6. Biofabricating
##Lecture notes
Lecture by Cecilia Raspanti, slides and info here
###Techniques
Different ways of categorizing: by what they imitate (leather, plastics etc), or by how they are made.
Can also categorize them under RAW ingredients and MADE materials.
####Bio-based They are made of organic or inorganic materials. Are they biological? Then they are bio-based.
####Bio-degradable Can they be broken down by microbes under specific conditions that we - humans - create?
####Bio-compostable Can they be composted within 180 days?
###The Plastic Issue How long does your product need to function? Let the material follow function. A throw-away cup does not need to live longer than 45 minutes, why is it made of a material that takes forever to break down?
"Plastic is a substance the earth cannot digest." The 8 issues with plastics:
- It never goes away
- Its breakdown pollutes ground water
- Threatens wildlife
- Poisons our food chains
- Affects human health
- Attracts other pollutants
- Piles up in the environment
- Costs billions to abate
Source: www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org
###What are plastics?
Basis is a polymer with then added:
- plasticizer, filler, stiffening, or expanding
- color/pigment
- stuff to make it more flexible, avoid shrinkage, to structure and reinforce, to create foams
###Processes plastic
- Machine it and assemble it
- Glue by polimerisation
- Stitch together later
- Casting or machining
- Manual or machine cutting
- Milling, drilling, turning
- Heat shaping
- Impressing 3D patterns
- Casting, mould casting
- Profiles tubes, rods
- Digital extrusion
- 3D mould
###Basic options for bio-based & bio-degradable materials We want stuff that is bio-based AND bio-degradable but ideally also bio-compostable (within 180 days).
Gelatine, agar, alginate, casein, cellulose, chitine or starch based plastics are a good start. These are the polymer replacements. Then we look for alternatives to modify the properties of the bioplastic, such as:
- Glycerine = plasticizer
- Egg shells, chalk = avoid shrinkage
- Fibers and natural debris = stiffeners
- Green soaps = expander (foaming)
- Natural dyes & pigments (like we did in biochrome week!)
- etc. etc.
Each have their own properties that can often be seen as both pro's and cons.
###Not new media, people ALL of these are heritage techniques, they were used long before we started making plastics (polymers). Credit always, and be specific about your modifications and local specifity of the conditions under which you are cooking the materials, or specificity of your local ingredients. Room temperature in Amsterdam and New Delhi are not the same. Also tap water may or not have a neutral PH value, can be alkaline, which can breakdown some materials but not others.
####Documenting
- Tools
- Ingredients
- Procedure
- Properties
##Algae basics
add here
###Algae inspiration
Eric Klarenbeek & Maartje Dros - Algae plastic 3D print filament
Austeja Platukyte - Foodsafe Algae packaging (fully compostable)
Amam - Bioplastics and agar packaging (90% of plastics are packaging)
Margarita Follert - Alginate top, packaging in natural colors
Carolyn Raff - agar beads: casted, cut and used for embroidery. She also makes amazing textures and patterns.
Jasmine Linington - alginate sequins (somewhat waterproof, but not soapproof, soap tends to be too alkaline).
Stephanie Santos - agar composite and gold leaf. She used bioplastics as glue instead of sewn seams.
Catherine Euale - alginate top, lasercut.
##Gelatine basics
Will shrink a bit. You can keep adding liquid and heat and keep manipulating it.
Gelatine bio foil, bio resin: strong but sensitive to heat.
Gelatine silicon: super stretchy and totally compostable.
###Gelatine inspiration
Miriam Ribul - bioplastics, check out her issuu book!
Juliette Pepin - amazing analysis of different bioplastics. Nice description and comparisons between the materials. Check out her documentation here
Aagje Hoekstra - Coleoptera (insect shells and bioplastics)
Mayan Pesach - Food waste mixed with gelatin, creating beautiful colors!
Textile Lab Amsterdam - Material archive
Maria Viftrup - gradient going from bio-silicon to bio-resin. To study how materials react to one another where they meet.
Maria Viftrup - dye your plastics with bacterial dye!
Tessa & Maria @Textile Lab Amsterda - Fish scale plastics: food waste, fish skin, scales, bones and pigments. Super durable.
Clara Davis - Laser cut bags and booklet made with modular stitches, no seams. Also made a booklet!
Great Dalessandro - bioplastic dress that changes over time, based on the lifespan of each material. Fades and decomposes layer by layer.
###Questions and tips:
- How do you avoid mold? It depends a lot on the moisture in the air in the environment where you work. If you work in a dry room you experience this less. The amount of water in the recipe is also a factor. Less water will dry faster so less chance for mold growing, but also harder to cast.
- Use everything the same to replicate the same environment, down to the spoon you use to stir the pot :)
- There are no mistakes, look at the mistake with love and discover a new application for it. Someone will be looking for exactly that.
##New leathers
###Microbial leather: kombucha A fermented tea drink. A symbiotic colony of bacterial yeast (SCOBY), it feeds on the sugars and tea to create layers of cellulose that can be dried up. Treated with different techniques and recipes. Results sit somewhere between leather and paper. There are many different strings of these, they are microbial so they behave similarly but there are also variations in how they behave.
The bacteria turn the environment acidic very quickly but some experiment with adding vinegar. THR34D5 has interesting recipes and methods for after-treatments.
Kombucha is sensitive to humidity and water. It laser cuts beautifully. You can easily stitch it wiht sewing machine, dye it with any acidic dye. Lots of pinks and reds! Alkaline dyes don't work so well, ut you can use it with pigments just before drying it.
It smells a bit like honey and vinegar mixed. Things get stinky when you grow big pieces. It grows between 25-30 degrees Celcius best and quickest.
