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.
Bumper crop is an android game I’ve just started working on with Dr Misha Myers as part of the Play to Grow project: “exploring and testing the use of computer games as a method of storytelling and learning to engage urban users in complexities of rural development, agricultural practices and issues facing farmers in India.”
This is a Raspberry Pi running a Racket Servlet (with the Mongoose 2000 data sync server) serving a webpage to the tablet. The neat thing is that it's running on solar power - a day of gloomy winter Cornish light (not even outside) charging the on board battery results in over an hour of running time. This includes the ad-hoc wifi transmitter, which is presumably the main power drain as …
Here's a prototype recipe notebook for open sauces. At this point it's primarily a test of a drag/drop interface to make it possible for anyone to make the recipe graphs we explored visualising in October. I'm testing it with the recipes designed for FoAM's recent Smoke and Vapour event.
Yesterday was the first test of the full DORIS marine mapping system I'm developing with Amber Teacher and David Hodgson at Exeter University. We went out on a fishing boat from Mylor harbour for a 5 hour trip along the Cornish coast. It's a quiet season for lobsters at the moment, so this was an opportunity to practice the sampling without too much pressure. Researcher Charlie Ellis was working …
Doris is a new project that has emerged from the development of Borrowed Scenery's Zizim app, repurposed into a scientific research tool in collaboration with the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at Exeter University and Helsinki University. Doris – named after the sea nymph in Greek mythology – will be used for mapping lobster catches on fishing boats so researchers working at the National Lobster Hatchery in Padstow …
Some examples of graphs that scientists have created and published using Hapstar, all these images were taken from the papers that cite our publication, with links to them below.
A mycorrhiza is a symbiotic (generally mutualistic, but occasionally weakly pathogenic) association between a fungus and the roots of a vascular plant.
Some serious connecting work going on with borrowed scenery for joining physical and imaginary worlds together. A new Boskoi database is up and running, giving us a place to put all kinds of story elements and plants found in the city. Boskoi uses the Ushahidi platform, which provides an API the game is now using to pull all items tagged in the map (which can come from the Android app …
