Grow your clothes: grass dress, algae shoes, kombucha fabric

[Music] hey always wondered how it would feel today between earth and grass so i wanted to create a third skin that can be grown something that is alive and that one can develop a relationship with [Music] to create a growing garment there was a huge exploration [Music] i started with researching different type of seeds and made different germination tests while i developed an experimental craft technique to create the sift's yarn later i designed custom looms for weaving and customize a diy open source spinning machine i call this project be grounded best to locate the races i was inspired by the earthing theory which has to do with getting closer to nature and all its healing benefits so i thought this biotechnological garment has potential healing properties where users would be able to deal with common health issues such as stress or anxiety but through the comments somewhere so it's weird yeah but weird it's nice and as we continue exploring we get to know that it's a win-win if we live in a symbiotic system taking care of other organisms and natural resources as we care for us [Music] i can show you a little bit this world of biomaterials so this is the the latest biomaterial that we made you can consider it like a biodegradable leather it's made from alginate which is algae from the sea combined with a wool from the sheep of iceland because i went on a trip and i came back with a bag of wool the reason why i combined this is because i have been making many iterations on developing the material recipe so this was the the alginate simple recipe this is what happens now you can tear it apart but with the fibers i can show you this one it has fibers and alginate and it is fiber reinforced so it can not be it's like leather and you would treat it as leather no you wouldn't wash it and when you put it on your skin it will take the heat of your skin and and then you would also like kind of wax it every now and then this is kind of like our latest material so i am very fond of it at the moment it's my best material no so i will show you my recipes now which are open source and they are like powered by also all the people here that they work and they research so as part of their research they have to contribute to this material library for example here you have bioplastic gelatin based with acrylic paint and you can have the recipe how to make it so we have gelatin based we have potato starch we have alginette with spirulina and mica this one for example is with clay so biopolymer is the binder which is gelatin the plasticizer is what gives the flexibility then the additive we have like clay we can have food waste this is uh mata one is chocolate this is kind of edible we had the student that she wanted to make edible clothes in this case you have something like this very rigid so this is like a coffee cup made from coffee grains and it won't dissolve coffee and it won't dissolve with coffee because in this case we use pine resin so this one is a edible yucca peel cup it's like a sweet potato so you make a mix with your waist and you bake with actually with water and a little bit of the binder and then you can actually eat it as like a toast ah these ones are the new ones this is avocado peats with tapioca starch it's super light and rigid because we want to make insulation like acoustic panel yeah i don't know if it will be edible though so we have all of the waste we have like fish skin you go to the fish market you ask for the fish skin and then you can make the procedure with glycerin and alcohol so that you can actually create fish skin we have banana peels we have it's from orange peels it's kind leather we have any kind of waste like orange so this one is from coffee and it is a coffee leather it's amazing it's super nice this is orange and they even smell nice they have like very nice touch and this one for example is a little bag from coffee and again it's it's resistant to you could use it and it wouldn't fall apart yeah yeah it's coffee leather the binder on this the binding is alginate this one is with alginate with glycerin to make it more elastic it is a recipe based on molecular gastronomy you know this is verification we are using it from the cooking industry but for other reasons the students as part of their research they have to contribute to this material library it's kind of like a mad scientist huh these are not final products but there are possible like opportunities for people that they want to change the way things work glycerin you need to have more glycerin but cut it like here and then we can laser cut it look it's really the right materials today we finished the bio by adidas sneakers [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] infusion this is one of my favorite techniques it's kind of like a medieval technique they used to do harnesses and armors the ancient egyptians and greeks from the ancient and then it was more in the medieval age like 1600s and then due to mass production they stopped so i'm kind of like trying to bring it back through digital fabrication where you can bring new aesthetics and you can have like all of these molds that you can use now we are going to go to our invented bio lab so we occupied this elevator because we wanted to have a biola so here we have some kombucha growing so this is kind of the laboratory where we work with living organisms so here you have the green tea with the sugar and the vinegar then you put the scoby the mother bacteria and then it starts like colonizing and growing feeding from the sugar it makes the cellulose so this one we will leave it here for one month and a half and then once it is like one centimeter thick we will wash it very well with soap and then we will dry it in the sun like leather so it takes a while to grow things in general so it's kind of precious no and here is the mushroom cultivation we are doing different experiments to see what the mushroom