Totems
Totems depicting biodiversity at the genetic, species, and ecosystem levels. These totems are the search for materials and chemical substances that can sustain and enhance biodiversity across living systems while at the same time, enduring the perils of climate change.
The technology used on these totems is chemically synthesizing with modern techniques in order to achieve biological pigments created inside the prototype by 3D-printed channels. It is computationally grown to create pockets with channel diameters ranging from millimeters to centimeters which allow for different levels of color saturation.
The combination of materials used are photopolymers, melanin from bird feathers, and polyethylene glycol.
Its usage is to help one understand, explain, and predict how pigments are generated on demand and recognize the environmental and human factors involved in its creation.
The benefits of prototyping with photopolymer totems is to utilize its formation as it can be tuned or even reversed to sustain the diversity of our planet.
The innovation found on this project is how it addresses the designers’ ability to chemically synthesize pigment and program its interaction across scales and species.
This project based on engineering melanin makes one question: who owns biological color? As these totems are still being developed and studied one still doesn’t fully know what are the biological and cultural implications of these new capabilities, its promises, and their risks? Through this art exhibition, one can question its ongoing relationship with biology and natural history.
Silk Pavillion II
A radical sustainable method for knitting, making, and building, combining kinetic manufacturing with biological construction.
The Pavilion is constructed with mechanical top-down kinetic manipulation enabling constant clockwise rotation of a mandrel that facilitates the 17,532 silkworms (sourced from Teolo, Italy) to upward spinning motion.
The Pavilion is comprised of three interrelated layers. Its primary structure is comprised of one-dimensional, braided steel-wire ropes. Its secondary structure is a two-dimensional fabric on which the silkworms are positioned and the tertiary is biologically formed by the silkworms.
Detailed view of partially dissolved textile tensioned to cable wires. The holes were intentionally placed to allow silkworms to navigate the interior and exterior surfaces.
This project mentions how this material of silk can be developed into clothing in the near future, and possibly architectural structures as a long term project.
The benefits of this project are to avoid the traditional process of harvesting silk which exterminates larvas while in their cocoon. This process allows a single silk strand to be unrolled from the cocoon without disrupting the life cycle and development of the organism.
The innovation and creativity amongst Silk Pavillion II are how humans put together silkworms and a kinetic apparatus in order to build a bio-sustained silk structure. It’s interesting how the structure relies upon the capability of the silkworms to spin longer lengths than the diameter of planet earth, in order to thread the tertiary layer.
This project makes one realize how unique and intelligent insect can act not only as a construction worker but as a collaborator with a man-made structure. It shows how one must go back to biology in order to learn from its technology and enhanced today’s designs in a cruelty-free and environmentally sustainable way.
