let’s start our discussion on the upcoming Temporary Autonomous Laboratory “Wormolution” here on this topic. Add comments, questions, ideas to work on, materials to prepare.
12. - 15. September, Le Commun, Geneva, Switzerland
Overview
Hackteria coordinates a Temporary Autonomous Laboratory during the early phase of “1000 Ecologies” inviting international researchers, artists and entrepreneurs as participants. The lab as a temporary construction should allow researchers from the fields of biology and engineering to collaborate with artists and so create links between the “two cultures”, the human sciences and the arts. On the topic of “Wormolution” participants will explore the territory between plastic as the abundant material of our society and the natural metabolisms and processes in nature. By combining their expertise, share simple instructions and engaging in critical and theoretical reflections artists and scientists will create new ways to combine multiple ecologies, maybe in a circular, maybe in a whole new way of freedom and awareness.
Keywords: Worms, Soil, Circular Economies, Plastics, Textiles, Metabolism, HLabX, Environment-culture, Lasers, Ecology and Life Sciences, Relational Biosphere
hey! what kind of equipment will be available for experimenting? i was thinking it might be fun to develop methods to look at the archaeology of plastic in the soil… how’s that fit in with what everyone else is planning?
Hi @kat happy we will finally meet. We have been trying density and chemical separation of microplastics in the last PlasticTwist lab session in Lucerne and Stuttgart. We filtered, sieved, used salt and sugar water and also tried digesting organic materials with hydrogen peroxide. We built centrifuges from harddrives and collected samples in the field. Happy to connect with you on that in Geneva. We also tried to stain the mircoplastic with Nile Red and took pictures in the ReSeq Fluorescent microscope. I can bring some Nile Red. We also feed daphia with fluorescent microplastics and took images to see how it was absorbed. (here is the picture of the daphnia and information about the fluorescent microscope https://reseq.hackteria.org/ ). Here some information on the last workshop: https://www.hackteria.org/wiki/HUMUS.Sapiens_on_TOUR
Hey @gaudi that looks great - yes super I’m happy to connect in Geneva, looks like we’re using similar methods. So from the images the micro plastics came out of the daphnia digestive tract and into the organism?
I’m particularly interested in looking at adsorption of other chemicals onto the micro plastics surfaces - have you looked at that? I spoke to an interesting researcher the other day who’s been looking at bisphenol A adsorption and interaction with microplastic, and how that affects aquatic fauna see for instance https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/15/2/280
Hi, cool!
May be may be of interest, I did some earthworm installation back in 2010: Dia de los Muertos
All the worms controlled a light sound installation.
This is super cool!! I also thought about to make TiO2 threads for the DSSC solid form electrolyte by the same technique but I don’t have the machine, maybe can we try some TiO2 as well?!
The daphnia absorbed lot’s of micro-spheres from the water. The daphnia in the picture is dead and maybe the digestive tract burst and the plastic went into the organism. Adsorption of chemicals sounds good, definitely want to know more.
I am posting here a topic that @dusjagr came up with and that we discussed in a chat.
Making plastic from milk. Denaturing of milk to get Casein.
“From the late 19th century until the 1930s casein was the starting material for the plastic Galalith, the u. a. was used for buttons and jewelry, but also for electrical insulation purposes.”
“Friedrich Ernst Todtenhaupt (1873-1919) undertook with the Galalith Society at the beginning of the 20th century also attempts to make artificial silk, but they were not successful.”
Hello to everybody! I’m sorry for my late reaction, I was working on the new website of my project, that will go online in the next couple of days.
For the meeting I will bring my waxworms (picture) and some samples of the material they produce.
As a industrial designer I’m interested in the actual application of technology and science, so I was thinking doing a workshop where we design and build futuristic worm-incubators for different applications…I think that could be fun…Let me know what you think about it!
Apropos this I also read about carbon nanotubes with manganese being used to catalyse plastic breakdown. Might be interesting too? And some peroxide / hydroxide with iron oxide would be good to have to hand too.
