Charlotte 't Hart is working towards a Musical Bonbon  (in collboration with Karin van der Veen)

"As I was interested in listening to the inner sounds of our body I tried to make a stethoscope in the lab.  But I wanted to listed to the smallest sounds in the body like the cracking of the bones so I needed better equipment. Outside of the lab this research resulted in my stethofoon presentation.

Meanwhile there was Karin van der Veen who looked for someone to help her make “MuziekBonbons”. She wanted to listen to music that comes from chocolate. I came up with the idea of putting a piezo element in a chocolate and experimented with this in the lab."

Charlotte: "This works because the vibrations of the piezo transfer through the bones of your jawbones to the little bones in your ear and you can hear the sound. You have to close your ears though to hear it better. But I don’t mind that, I really like the idea of handing out earplugs before letting people listen to something.

Another thing that came out when I tried it on fellow students is that you start drooling because you have to hold the piezo in between your teeth and there is a wire coming out of your mouth. This is something I still have to solve.

Alse there is the thing of the coverage of the piezo element because you don’t want this metal and christal in your mouth. My first experiment was with isolation tape, then I put heat shrikable tubing around the element an dipped in chocolate for a second version.

But it did not feel very comfortable yet and wasn’t very durable as well. What was very nice is that you did not have to bite through the chocolate to hear the sounds, you could just put your teeth on the chocolate.

Now I am experimenting with smaller piezo’s and planning on using epoxy as a coating. Also we are experimenting with different tastes of chocolate in combination with sounds.

I will present the first version of this work on my end presentation of this year, june 2012 together with Karin.

I really like that I sort of came back to sugar in combination with the human body!!"

  

Guided by the idea of the live cinema in its truest sense, Nenad Popov and klaravat developed methods for growing specific kinds of living matter directly on 16mm film loops: mostly friendly species of fungi like moulds or yeasts.
The biological processes transform the film while it is playing in the projector. This results in an incredible variety of evolving landscapes composed by often unexpected assortment of textures, patterns and colors which, removing the spectator from the real world, let his subconscious free to fall into a dream.
They created a gratifying environment where not just the moving image will seduce the audience but the mechanical sound and structure of the projectors.

During the festival Lighthouse, 15th of March 2012 at the Korzo Theater (http://www.korzo.nl/), The Hague, Nenad Popov and klaravat showed their grown mouldy films in a installation form.

 

complete research process of Eucariotic Punk: http://eucarioticpunk.blogspot.com/

Wednessday 02/03/2012 we had a awesome fungi workshop at Mediamatic in Amsterdam with Maurizio Montalti, a passionate researcher, artist and engineer interested in life's bigger and smaller insights.  http://www.mauriziomontalti.com

Besides he learned us to make a sawdust substrate on which woodloving mushrooms like Black Poplar,  Shitake or Glow in the Dark mushrooms like to grow,  Maurizio gave detailted feedback on all our fungi questions rising from our various  trial and errors fungi experiments in the last months.

We began the workshop by making a mixture of sawdust (from a nice windmill in Zaandam 49%), rye grains ( roggegraan, 4%), wheat bran (tarwezemelen 1%), calcium carbonate (krijt, verkrijgbaar bij Jacob Hooy 1%) and some water. Every substance is weighed and measured properly before we mix them thoroughly together. We put this mixture (the substrate) in special filter bags, and put the bags in a pressure cooker (for 40- 45 minutes) to get rid of the existing mold and fungus spores that are often naturally present on the wood. After we cool down the bags (which takes an hour) we add the mushroom spawn (10 gram per 1,5 kg substrate or one spawndowel) in the cleanroom, to avoid contamination and sealed the bags of. while waiting for the bags to cool down Maurizio passionate told lots of stuff like that you have to keep in mind 3 parameters for optimal growing conditions. that is temperature (25- 30 degrees celcius), humidity and sterile conditions), letting myclium growing in the dark goes faster. That bacteries normaly fall from above so keep your bags horizontalwhen you open them and work fast. You can use 70% ethanol or alcohol to sterile your home made glove box. Oyster mushrooms are strong and can be grown on just straw nd don't really need a hyper sterile environment.

It will take about 6 months before the shitake batches are fully grown. ( 4 months for the Black Poplar) When the time is ripe for sprouting you can give it a shock; by lowering the temperature with 10%, to let light come in and let oxygen in by simply opening the bag or by making a cut in the bag. Make sure you keep the humidity high, by spraying it every day (but don't spray on the mushroom self). Only when the substrate block is completely white you can inject it with water with a syringe. You can aswell put  the bag in a terrarium together with a a few bowls of water, open te lit a few times a day to let oxygen in.

Also Maurzio and Margarita guided us along the works of amongst The Secret Sounds of Spores by Yann Seznec and Patrick Hickey http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzpaAMYSPTA. Ecovative's great light weight mycelium material samples http://www.ted.com/talks/eben_bayer_are_mushrooms_the_new_plastic.html, The mycotectures of Phil Ross, and the mycelium moulds of Thomas Pleeging http://thomaspleeging.nl/projects/mould.php.>

To regenerate a harvested substrate batch, you can give it a cold bath (for about 4 hours.) and dry it with a towel.

In short  Maurizio  realy opened some  doors in this workshop about the secret art of growing mushrooms.

