NOTES

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

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".

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 …

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 …

When I first started working on the Sonic Bikes project with Kaffe Matthews in 2013 I had just moved to Cornwall, and I used the Penryn river for developing "The swamp that was" installation we made for Ghent. We've always talked about bringing this project here, but the various limitations of cycling (fast roads, stupid drivers and ridiculous hills) were always too much of a problem - so we wondered …

It's workshop time again at Foam Kernow. We're running a Sonic Kayak development open hacklab with Kaffe Matthews (more on this soon) and a series of tanglebots workshops which will be the finale to the weavingcodes project.

Instead of using my cobbled together homemade interface board, we're using the pimoroni explorer hat (pro). This comes with some nice features, especially a built in breadboard but also 8 touch buttons, 4 …

A new project begins, on the subject of ecology and evolution of infectious disease. This one is a little different from a lot of Foam Kernow's citizen science projects in that the subject is theoretical research - and involves mathematical simulations of populations of co-evolving organisms, rather than the direct study of real ones in field sites etc.

In preparation for our Machine Wilderness workshop coming up in November, we spent a morning discovering edible plants around Penryn with Rachel Lambert from Wild Food Foraging. We’re hoping to cater for the workshop using foraged produce, but for now I’m enjoying eating the bits and bobs we collected, including linden, nettles, yew berries, sorrel, sea spinach and daydreaming of food.

These are notes from the NightScience event in Paris, July 2015. This was a two day free and open event, held by the Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires, around the topic of equitable access to scientific research and education. FoAM were there to talk about our citizen science projects, but also to embed these projects within the framework of community work spaces and the open access movement.

Much of our work at FoAM Kernow occupies the interstices between science, arts, and education. We've been spending time lately thinking about what the biggest gaps and problems are that we face, and what we might be able to do to help. One issue keeps raising its head – the accessibility of research findings to broader society.

Over the last six months we've been taking a crash course in company formation, treating it like any other investigation into a strange and esoteric technology. Last year we registered FoAM Kernow as a UK non profit organisation in the mould of FoAM Brussels. Starting off with absolutely no knowledge at all (but with a lot of help from FoAM's wider friends and relations) we found a lot of …

As university researchers fall foul to increasing metric and bureaucratic demands, time and energy for creativity is ever decreasing. At the same time, access to formal learning in the UK is becoming harder with increased university fees. A niche is opening...

Biohackspaces, or community biology labs, are popping up globally – offering anyone the opportunity to learn and play with biology, without committing to a long, prescriptive, and expensive …

A short update on the things currently going on at Foam Kernow alongside the stuff I've been blogging about recently. We are near completion of a new version of the butterfly hunting game - this time being developed for the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, where it will be a citizen science exhibit to collect data on visitor's perceptions of the wing patterns. A brand new …

One of the main objectives of the weavecoding project is to provide a simulation of the warp weighted loom to use for demonstrations and exploration of ancient weaving techniques. Beyond the 4 shaft loom dyadic calculator we need to show the actual process of weaving to explain how the structures and patterns emerge. Weaving is very much a 3D process and these visualisations fail to show that well. It also …

One of the most inspiring things we heard from Leslie Downs (our Advisor on textile innovation) was about the way he manufactures high specification structures for aerospace engineering by weaving on ordinary looms, sometime even hand looms for their flexibility. It turns out that some of these techniques are also possible with tablet weaving: I came across this mysterious diagram in 'Byways in Handweaving' by Mary Meigs Atwater

Tablet weaving is an ancient form of pattern production using cards which are rotated to provide different sheds between warp threads. It's used to produce long strips of fabric, or the starting bands and borders that form part of a larger warp weighted weaving. We'll come to the second use later in the weaving codes project.

After writing the 4 shaft loom simulation the next job was to try weaving the structures with real threads. Would I be able to replicate the predicted patterns and structures? Ellen warned me that the meander weave would result in unstable fabric, but it would depend on the nature of the material used so was worth trying. Originally I planned to warp up the Harris loom but I need to …

Some photos from Shakti Lamba who is currently testing Symbai in the Chhattisgarh state in north eastern India.

Symbai is part of a project to study the evolution of sociality and culture in humans. Shakti collects detailed networks of knowledge, prestige and friendship in villages with contrasting cultural structures in rural India.

As part of this year's Fascinate festival we took over the bar at Falmouth's Poly with visualisations of the camouflage pattern evolution process from the egglab game.