Australian performance-maker Sarah Neville and family were in residence at foam for 3 weeks in October 2013, firstly at Castello Parenzana near the legendary town of Motovun in Istria, then at the Future Fabulators kick-off in Linz, to end amidst the urban landscape of Brussels. In company with her five-month old daughter Florence and together with Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney, Sarah is investigating ancient and contemporary myths formed from making meaning of natural disaster. Sarah’s husband Matthew and four-year old daughter Miranda are contributing to the project remotely from home in the Adelaide Hills in Australia. Miranda is sharing her understanding of the natural world through creative storytelling and painting and Matthew is participating by responding to the concepts emerging at Castello Parenzana through an exploration of sound.

• parenzana_residency_notes
• research_report_parenzana

Brittish-Chinese speculative designer Lisa Ma had a Microresidency at FoAM in Brussels for one week in April 2014. During her residency, she developed a 'bioluddite charter', in order to surmise what an 'umbrella movement' for critical biotechnology might look like. She also worked on a speculative scenario of bioluddites in waiting rooms, looked back into the history of Luddism, correlated bioluddism with food futures and collected a range of bioluddite's conundrums.

“Being a ‘luddite’ is more than the derogatory term for people that refuse to use twitter or a smartphone. Luddites changed history by initiating critiques of technology beyond the mechanics and into the way that technology affects everyday people in the industrial era. Luddites prototyped activism through violence in a time of military powers. Are they relevant today? Might Bio-luddites prototype a new form of activism to critically use biotechnology? Can bioluddite activism be sustained within the service culture? Might these activities become socialized?” -Lisa Ma

• fringejoyride_residency_notes
• fringejoyride_residency_review
• bioluddite_charter

Futurist Scott Smith, aka Changeist had a short residency at FoAM in May 2014, in preparation for the Data Ecologies symposium and book sprint. He introduced his Design Fiction card deck, that was used in FoAM's futures card games workshop and talked about his approach to Mundane Futures to be included in the Futurist Fieldguide.

Bringing news from the Nordic LARP gathering in Estonia, Stuart Candy had his microresidency at FoAM, donating his The Thing From The Future cards for the futures card games workshop, discussing the inclusion of What's in the box? technique at the Strategic Foresight course on Guerilla Futures at the OCAD University.

Aside from participating in the Laurisilva Futures workshop, Narrative Strategies symposium and the Extrapolation Factory workshop, media artist Alex Davies was a resident at Time's Up in Austria and FoAM in Belgium, exploring possible connections between physical narratives, pre-enactments and UrbEx expeditions.

Stacey Moran, Adam Nocek and their daughters Ivy and Fiona have a family residency at FoAM reflecting on speculative culture and its relationship to Japanese animism and European scientific pantheism. Living at FoAM for nearly two weeks in June 2015, Stacey, Adam, Fiona and Ivy will explore Japanese animism. Adam and Stacey are parents, scholars, theorists, teachers, and writers whose interdisciplinary work focuses on finding connections between art and science. Taking the lead from Isabelle Stengers’ claim that words like “animism,” “magic,” and “belief” have been compromised by the rationalistic split between fact and fiction, their time at foam will be spent looking for ways to reclaim animism for the technological world. Specifically, they will look to Japanese forms of animism as they apply to Adam’s work in media, film, and technoscience, and Stacey’s work in feminine poetics of storytelling and myth-building.

• animation and animism
• http://fo.am/japanese-animism/