3D printing enables wearable micro-organisms

After Lucy McRae paved the way for wearable liquids with a low-tech implementation in Robyn's Indestructable music video, MITs Mediated Matter professor Neri Oxman has created a similar concept with her piece 'Mushtari' using a state-of-the-art multimaterial 3d printer.

She devised transparent hollow channels that are grown in the digital design space, as seen in the video below. These are then 3d printed, with the hollow spaces filled with support material for which she had to devise a specific method in order to be able to remove it completely.



The idea here is that new materials can be created on the body, such as fuels, yeast, food and medicine, by having microorganisms in the channels react to sunlight. For future developments I think it is important to place the wearer central in the design process - how will the wearable fit the wearer's dynamic identity, what qualities and values should it strengthen? I can imagine this to be useful for chefs who prepare special sauces, gravies, ragus, juices, marinades or creams and would like to carry their ongoing creation along with them through the restaurant to be able to show customers, taste and influence it on-the-fly. I can also imagine it to be useful for medical professionals such as doctors or holistic therapists who can then show their medicinal prowess with their own body and establish a sense of authority in a futuristic, estranging and possibly quirky way. Most important is that in the end, the human being has to be wearing the wearable, not the other way around.

Streetlight trees

This invention is a terrific example of how nature and technology are blending to create a humanized nature that is in ways better and more beautiful than the kind of nature we used to live in.

Taiwanese scientists, in their search for better light sources, have unintendedly created luminescent tree leaves. They implanted gold nanoparticles into the leaves, and after subjecting them to UV light they started emitting a reddish glow. What's more, this glow creates a kind of internal feedback loop in that the leaves' cells will photosynthesize more and thus further reduce carbondioxide in the air.

Unbelievable as it may sound, this might be the streetlight of the future. So if we invest more into researching the possible transformation of natural, seemingly useless things into 'products' with direct economic value, our cities can come to feel a great deal more 'natural.'

A car that is grown instead of assembled

The chance that you are anywhere near L.A. lies probably near 0.5%, but if you are, and like terrific concepts, go to the Los Angeles Auto Show. It is there that you can see the result of a design competition for a future car below a thousand pounds of weight, including some radical but mind-opening concepts.

For once, innovative thinking goes into changing the entire means of production of cars, and draws its inspiration from biology. The Mercedes Benz Biome concept is one of the most extreme ones I have seen, if not the most extreme. It imagines a car that is grown out of one module, submerged in a `Nursery´ where cars are developed in a matter of days. Like the human body, the car would essentially be one integrated system, with except for probably the wheels, no separate parts. The car has no engine. Power deliverance is biologically integrated into the system by having it feed on a nectar that is synthesized from plants and from solar energy. This way, we make technology dependent, or in fact an intrinsic part of, our natural environment, so we have to take care of it very well. It´s a fair idea to me that we do not only create economic, human value out of nature, but that also we create natural value out of human endeavors.




Other almost equally far-out concepts are the Toyota Nori, made out of seaweed and carbon fiber, the bionic Nissan iV, and the Smart 454 that is produced by knitting robots. Is that hinting at an answer to how an aging population can still add value? Personally, I will be quite excited to see either one of these concepts on the road in my lifetime.

Bacteria grow textiles

Bacteria + green tea + sugar solution = a brand new garment out of bacterial cellulose.

That's the idea of London-based researcher Suzanne Lee. Where the material may not be very comfortable to wear, it has a very unique aesthetic to it, so with further optimization this might go somewhere. Whether this can become their original vision of a "garment emerging from a vat of liquid, having been completely shaped by micro-organisms" is the question, but nothing is impossible of course.

a meat world

With titles like 'Kiss the fat' for her paintings that aesthetically glorify meat, Victoria Reynolds seems to emphasize the intricate and sensual beauty of biological material. After the rise of modernism, people evidently became alienated from this, even up to a point where it is a taboo to even speak about such things and feelings of disgust are conditioned into us associated with these realms of perception.



But in the future, the organic will become ours to create, giving us a new toolkit to construct our world with. Already, functioning hearts, livers and fleshly objects alike can be grown on demand from mice cells. It is time we face the perspective that we are just a bunch of cells, like any other organism, and incorporate flesh into our daily awareness.

But besides that, I also find it just a fantastic choice of medium to depict these abstract structures of flesh like a 17th century Baroque oil painting, and shows us how things like nature don't mean much to us anymore. Instead, we came to prefer creating our own world, and in that increasingly match the complexity of the nature that gave rise to our own nascence. I'd say yes to a world made of pulsating, throbbing, interacting and interconnected structures of meat, instead of all this cold concrete we live in now.

peripetics

This animation is titled "Peripetics or The installation of an irreversible axis on a dynamic timeline" and was created by Zeitguised. A beautifully abstract expressive way to depict dynamic physical systems. Especially the breathing gestalt at the end of the movie is interesting to see. If together with our systems we can come to live in a harmonious symbiotic rhythm, we can truly come to feel one with them and surpass the alienation we feel in our current lifeworlds.

life inside a tumor

Medical animations never cease to be mind-bendingly stunning. Watch this a second time, and imagine what you see to be a posthuman city.

The Flowers have Eyes

Here's some visual nourishment for the true fetishist of everything about biological technology, or  technological biology, whatever. I still am looking for a good term for this. I kind of like McLuhan's term 'hominization of the planet' (from 'The Global Village', 1989). Maybe George W. Bush would rather use 'planetary humanification'. Couldn't resist mentioning him at least once on the blog, excuse me.