Recent Posts.

Search site...

ABOUT

formAxioms is a media lab that designs concepts, models and forms of collective emancipation.

We are critical generalists, masters of none.

We are explorers of techno-diversity, as such we are medium agnostic. Our OSs are developed through DIY synthesis of digital and analog tools —prototyping and testing collaborative and participatory frameworks, building physical and digital structures.

We are (trans-)media and we prototype quasi-objects, anarchitectures (spaces-interfaces-installations-infrastructures), working to re-discover the emancipatory potential of art and design.

–

formAxioms was established in 2018 by Eva Castro and Federico Ruberto. It is a media lab and design agency that promotes research on space, selfhood, performance, art, planetary structures, and economy-ecology. It prototypes quasi-objects (spaces-interfaces-infrastructures), working to re-discover the emancipatory potential of art, architecture and design. FormAxioms’ projects are spaces of retention and immersion challenging the threshold between physical and digital experiences. Part of the lab research is questioning (and building new forms of) archive, conceptualise and designing memory palaces-theatres, spaces that are accessible through games, installations, diagrams, sound and video interfaces, an-architectures, objects, and audio-visual performances.

We build quasi-objects as we despise the commodity form, commodified life traded and traced though the allure of  objects. We favour thus transformative quasi-objects, spaces and events, an-architectures engaging the possibility of chance, catalysed by the intersection of both physical and digital actions. formAxioms’ quasi-objects are art projects difficult of intake at one go as we aim at generating deeper form of long engagement and emancipative thought through feral forms of collective modes of synthesis and abstraction.

Our projects remain partly open, unfinished. They are conceived as multi-layered frameworks allowing collective expansion and transformation …allowing a certain dose of unpredictability and contingency to get through. Our framework thus play at the intersection of transformation (entropy and decay) and negentropy (the possibility of sustaining a structure, in time).

The group experiments with a mix of design strategies and critical frameworks (philosophical, media-theoretical) to pursue alternative forms of world-building. Our interest is questioning the relation real/ideal, post post-modern thought, through a framework carried forward by engaging critical fiction and by adhering to an ontology of modelling: two pathways for creating syntaxes that allow for both, the constitution of (a shared) structure and the divergence from it.

We promote critical diversity and openness, curating practices in which neither the individual nor the collective are subject to the powers of the other, as they are both conceived as negotiated thresholds, elastic and materially hybrid membranes, field of attractions/repulsion.

 

FromAxioms has worked and collaborated internationally and exhibited worldwide.

It is since 2021 one of the three curatorial cores of HotHouse.

form | axioms / what’s in the name?

Axiom = a noun ἀξίωμα (axíōma) derived from the verb ἀξιόειν (axioein), meaning “to deem worthy”, but also “to require” (wiki). Axioms = “point-zero(s)” that cannot be derived by principles of deduction; un-demonstrable by mathematical proofs because they are the beginning of such proofs. Axioms = inferences/statements that define a new possibility, they are “starting point” without neither a “surface” nor a “volume”. Their presence defines one or more structures. An axiom is a self-evident entity so it requires a leap, it requires agency to be posited. At the bottom of each system there are axioms. Axioms are statements that are made or that make themselves evident; their instantiation, assumed to be “true” (to have a reality) without a necessary proof, utters thus the possibility of a new reality.

Form>axioms = The speculative environments we construct are neither emergent nor they are preemptively defined beforehand, they are “worlds” (see Nelson Goodman), new world-s relying for their construction on the processes of formation they relate to and on axioms (“of choice”) that are needed to define such relation. Axiomatic decisions are necessary for navigating, analyzing and re-presenting, “understanding” the process of formation of a selected territory whilst making it evident to other agents. Any process of formation requires axiomatic decisions. Together, forms and axioms constitute “worlds”, they are both necessary for any process of “world-building”, as any “world” is formed by series of decisions (axioms), inferences that need to be stated to determine how the emergent properties of a system are made evident (extracted, analyzed, selected), and how the manipulation of complex and vast layers of data are tamed or augmented. Axioms are the “ideo-logical” framework of any system. Axioms define processes of formation and processes of formation are intrinsically informative of axioms. A de-signer is a world-builder, a trans-media story teller that juggles in the interstitial space; it is an interface that plugs top-down events to bottom-up processes in order to constitute the relations of axioms and forms, tied to the (never-ending) end of the process, where the “vision” of a new reality must be stated.

formAxioms:

see work-list

Team

Eva Castro

Architect/\/Researcher

Federico Ruberto

writer/\///designer

[Eva Castro] I’m a professor of practice at AS+D – SUTD, Singapore, where I currently coordinate core studio 2 and co-lead advanced option studios. I have been the director of the Landscape Urbanism Unit at Tsinghua University in Beijing and a visiting professor at the Architectural Association in London, where I taught – as a diploma unit master and co-directing the Landscape Urbanism Master program since 2003. I have also held positions as visiting professor at HKU, Hong Kong and honorary profesor at X’ian Tech University. As a practitioner, I’m a the cofounder of Plasma Studio and GroundLab. I’ve has been recognized with several awards, my work is published and exhibited worldwide. I run the multi-media lab, formAxioms, and since 2021 I’m part of the collective Hothouse.

[Federico Ruberto] I’m a writer-designer working between philosophy, anarchitecture and art. I produce text, images, sounds and physical/digital installations: multi-media projects that intersect digital (platforms) and physical space (buildings and planetary urbanism), political economy, technology (of selfs) and (artificial) ecology. I investigate the multi-scalar processes that actualise “models”: of the self, of world(s), and language. I hold a PhD [summa cum laude] in “Philosophy, Art and Critical Thought” from the European Graduate School, an inquiry on the concept of “contingency” in formal/natural languages; a research that connects metaphysical questions to the field of de-sign. I believe that “to write, is to research Chance” [GB], hunting emancipatory feedback-loops and promoting forms of positive-alienation (alienation-from-alienation). I run the multi-media lab, formAxioms, and I’m part of the collective Hothouse since 2021. I currently teach at the National University of Singapore, in the Department of Architecture, where I am the Programme Director of the Bachelor of Arts in Architecture.

Team varies from project to project. Here in the pic (2025), the core: Federico, Eva, Jacob, Coobs, Daryl, Corentin.