Mediamatic's Mycelium Rising blog has great fungal topics: http://www.mediamatic.net/search/101422/en

 

 

 

Hot Pool (2010) is a diorama in which a landscape of wax continuously transforms under the influence of melting and solidification phenomena. The installation is an autonomous generative system wherein candle wax and heat are the shaping elements. The ongoing process is visible for the audience through a small window.

A black container is standing on six metal legs. A window opening is located at the front. Inside the container the basic facilities are installed: 20 kg. of candle wax, 61 heating elements, fans, electronics and lighting. The heating elements are mounted underneath the bottom of the metal container. These elements are switched on and off individually by a special algorithm so that the candle wax melts locally and solidifies again after a while. Through expansion and shrinking during the melting and coagulation process an expressive landscape emerges that slowly changes in time.

This time lapse recording (acceleration 20x) gives an impression of what is happening inside the diorama. http://notnot.home.xs4all.nl/hotpool/hotpool_youtube.html

afmeting: doorsnede 113 cm., hoogte 154 cm.
materialen: hout, lak, metaal, verwarmingselementen, ventilatoren, kaarsvet, electronica

source: http://notnot.home.xs4all.nl/index.html

KingOyster,  Eryngi mushroom

Amadou of the Fomes fomentarius mushroom, close up

Elephant Man skin mushroom

Marijke;s dough test

Uldy filmsInspired around the theme of manufactured landscapes, Clara Lozano and Nenad Popov have been investigating the possibilities of making a film using biological processes. Films were produced by growing the molds appearing from food (milk, tomato, etc) directly on 16mm film.
The results are abstract film compositions of colors, patterns, textures and sounds where each piece is unique and even evolving during the reproduction in the 16mm film projectors.

The process: 

After wondering around how to experiment with film in a way that could be or become a performative material which is able to evolve over time we come with the idea.
 We are going to grow molds in 16mm film!

After recovering the wooden structure, that we are going to use to place our materials, with plastic foil for kitchen use, we can start pouring our ingredients.

1. Tomaten puree
2. Vole Yogurt (with blue food colorant)
3. Kookroom
4. Milk with green colorant

The wooden rail with the covered film needs to be covered with plastic around.

After one week some molds have grown on the film. We remove the film from the plastic where is quite stuck.

We clean the wood structure to place the film back, this time without the plastic. It needs more time! Nevertheless, it's very stinky!

full research of Nenad Popov and klaravat can be found at http://eucarioticpunk.blogspot.com/

Ronald made an architectural scale model out of mycelium substrate blocks. He cut them in slices with a handsaw, wetten the parts which wil connect to each other. He speeded up the proces by filling the caps with sawdust. Keep the whole moist, and within no time there is a living architectural model with even mushrooms growing out to support a wall of this structure.

How to take care of your:

Grijze Oesterzwam, Grey Oyster-mushroom, Pleurotus ostreatus  http://www.casaforesta.nl/producten/groeibaaltjes/grijze-oesterzwam

Koningsoesterzwam,  King Oyster-mushroom, Pleurotus Eryngii  http://www.casaforesta.nl/producten/groeibaaltjes/koningsoesterzwam

-keep your substrate between 8-18 celsius
-after a few days cut two  slits of about 5 cm in the top of your bag.
-spray (for example with a plantspray) a little water through the holes.
-the mushrooms needs light, but don't place them in direct sunlight, a basement or a shed with a small window is a perfect spot.
-after a week you will see the mycelliumthreads spreading through the straw. If you bag turns green or orange, then its contaminated.(and you have to throw it out)
-whenever small mushrooms appear on top, cut the plastic on both sides till the top is completely open.
-fold the plastic down when the mushrooms grow harder, spray water 2x a day. (keep it damp, but not soaked in water)
-after the first harvest,  give your straw mixture a rest, turn the plastic back; at half a cup of water and close it with tape. after a week make some new slits in the bag.
wait patiently, the second harvest will come only after a few weeks. When nothing happen, put it away cool in a shed. Another method is that after the first harvest you can soak the mycelliumstrawmixture onder water for four hours, tkae it our and dry it with some towels. After the second harvest you can put the package on a compostheap.

-If you wanna make new substrate; boil some straw for about ten minutes and add 1/10 of your old substrate in it and repeat the whole process.

 

The Oistermushroom loves to eat motoroil. Here Paul Stamets  is pooring motoroil in his staw-substrate. At the moment there is more oil spilled than there is currently mycelium available. Much more mycelium is needed and, fortunately, we know how to generate it.
http://newparadigmdigest.com/3859/oil-spills-mycoremediation/

 

Robert Smithson (1938-1973) was highly critical of art that sought to reclaim degraded land. He preferred to demonstrate industry's role in molding new land forms. Smithson thought artists shouldn't clean up or decorate industry's messes, so his notion of reclamation meant re-evaluating a site's ugliness or appreciating its problematic condition for what it is.He didn't offer to create works that would rejuvenate the land, since he believed that such works "cosmetically camouflage the abuse." "In accepting the reality of the site, Smithson ensured that the damage from industry would remain visible."  Smithson's plan for Bingham Copper Mining Pit-Utah Reclamation Project (1973) made no attempt to ameliorate the blight caused by strip mining. Rather, he proposed to add four small curving lines at the very bottom of the world's largest open-pit mine, in order to transform a three-mile trench into a gorgeous gorge. http://greenmuseum.org/c/ecovention/sect3.html#sites

 

glue pour, Vancouver, Canada, December, 1969