blog

Cultivating FoAM Kernow

Towards the end of last year we were struggling a bit at FoAM Kernow, a busy year with lots of media exposure and overlapping projects had left us excited and energised but it seemed at times as if the organisation had gained its own momentum and we were being carried along with it.We had a very timely chat with Jane Sutherland at Krowji in Redruth who told us about her new project called Cultivator - an EU/Arts Council England/Cornwall Council funded scheme to help creative organisations like us. We were chosen along with 4 other companies to take part in this 3 year scheme which is also working with Plymouth University.

Machine Wilderness at Transmediale

A write up of our workshop at Transmediale looking at the potential of animal behaviour for designing technology that is suited to that biome. We worked in the direct vicinity of the Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt under the experienced guidance of behavioural ecologist Matthew Creasey.

Enacting Futures (on Experiential Futures)

"Enacting futures in postnormal times", article by Nik Gaffney and Maja Kuzmanovic has now been published in a special edition of the Futures Journal, Volume 86 on Experiential Futures.

Dazzlebug in Alaska

Some photos of the our citizen science game Dazzlebug being exhibited at the Anchorage Museum in Alaska as part of their Camouflage: In Plain Sight Exhibition running from the 28th October 2016 to the 5th Febuary 2017.The bugs which have evolved throughout this exhibition and before have already been sent for processing by the researchers - more info on that here soon!

Report: Rethinking Diversity in a Rural Region Conference

FoAM Kernow is an organisation in one of the most disadvantaged parts of the UK. Many of the gaps in our society are particually obvious in Cornwall, the separation between those whom our social structures benefit and those who they do not are clear to see in the separation between the coastal and inland regions, and in many finer grained distinctions.

Allotment Crap App

We’re prototyping a system for behavioural change for sustainable planting and fertilising in allotments and smallholdings, based on the Farm Crap App.

Farm Crap App Pro Edition

This autumn we have been developing a new version of the Farm Crap App with the Duchy College and Rothamstead Research. This project is about tackling the difficulties farmers have using natural fertilisers while needing to report realistic figures the government agencies - and understanding the guidance they provide. The original version was a big success, but only contained information on a handful of manures and didn't deal with the nutrient content of the soil.

Machine Wilderness at V&A museum

In a yearly festival called the Digital Design Weekend, the Victoria and Albert museum opens its doors to the public for a hands-on experience of emerging technologies and design. Machine Wilderness set up in the museum garden to show prototypes from our program to human and non-human visitors.

Machine Wilderness at Pixelache

Interfaces for Empathy is the brilliant theme of this year’s Pixelache festival. In many ways it also describes what we’re aiming for in Machine Wilderness. Here's what happened in our workshop during the festival.

NES/Famicom game programming discoveries

Working on a NES game you are treading in the footsteps of programmers from the 80's, and going back to modern development feels strangely bloated and inefficient in comparison. This is a log of some of the things I've encountered writing game code for the What Remains project.

Sonic Kayaks at the British Science Festival

Last week we launched our Sonic Kayaks for the first time at the British Science Festival in Swansea. Sonic Kayaks are scientific instruments for citizen-led marine microclimate data collection, as well as musical instruments for expanding our senses allowing exploration of the underwater environment in real-time through sound. The installation ran over two days, and was fully booked with 64 participants. This post forms our documentation of the practical lessons from the event.

Greenspace voxel models

A run through of physical models made from voxel data obtained from LiDAR flights through cities.

Change of location, brain scans, Mineways, OBJs, smiles

We have been notified of a particular place of interest within the data, this being in Luton – it feels good to have a central place of significance to work on now. The area is about 520msq, made up of four voxel ’tiles’, so I spent some time bringing other parts of the project up to date with that. Alas, four delicious cross section scans:

Exporting OBJs from Minecraft for 3D printing (spoiler, not so fabulous)

After rendering voxel data in Minecraft Pi, the next logical (and exciting) step was to export the blocks as a 3D file ready for 3D printing. Jo is the master of all things 3D and tangible, so I have been very excited to send this off to her – after a day of dallying around, we are definitely closer to that goal.

Voxels: Minecraft & surprising lack of immediate obstacles

So far in the ‘play’ stage of the project, I have rendered wonderful little sections of Milton Keynes in Fluxus with both practical and slightly more esoteric outcomes – firstly, we have a script that outputs .OBJ files using small sections of data, which can be used for both digital and tangible modelling (such as 3D printing). That’s the practical part. The latter made the primitive object performance ready, which I explored during livecoding events in Leeds and Newcastle by animating it – however the long rendering times made this difficult, and something that must be fine tuned in the future.

Fluxus and Voxels and long rendering times

Following on from previous Voxel Debut, it seemed a good idea to visualise the data using Fluxus, as a newbie to live coding visuals. Before this stint, I had never really worked with 3D and animation, so thinking this way has been an entirely new concept to me, alongside learning Fluxus (& Scheme, in general). With a couple of Algoraves coming up this week, an incubated week of intense livecoding and voxels is entirely necessary. I have found, so far, that focusing on either is in turn helping my understanding of the other.

