FoAM

Tilt the vessel and the roots redirect. Modulate the light, the pattern changes. The technique is simple; what grows from it is anything but.

Carole Collet spent over a decade learning to work at the pace of a cactus, aerial roots, mycelium – treating garden and grow-tank as studio, plant and fungus as collaborators. "Designing (for and with) Living Systems" gathers fifteen years of this inquiry: botanical studies, speculative provocations, slow-manufactured objects. Learning the plant's terms,…

Turning to the underside of worked form; on pattern, threshold, and what gets through.

A new cluster of pages from the Anarchive's Silver Reader.

Foglets flash and fall; a curtain of tiny, mobile, force-bearing machines pretending, badly, to be nothing at all. The room turns viscous, catches on itself, forgetting the surfaces promised by its grip. The old dream: matter made answerable, speck-by-speck.

In 1991, the “pixels” were…

In a conversation with Kate Rich, moving between bug reports, bylaws, and spell‑making, TITiPI – The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest – works through their experiment in instituting otherwise. They rethink what institutions are for, and what kinds of life they make possible. What do budgets, servers, and contracts become when shaped by abolitionist commitments, radical kinship, and…

July 2024. A terrace in Istria. Tiles half-laid, some already fixed, a template that doesn't match the floor, an unanswered voice call from Brussels. 480 limestone pieces, CNC-cut from a shape proven mathematically a few months before. One constraint: no tile can be flipped.

Three months, a long hot summer to find out if the pattern held.

https://anarchive.fo.am/silver/spectres/

Developed through studio visits with Then Try This in Sheffield and Cornwall last autumn, three new texts from FoAM's Anarchive trace technology's minor paths and forgotten possibilities.

In "From Scratch?" Alex McLean and Justin Pickard trace live coding from today's…

Most humans already know how to work with responsive systems – how a room's acoustics shape your voice, how your walking rhythm adjusts to different surfaces, how small changes in timing can shift a conversation. These same patterns of mutual responsiveness operate similarly in technological systems, creating spaces where technologies respond rather than dictate.

We're anarchiving two approaches to the same idea: technology as invitation, not imposition...

Pattern Thinking Across Domains: Alex…

☀️ As we approach peak thermal expansion at summer solstice – materials, bodies, air pressure all responding to heat – we're releasing texts from the Anarchive that themselves breathe and expand. Part of the silver reader, this cluster on pliable architectures reaches out to the methods it explores, through publishing formats that flex and flow between words, images, and embedded encounters.

Reaching and responding flow both ways. Your movements set breathing walls in motion while the structure's…

ekip Policy Lab #7 in Lund, Sweden, June 2025.

Innovation aspires to create radical change, to shape the future using the tools of the present. It can foster a sense of agency, but also demands responsibility. Single issue solutions in one field can create unintended consequences for others. Innovators can perpetuate unsustainable lifestyles and social injustices, without necessarily being aware of it. That’s why cross-innovation,…

This post documents the process of encoding a basic map of the historic spread of early hominids across the globe onto an animal body.

The animal in question is a fox called Reinaerd, the Flemisch/Dutch medieval fairytale trickster, which seemed a suitable character to embody such a map.

Step 1:

Reworking an existing map, simplifying it to have red correspond to the earliest areas, gradually shifting hue to more recent times. (Which would theoretically make the arrows obsolete.)

Step 2:

Adapting…

At Imbolc's first light, we're kindling new pathways through technology's familiar terrain. Today we open a canvas of possibilities from the 'silver route' of the Anarchive, an expanding surface where gathered fragments challenge how digital worlds are built and bound. Like light through woven cloth, constellations of experiments and ideas expose the seams in our technological present, inviting different ways of making and knowing. 🗺️

Move lightly across this shifting surface where digital…