For the last couple of years I've been doing sporadic teaching of electronics and programming for undergraduates and masters students across a couple of courses in my local university. This has taken the form of one on one teaching a day a week in the spring term, in a basement cupboard sized room with a soldering iron and piles of components. Students book up half an hour blocks of time …
The latest version of the Farm Crap App is currently undergoing final testing by agronomists and farmers before a new release in the autumn (let us know if you would like to take part in the beta testing). This version sees a gigantic increase in the amount of different crops and manures it contains, and the vast majority of the RB209 guide is now represented, so it is very satisfying …
One of our biggest (and unfortunately entirely unpaid) research projects is administration. Accounting in particular is interesting from a range of angles, as a kind of cultural probe into the current state of what society considers important - but also as seemingly the single thing that very powerful white men loose lots of sleep over.
Recently the UK Government decided to require all companies to issue their VAT tax …
We are delighted to announce the joint FoAM/Eden Project Invisible Worlds resident for 2019 - Austin Houldsworth. No buyer for your property? Has climate change ruined the housing market in your area? ‘The Intergalactic Estate Agency’ is here to help.
A few pictures from last weekends debut of the Penelopean weaving robots at Algomech festival in Sheffield. After a frantic couple of weeks in mass production, a swarm of 8 robots and a may pole invaded the winter gardens: wove and un-wove braids to the sounds of livecoded beats and ancient Greek poetry.
We were recently asked by one of the UK research councils to write about how we collaborate with university academics to build ‘impact’ into research projects, partly to provide inspiration for the researchers but also to address some common misconceptions.
This post is a summary of Karin Johansson's MSc placement at FoAM Kernow on the Sonic Kayak project. The Sonic Kayaks are currently being modified for use for people with visual impairments. Karin helped develop and test an evaluation approach that can be used in future to look at whether the Sonic Kayaks offer wellbeing benefits to the paddlers.
The AccessLab project has been a series of five workshops, aimed at decentralising research skills, encouraging open access, and building local communities. As the funding draws to a close, we ended by bringing participants back together for a scoping workshop to decide on possible future paths for the project. This is a brief write-up of the main outputs from the scoping workshop.
As part of our continuing mission to promote and celebrate all forms of administration, we are publishing our UK VAT accounting procedure. This is important if you are running an arts organisation, non-profit or independent research organisation (or all three in one glorious muddle, like we are) as this means your income is likely to be a mix of commercial and grant funding, making you partially exempt for VAT and …
Invisible Worlds Residencies were developed in 2018 as a collaboration between FoAM and the Eden Project, to explore phenomena beyond our senses: too vast, too small, too fast, too slow or too far away in space or time.
Our second reply in the series from Sam Gyimah MP arrived shortly before he announced his resignation from government. We've written a reply to be sent via our local MP anyway, although I doubt he will see it.
This letter I think perhaps gets us closer to the assumptions at the heart of a lot of UK policy, a surprisingly simplistic view that research is entirely something done by universities, …
A comprehensive description of the AccessLab format - a workshop to decentralise research skills and encourage open access publication of scientific research.
One of the strategies we've been exploring at FoAM Kernow is using our hardware projects to research different ways of building things. For example our approach of design assuming collapse (& brexit) has resulted in much higher awareness of our supply chains, and through this - potential dependance on manufacturing in places with less environmental and health regulation.
On the Penelope project, our plan was to develop technologies that could be useful in constructing a swarm of robots which could be livecoded by using the pattern matrix - a general purpose tangible programming system based on the Raspberry Pi. In order to make communication possible remotely, radio is the most obvious approach to get up and running quickly (other options that are intriguing are infra-red and audible …
Penelopean robotics are about rebuilding technology in the woven cosmos. You can read more about the theory in part 1, but roughly our aims are to:
Embody Penelopean technological practice - they should be easily undone (taken apart) so they can be understandable, self documenting and repairable.
They are not automated looms, but must eventually be capable of weaving in some form, maybe by interacting with ancient Greek weaving …
Our letter to Sarah Newton MP for Truro and Falmouth was forwarded to Sam Gyimah MP, the Minister of State for Universities, Science, Research and Innovation.
An open letter sent to Sarah Newton, Member of Parliament for Truro and Falmouth by FoAM Kernow.
In July we ran an AccessLab in Penzance (UK), for people who work in marine and fishing sectors. This event was the first of three AccessLabs for 2018, funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and in partnership with the British Science Association (BSA). This blog post is to document the format changes made, feedback received, and notes for future iterations.
The Penelope project is concerned with many things, pattern structures in ancient poetry, comparisons of Andean and Greek mathematics, and the role of liveness in thought processes - to name just a few. We can also add robotics to this list.
We are working on a lot of hardware projects at the moment as we are interested in how to to rebuild technology from various alternative starting points. It seems most "off the shelf" hardware has converged on increasingly inaccessible and conservative forms, but luckily (and probably not due to entirely unrelated reasons) at the same time there has been an explosion in the availability, community documentation and potential of open …