Re-Enchanting the Present

At the Center for Philosophical Technologies, FoAM’s co-founders Maja Kuzmanovic and Nik Gaffney will discuss their interstitial techniques for living with uncertainty, combining experiential futures, generative technologies, labcraft, and the ephemeral tools of panpsychism.

FoAM is a network for speculative culture at the intersection of art, science, nature and everyday life. As strategies of resistance against dystopian fear, FoAM experiments with futurecrafting and conviviality to re-enchant the present. They explore, among other things, animist approaches to interdependence, attunement and reciprocity, using a wide spectrum of transdisciplinary techniques — from mythological to ecological. When attuning to arcane forces of change — such as globalization, the atmosphere, interpersonal dynamics, or gut flora — FoAM’s work combines pre-modern crafts of magic and ritual with Futures and technological arts. They evoke and invoke ways of viewing, being and acting in a world where the continuation of humanity is no longer certain. Dark arts for dark times, capable of transforming “the darkness of the tomb into the darkness of the womb”. These techniques for re-animating fertile darkness inevitably begin with care. A careful and care full engagement with the world. Care as an antidote to nihilism, apathy or indifference. Care as the potion anima takes to remember itself as inseparable from animate matter.