eats so this is oyster mushroom with hemp nuts here we have reishi mushroom with hemp net which is more like dance and this is like coffee grains with oyster mushrooms the mushroom is colonizing and eating the coffee and the straw and it will make a brick in the end and why are you working with mushrooms mushroom is the future because it's an amazing material i mean mycelium is the the network of nature so it is the best material to work with but it's difficult would this be material for clothing these ones are more like for construction and architecture the ones that they are for clothing they would be like mushroom leather which like growing a thin film on the top layer without any three-dimensionality because when you want to do fashion you want to do sheets flat sheets but you really have to be kind of a polymath i mean you have to know a lot of different it's construction and fashion and astronomy oh there's a lot of crossover right you need to spend time trial and error talk with people and just focus we say okay this year we focus on mushroom and we try try try until we we make it and last year we focus on alginate so we try try and then it happens so it's a kind of trial and error situation and then here we have the bacterial dyes my students they did this yesterday and we work with coloring bacteria chromobacteria you can either extract the pigment or you can directly inoculate on fabrics in this case we would be harvesting only the pigments so then you can actually paint the whole fabric these ones as you can see is from my students that they did yesterday and it has already started growing so this will colonize the fabric and in this case we are kind of doing like a thai dyeing technique or shibori technique japanese of like folding how are you able to control what is basically a living entity so in this case the bacteria it is on the agar medium agar is the nutrient agar the food for the bacteria to grow in this case the food is in a liquid state in this case because you can impregnate the textile with the liquid food what are pigment bacterias what does that mean yeah bacterial dyes but people when they hear bacteria they are like no but we can call it living organism it sounds like safer these are bacteria biosafety level one so they're harmless because we want to democratize like science no chromobacteria is that something that an average consumer would know about it's something that they don't have in our kitchen you you have in your kitchen actually the ones that they give you more color are the ones that they are red they are seratia american sans which is the typical like if you have like any kind of contamination in your kitchen or in a hospital with the red dots this is colored bacteria but this is not biosafety level one it is more harmful so we don't work with that this is our dryer this is my green tea and these are the oranges so i'm drying these before drying them i have a little bit boiled them with baking soda so that they kill the bacteria yeah i'm drying them now and then i will trim them and shred them and then i will make the powder so that we have like all of this box this box of waste and then we can make the different biomaterials so this is like coffee waste this is green tea waste first we have to dry them then we shred them sift them and then after we can use them in the mixtures that we make so here agnes my student she's working in the theater making costumes it's for a mask i'm using cabbage for the color so cabbage actually is the one that will give you all the colors it is very ph sensitive and you can have all the different like gamma the color spectrum this is only ashes less ashes more ashes just to see how transparent and how it tends to transmit and this is with the vinegar yeah vinegar cabbage ashes yeah but also because it got another color and when i added the ashes it can just the moment we add the ashes change the color yeah yeah what's this project so this one is the one that we are making with the fibers and the alginate for these fashion designers so i'm just separating the fibers and then i create sort of like a crosshatch layers i can put them there and then we we place on a big frame we pour the alginate and then we like tap it down so that it's nice and smooth and then we let it dry we have kind of invented the technique and we like it it's actually a wolf of felting we were using like real wool but i was having to brush through it and that was quite a tedious process so um having this felting well has made our lives much better also the designer wanted this do you work when you're working with an established designer well she's an upcoming designer and she wants to work only with biomaterials but we also show to her how to make the materials for us it's important that she by herself learns how to make them they don't teach you this kind of stuff at school you know so like a lot of this thing is like cooking you know so if you get experimental with cooking it's kind of the same well so this mix is black because it has the activated charcoal so activate charcoal is used for filtering our water and filtering the pollution okay so supposedly this could be like a garment that is absorbing this of course we didn't test if this thing actually is filtering or not so we need to make the tests [Music] i mean there are also many questions about the biomaterials because you should be able to choose the material for this for textile industry for example that doesn't affect the food industry because we want land to eat we don't want land to make leather so you should try to use feedstocks or waste or plants but they are not used in the food industry good so we do the opposite of the textile industry we put the hair back but yeah there is no substitute for leather at the moment we can do it like that yeah of course if you want to make this technique more reproducible you will need to have like this machine that actually does this thing that i'm doing now so now this is very