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 …
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.
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 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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Tablet looms have some interesting properties. Firstly, they are very very old - our neolithic ancestors invented them. Secondly they are quite straightforward to make and weave but form an extremely complex structure that incorporates both weaving and braiding (and one I haven't managed to simulate correctly yet) - they are also the only form of weaving that has never been mechanised.
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 …