Voxel Debut

Recently, we were approached by Dr Karen Anderson of the University of Exeter to visualise voxel data of Bedford, Luton and Milton Keynes. A natural place to start with the data would have been to interpret it in Python and recreate the cities in Minecraft, so of course I became distracted and found myself being led down a different, more Fluxus/3D/performative inspired path. However, the first port of call was to actually read the data, which requires a brief explanation of the data format.

Sonic Kayaks: how to build musical instruments for marine exploration

Here is a bit of a writeup of the gubbins going into the sonic kayaks project. We only have a few weeks to go until the kayaks' maiden voyages at the British Science Festival, so we are ramping things up, with a week of intense testing and production last week with Kirsty Kemp, Kaffe Matthews and Chris Yesson joining us at FoAM Kernow. You can read Amber's report on the week here.

Ars Bioarctica

A Machine Wilderness session at Kilpisjarvi biological research station some 300 km into the polar circle in northern Finland.As part of the Ars Bioarctica residency program we proposed a team residency consisting of L.A. based artist/maker Ian Ingram, Finnish artist Antti Tenetz and Theun Karelse of FoAM.

Sonic Kayaks open hacklab 2

We now have the full system working, with temperature sensors and a hydrophone logging and sonifying underwater data in real-time to the paddler. This lab session was to design the final build and sonification elements.

Symbiotic Systems workshop

Prototyping symbiotic sytems based on specific landscapes in Amstelpark. April 29-30, 2016 A two day workshop in the Machine Wilderness program led by Ivan Henriques, prototyping an artificial systems that is integrated into the landscape of the Amstelpark.

Data sonification for citizen science

We're working on two sonification projects at FoAM Kernow - Red King and Sonic Kayaks - so have started looking into how we can get the most out of sonification for citizen science.

Cricket Tales released

Cricket Tales is an ambitious citizen science project. 438 days of CCTV footage from the Wild Crickets Research group - the only record of wild behaviour of insects of it's kind. It turns out that insects have more complex lives and individuality than we thought, and the game is a way of helping uncover this more precisely. For Foam Kernow, this was also a significant project as the biggest production that all three of us have worked on together.

A 6502 lisp compiler, sprite animation and the NES/Famicom

For our new project "what remains", we're regrouping the Naked on Pluto team to build a game about climate change. In the spirit of the medium being the message, we're interested in long term thinking as well as recycling e-waste - so in keeping with a lot of our work, we are unraveling the threads of technology. The game will run on the NES/Famicom console, which was originally released by Nintendo in 1986. This hardware is extremely resilient, the solid state game cartridges still work surprisingly well today, compared to fragile CDROM or the world of online updates. Partly because of this, a flourishing scene of new players are now discovering them.

The General Opinion at SWARM

Swarm was an event organised by Field Notes at The Exchange Gallery in Penzance on the 23rd of April, bringing together artists from Cornwall and Devon, the day populated with events and networking and musings alongside installations and talks by local artist groups, such as Keiken Collective, Back Lane West and Howl Projects, amongst others. Medium Rare contracted us to bring their visions of open art discourse to life, and following a small proof-of-concept installation at the gallery in November, we focused our attention on presenting a working system at Swarm.

Red King and crowd computing

We've started a new project called the Red King. Researchers have developed models of host and parasite evolution, and are interested in what conditions need to be met for diversity in host and pathogen types to arise. Originally we were asked to make an educational game for outreach purposes – but it's much more interesting if we can make this a two-way exchange. We're looking at whether we can use crowd computing to turn this into a citizen science project.

slub Penryn->NYC live stream 25-03-02016

A streamed slub livecoding performance from FoAM Kernow, Penryn to source2016 at NYU, 35 w4th st, Manhattan.

A tanglebots workshop report

I've tried a lot of different ways of teaching children programming, starting a few years ago with primary school children in a classroom, then doing inset training days for teachers and finally private tutoring in homes. For the finale to the weavingcodes project we are trying a new approach, teaching families about code, robotics and thread by building "tanglebots".

Sonic Kayak open hacklab 1

This week we welcomed sound artist Kaffe Matthews and marine researcher Dr. Kirsty Kemp to FoAM Kernow to begin our exploration into Sonic Kayaks, as part of an open hacklab.The Sonic Kayak project has evolved from the Bicrophonic Research Institute (BRI), established by Kaffe Matthews and David Griffiths in 2014. Through ten years of international projects the BRI has developed the Sonic Bike whose music changes depending on where and how fast the cyclist goes, played through a pair of bike-mounted speakers and onboard GPS system. Our plan now is to evolve the Sonic Bikes to the coastal marinescape.

Artificially evolved camouflage

As the egglab camouflage experiment continues, here are some recent examples after 40 or so generations. If you want to take part in a newer experiment, we are currently seeing if a similar approach can evolving motion dazzle camouflage in Dazzle Bug. Each population of eggs is being evolved against a lot of background images, so it's interesting to see the different strategies in use - it seems like colour is one of the first things to match, often with some dazzle to break up the outline. Later as you can see in some of these examples, there is some quite accurate background matching happening.