Jan 17-21 (1 week)
Teammates - Bea, Kristen, Pranjal
<aside> 🔍 Brief: Design and make a bio material instrument and play it together
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The brief seemed so simple and yet so complex. The guest speakers Anoushka and Ronnie gave us a little bit of background on what biomaterials and how to obtain sounds from materials. This project gave me an impression to be a highly experimental one. Having just only one week in hand, we had to get hands-on since day one.
It was nice that the college arranged for the materials next day, so we could just get started with the project. After collecting the ingredients, we headed to Bea’s place to start sampling each ingredients. We followed Anoushka’s recipe and after a few technical difficulties, we made a couple of batches of Alginate (with and without Glycerol). Those didn’t set at all even after a day.
Sodium Alginate with and without Gelatin
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Now we got a bit tensed because we felt like we were a bit behind. In the meantime we also started thinking about the various forms in which we could make the mould for us to experiment with. Surprisingly, the Agar Agar set very quickly and we got a nice texture also out of it.
The fabric gave the material an interesting texture
Agar Agar sheet made with a little bit of Glycerol
For the next batch we added other substances into the pour to see how each material reacts to it.
Additive: Banana peel
Additive: Mushroom
Additive: Mainly Turmeric and chilli powder
Additives: Bread, Spinach and carrot
This developed mould over the next couple of days
Two days had went by and at this point we started experimenting the sound part of the project. The texture that Agar Agar created interested us in exploring more in that direction. There were many ways in which we could shape the sheet. Firstly, stretching it over a cup and hitting it, then by scratching or rubbing it. Next we wanted to experiment with materials that was tensile something like a string. So we twisted a sheet of agar agar to check its elasticity.
Agar agar added with mushroom added to it
Experimenting with sound and medium
The sheet wasn’t stable enough and the additives added weakened it.
We assembled the audio equipment like the contact mike and the H2N and attached it to the headphones. It was fun time for us to experiment the equipment on various everyday surfaces. It was understood that the mic picks up the vibrations and not the sound.
Various Alginate pours with different additives under a magnifying glass
After we ran out of the various combinations, we explored other bio materials. Kombucha seemed very tempting, but we thought that we didn’t have enough time to ferment it and process it. And while talking about fermenting I remembered that how sugar can be engineered into different forms. The other thing that we explored was caramel strips. Obtaining the feedback from members in tension seemed very attractive to me. But there was greater risk now. I remembered the quote John said “the only mistake one can do is to do nothing” and so we explored various forms in which we could solidify the caramel.
Sample of caramel in different forms