####Kombucha inspiration!
Suzanne Lee - Microbial Leather 3D moulded top and jackets. GORGEOUS! Stamped patterns with bio-inks. So nice.
Kwasaki Kazuya - kombucha mixed with digital fabrication. Created a jacket, 3D scanned it, CNC'd a mold and grew kombuha on top of it, for it to grow in the 3D shape directly. Whoa!
Moya Hoke - Green tea kombucha suit. She made a molding tray in the shape of a suit! Hilarious. Haha. Made of coated metal, would not work in uncoated metal.
Sammy Jobbins - lasercut structure.
Zionium - green and black tea wallet. Semitransparent so you can see within your wallet! Lovely contrast stitching, really looks and feels like leather. But if you stitch this, moisture can access the material. Hmmm.
Emma van der Leest - kombucha and pigments bag for Biocouture London. Laser cut and laser engraved, speckled with powdered pigments to color the surface before drying.
Emma Sicher - kombuch and food waste, e.g. little sugar bags.
Barbara Arteaga - Kombucher: electrospinning machine, to spin cellulose from kombucha instead of growing it in layers.
###Fish skin leather (spoiler alert: not an innovation)
The Inuits have been working with this forever. Hundreds of years of experiments with local materials happening there. Boom. Be aware of your surroundings, see what is already easily found around you.
Maria Hees - carp leather dyed and naturally tanned. Tanning chemicals tend to be very polluting. Can be done with tea, bark and nuts or tara pulver, whatever contains large amounts of tannins.
Nienke Hoogvliet - salmon skin stool. Leather is probably stronger than the metal frame.
Nienke Hoogviet - laser cut salmon leather sequins
Jurii Kasao - jelly fish leather dried on 3D mould into the shape of a bag.
###Mycelium leather
Vegan leather: very soft and thin material. Thickness depends on amount of substrates and how long you let it grow. Also a recipe for a composite.
Maurizio Montalti - mycelium leather bag & shoes (high pressurized).
Maurizio Montalti - Mogu: Industry of natural processes
Aniela Hoitink - Mycelium Dress. Patches grown in petri dishes. No seams
Gradozero - Muskin (mycelium leather). It feels amazing, like a thick suede: hairy and smelling good.
Mycoworks - Check out their resources page!
###Fruit leather
Starting with food waste. Rotterdam students went to market and looked at stuff disposed at supermarkets. Often vendors have to pay to dispose of e.g. fish waste. Also for fruit waste.
Fruit leather Rotterdam - samples and concept bag
Aurore Bourguignon - Fabtextiles - coffeewaste bag
Barbara Sanchez - Fabtextiles booklet on issue
###Algae leather
Using algae without turning it into powder first.
Violaine Buet - the master of algae leathers and seaweed layers. Woven algae strips into fabrics.
Tjeerd Veenhoven - Algae fibers and yarn. Algae covering sea in China so the light could not come through. This is not great for the sealife below the surface. Let's take out the algae and use it.
Julia Lohmann - leather stretched into architecture. She stretches it out onto large constructions, masks, collargs etc. She uses giant algae, and treats/tans them the way you would leather.
Nina Edwards Anker - Chlorophyta algae dried into shape, crunched up transucent lamp shades by Studio Nea. Lovely.
###High-tech lab grown materials
Lab grown skin - "Pure Human", Tina Gorjanc made bags grown from Alexander McQueen's skin.
Modern Meadow - Zoa's lab grown leather. Apparently very nice.
Elisa Brunato - cellulose extraction sequins. Beautiful! Uses crytallization of cellulose to create reflective material, where cellulose turns into crystals that act as a prism diffracting light.
###Silks
Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley - silk spun by spiders from Madagascar, dyed, woven into a cape.
Spider silk is also done by Adidas (industrially engineered, so not natural collected by spiders).
Bolt Threads' Spider silk - industrially engineered spider silk.
##Cooperation with nature
Tamara Orjola - Forest wool (pine tree fibres), made of "tree waste", the tree sheds them anyway. They can be softened and spun into yarn or by felting it.
Carole Collet - Domesticated Roots (lace-like root structures). I love love love this project so much.
Sarmite Polakove - Bark fabrics: studiosarmite.com produced quite soft material. When you cut wood and take layer between the bark and wood, which can be cut into strips or just used as a whole (which is difficult to attain). You can use these strips for knitting and weaving. Leather-like.
Billie van Kwatwijk - tanned cow stomach leather. www.billievankatwijk.com/ventri. Cow stomach has very beautiful textures. Goes from white to dark brown. These textures cannot be designed.
Austeje Platukyte - pine tree resin composites. Very smooth beautiful resins. In Japan they used to use pine tree resin to create lacquers that can be sanded done very finely. Age-old.
Diana Scherer - Rootsystem domestication:
Shellworks - Ed Jones, Insiya Jafferjee, Amir Afshar and Andrew Edwards. Carbshell extract (chitosan) to create waterproof plastics. Not completely biodegradable. Great patterns and colors, translucencies for different uses. They made their own machines for everything! OMG yesssssss. The recipes are quite well-known. The machines are probably not open-source.
##Material archives
There are so many out there. They are so interestinggggg.
- Material Archive Amsterdam Textile Lab
- Fab Textiles Barcelona
- Material Experience Politenico Milano
- ZHDK Material
- Material Connexion
- Materfad Barcelona
- Surfacematter London
- Materio
- many many more, see slides.
These are not only about the materials but also about finishings!
##Assignment
- Experiment with grown materials
- Experiment with crafted materials
- Stick a go-pro to your forehead and record everything