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7. BioFabricating Materials

Research & Inspiration

describe what you see in this image

  1. Megan Heeres - Invasive Paper Project
  2. Aléa Work: Stella Lee Prowse & Miriam Josi - Mycelial Patterns
  3. Maddie Olsen - Eukaryotic Elegy
  4. Aradhita Para - Creator and Founder of Cellsense biobeads
  5. Sasha Fishman - Timekeepers: Cicada Chitosan bioplastics
weekly assignment

Check out the weekly assignment here

References

I've been tuned into the world of biomaterials, biodesign, and biofabricatoin for a few years. In 2023, in my undergraduate program, a team of my peers and I developed a project called Mother Nacre. We presented a concept for creating a new generation of heirlooms, preserving precious plastic objects with a coating of biomimetic nacre, AKA Mother-of-Pearl. Mother Nacre was presented at Parsons and MoMA in New York City in 2023, and was awarded the top prize at the 2023 BioDesign Challenge. Kind of a shock, but hard work pays off. Still very proud of this project and collaboration, even though I feel shy talking about it. Love to my team members and instructors: Finn Yencken, Sarah Becker, Lily Xiao, Orin Noel, Riley Cox, Starling Wolfrum, Laurain Park, and Ryan Hoover ◡̈

I also use biomaterials, found and made, in my own creative practice. I collect things like insect wings and cat whiskers. I make and use alignate string as weft for weaving or yarn for crochet. I work with agar-agar bioplastics as an alternative to resins and vinyls. I apply metaphorical meanings to these materials; preservation and decay; windows and portals; memory and vision.

Fabricademy Alumni

Tools

Material List

Collective Research

Our efforts this week were collaborative, so I wanted to gather the results in one place. The PDF is too large to upload to this site as a file, so I am also including a link to it: click for presentation

I'm searching for a better way to embed the file, but for now the only free way is to embed from my personal Google Drive.

Process and workflow

From the documentation above, I am including the recipes here that I worked on in class.

Tajah and I teamed up to make the gelatin bio-foam recipe.

Gelatin Foam Gelatin Foam

I love making alginate string. I had not done it in 2 years so I was excited to try it again. I felt like I still had the muscle memory to extrude it from the squeeze bottle, which was very satisfying. I also made foils and beads

Alginate1 Alginate2 Alginate3

Cecilia showed us how to make vegan fur from cattails.

Cattail1 Cattail2

Together, we got a tutorial from Niehs on starting Kombucha and Mycelium.

Kombucha1 Kombucha2

Mycelium1 Mycelium2

I opted out of making Fish Skin Leather because I really do not like handling raw meat!

From Waag this year, Ambermade some thorough and fun documentation of the fish skin leather process!