Midterm Johan R

http://bha5.bioclub.org/participants/johan/

I would like to experiment with local fibers, bacteria and fungi to create sustainable bio materials and edible by-products such as kombucha leather, mycelium bricks, etc.

https://vimeo.com/258703232#t=1634s

Feedback

Georg: During last week's feedback discussion, an interesting aspect of the project surfaced: the distinction between the devices that enable bacteria, fungi, etc to grow - and the living bacteria, fungi, etc themselves.
Also, the devices are prototyped used wood, it might be an interesting exercise to turn the BHA devices into growing objects themselves, and blur the border between outside/inside of the incubator.

Roland: The above idea of a grown incubator is amazing and fascinating on many levels. Very science-fiction. Writer Olivia Butler has this story about a seed growing into a space ship. This grown incubator could look completely different then the MDF design of course. Which makes me think of Thomas Thwaites project in which he designs and makes a toaster completely from scratch, making all the materials - and it looks nothing like your standard toaster, but it works! ( dezeen ). On your presentation ideas: I like that you're open to try many things. I would suggest deciding which one to focus on first. BHA student Nel Thomas from Kopenhagen shares a lot in the Fungal Materials facebook group, which is a great resource of inspiration.

Malu: There is a group of designers working on growing furniture from trees or roots (full-grown.co.uk) Maybe that could also be an interesting approach. Instead of 'eating the whole lab equipment you could harvest it'. I did do some experiments with root already and they do follow a shape pretty well.

Laura: Super interesting concepts developing in this chat. I do hardly recommend you Johan to join the Kombucha Genomics project, a joint project by Counter Culture Labs and BioCurious. Although this project aims to describe kombucha at a biomolecular level, there are diverse interests in the group. That is the case of Kombucha Genomics in Argentina, where the main interest is brewing different types of scobys in order to get diverse types of leathers (personally I'm interested in the whole project, from genetics up to leather and fermented foods in general). I'm part of the project and though it started several months ago, there are people joining us constantly. On sat 24th march 10amPST / 1pmEST / 18:00GMT, there will probably be a Q&A session, depending on how many people want to join the session. Let me know if you could join at those hours (I think that is 3am sunday for you!) Johan Laura: by the way I do mentin that I found super interesting yesterday's talk on BioCultura by Andrea Polli. It has lots of aspects related with your project and inspiring for it!