scientific you can see it's like massaging the material so make it leather buy a level but the thing is that if you want to make something that it will actually be able to have a bigger impact it should be compatible with an existing industry so when we talk about the textile industry we would be talking about making thread so bio-based fiber yes because it can go then to the knitting machine and the sewing machine and the weaving machine so now we are applying calcium chloride calcium chloride is the thing that actually solidifies the alginate makes a chemical reaction yes so now it is leather it is waterproof it has created the the surface the little membrane calcified the alginate and that's it you see now it needs to dry so it doesn't get in your skin anymore no it doesn't get in my skin and it has made this like encapsulated the membrane now we will let it dry it will lose its mass it will lose the excess of water and then it will be red of course we can here in the fab lab we can if we really want to push forward this project we can make the machines to automate this process so we can make a poorer and leveler and we can make all of this in a sprayer [Music] but first we need to do like some if we want to scale up that we need to do some material tests to see like what are the properties and be able to compare it with something that is already existing it's it's difficult to bring new products in the market so what we would call subtractive manufacturing is what the industry has known for more than 200 years because this one starts from a full block of material and then you excavate you sculpt and you take out the material reaching to have a mold that is your 3d model this is subtractive manufacturing therefore you have waste yes you have waste what is additive manufacturing is the 3d printing what came and revolutionized kind of like the way we make things this one we are making a test because we are calibrating the 3d printer so we are making like the simple cube when you have the opportunity to compute material performance through the 3d modeling then you can put in the material the inherent properties that you want it to have you can also do this by geometry you know so you can design in the 3d model the material behavior this one it is designed to be stretched in one direction because of the geometry but not in the other direction so this is how you 3d model behavior so this is like a a printed chain so simple so you design it so that there are the joints already what's the material there pla polylactic acid typical fdm material the pla plastic polylactic acid is based in corn corn starch but i don't suggest that anybody can make whatever because this needs mechanical recycling it's not compostable so we actually have a trimmer here that we can recycle this and then extrude again so that you can have the closed loop but not everybody can have this machine to make pellets now and then extrude it again i like 3d printing applied on textiles and i think it's kind of like the future it is tackling a little bit the subject of print on demand so you don't need to have like a lot of stock and also the customization that you don't need to print like any copies super cool the trick here is how you can use already made infrastructures changing all the material so how can we use the plastic industry that is now extruding with petroleum to use other kind of feedstocks if we can do that then we it's a success because if we need to make a whole new industry then it's a bigger investment yesterday i made this bioplastic because i want to make a lamp so you have gelatin you have a little bit of glycerin so that is not so elastic then you have some hibiscus flowers and then you have some mica powder and let's see if we can i'm not quite convinced that the future will be with this kind of plastics but i think that putting the knowledge and the mindset and the mentality for others to create their own materials it is also helpful when they when they go to the industry and they can actually ask for mixtures that they want because they know that they can make them as they want so don't take anything for granted now i would like to show you how it comes out from the other side but what i see here is that it's still very liquid and i cannot peel it off correctly because if it is not liquid then you can just peel it off very easily so now it needs to dry more we will leave it here for two days in an angle so that the excess of water it falls down and it will dry faster this one is from my student catherines we grow this kombucha leather and then she was designed to laser cut it like drying it so actually the students in the textile academy they also try to design these little new industries no the micro factor is that they can actually produce mushroom leather or kombucha leather bioplastic industry is not something new it's something that comes before the petroleum-based industry it was before having petroleum-based plastics we were using actually casein-based plastics which are milk based plastic and due to the fact that we are in an economy of petroleum you have all of this facilitation for the industry to be able to produce massively in excess i think that we are heading towards an other kind of industries i always believe that art the artistic creation is the vehicle for technological advances

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 66,295

Keywords: biofabricating materials, grown materials, bioplastics, growing fabrics, bacteria materials, bacterial leather, alginate, fish skin leather, mushroom leather, fruit leathers, biochromes, natural dyes, bacterial dyes, animal fibers, vegetable fibers, color modifiers, dyes from roots, flower dyes, bioplastics recipes, natural bacterial dyes, circular fashion, agile fashion, fabricademy, kombucha fabric, algae leather, crystal shoes, anastasia pistofidou, begrounded

Id: VPUX7nRlYAU

Length: 30min 34sec (1834 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020