of Play at Mind Candy, where he designed and produced Perplex City, the world's first commercially successful ARG. Perplex City used the web, email, SMS, mobile phones, radio, skywriting, helicopters and live events in London, New York and San Francisco to tell a story to hundreds of thousands of people.

Before becoming a games designer, Adrian studied neuroscience at Cambridge University and Oxford University, and campaigned for the human exploration of Mars. Adrian is also the founder of the Let's Change the Game competition, run in collaboration with Cancer Research UK, which aims to develop an ARG to raise money for cancer research.

More information:
http://mssv.net/
http://www.perplexcity.com/

This lecture is supported by the Flemish Authorities, the VGC and the Culture 2000 Framework of the European Commission.