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The Thick Present / The Thin Ice

Hip-Deep in the Thick Present #4. Working out what the work is is part of the work.

With All Caveats

Manifesto Writing in an Age of Uncertainty

Experiential Dreamscapes

One of the more powerful ideas when futuring is not around predicting what will happen, but imagining what might happen.

Walk with me

Interview with the Amsterdam postman Rachid Tahri.

To care, with care, for care

To care for someone is to allow yourself to be touched.

Breaking the Mochi...

Written in the winter darkness of the southern hemisphere, Alkan Chipperfield's musings draw us into moments of infinite vastness and glimmering light. A gentle invocation of daylight's return. 

Räucherwerk

A sonic Räucherwerk closing circles and scrying paths through the nascent year. Futures written in wisps of smoke.

Voids within Voids

In the liminal space between the years, we linger on the edge and gaze into the void. Press play at midnight. Notice how time warps around you.

Gathered & Scattered (Yuletide soundtrack)

Ushering in the festive season, Lowdjo and FoAM invite you to grow worlds at the scale of your (dinner) table.

Seed Crystal

An emerging soundtrack for FoAM's Anarchive, mixed by Lowdjo on winter solstice 2022-12-21

The Unbearable Lightness of Solarpunk

Hip-Deep in the Thick Present #3. Solarpunk is sometimes claimed as a window on the future we could have if we were willing to make it happen. But as with all forms of science fiction, it is better seen as a window on the present.

Fragments Of A Hologram Rose

Hip-Deep in the Thick Present #2. Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Exercises in Attentiveness

How do you know what you know? These field notes are thoughts in formation with an island that promises isolation yet never fully delivers detachment, where the past refuses to lie dormant in the present.

Existential Box Fort

Hip-Deep in the Thick Present #1. You can’t change the world.

Gathered and Scattered

On the remarkable possibilities for conviviality through screens and cameras, but also their limitations.

Worlds Within Worlds

The complex physics of soap bubbles has lent itself as a dominant trope from which to understand and study the structure of the universe.

Within The Screened Circumference of the Minds Eye

Beyond the 'reflected-real', the surface of a soap bubble returns us to certain phantasms of our own invention. Figures swim across its boundary surface – visions sensed beyond the shift of optics.

A World Replete

Look upon a soap bubble's shimmering surface and allow the deluge of its shifting clouds of prisms to flood the mind.

A Mutable Symbol

The soap bubble is a floating, shimmering thin-filmed sphere of almost nothing, and yet it evokes the whole world and many other distant worlds beyond it.

“Maybe we were the birds”

Using unknown sounds to create conditions for speculative thinking

FieldAcademy - sensorial heritage

A field-report by Anne-Florence Neveu of the Field Academy sessions exploring Amstelpark as sensorial heritage.

PIFcamp 2022, ePIFany

Spending a week at PIFcamp (organised by Project Atol in Slovenia for the eighth time) next to the miracle that is a crystalline river running through a valley. This is what came to mind:

Arka Kinari (May/June 2022)

A sign of life from Arka Kinari, sailing through Indonesia until October 2022.

ARTIS zoo residency Driessens / Verstappen

Driessens and Verstappen bring their Spotter (AI) to ARTIS Amsterdam Royal zoo during the Machine Wilderness residency programme, here's what happened next:

ARTIS zoo residency Heather Barnett

Heather Barnett is looking into ant behaviour at the zoo during the Machine Wilderness residency programme, here's what happened next:

Life, life support and the afterlives of (im)possible worlds

How can stories, scenarios and situations enhance agency amid chaotic circumstances?

MonsterCode StrandLAB

First public experiment in the MonsterCode research-line around Almere beach during the Summer Sessions at StrandLab Almere.

Convivia, refugia. Not always everywhere

On distributed convivia and networked refugia, shelters from the always everywhere of the Digital Age.

Change is coming to the FoAM Kernow studio

We’ve been up and running since 2014 - much has changed since then, and the time for a shift in direction has come. This post is to outline what’s changing and why.

Becoming Realists of a Larger Reality

A guided tour along FoAM's interconnected paths through the larger reality.