Remixing Materials

I cannot not mention in these two reflections, that life changed a bit. Under the word of life, I’m thinking of sensing time, being physically somewhere or just how I can focus.

Due to several changes, I had to travel back to Budapest 2 times and due to a third change which was, being tested positive and becoming sick, I had to spend many classes online, which was challenging from many aspects - being able and stay awake with fever or just being able and actually require this physical knowledge through the screens.

Thanks to Lara I was able to get the knowledge I needed from the presentations she uploaded or spending a whole day with the groups online and study about different processes and recipes of making bio-materials. My only physical contribution in the second week was that I could collect food waste, such as: garlic peels, cocoa beans, egg shells and grounded coffee to be able and experiment with those, how can we turn waste into new materials and by that later on study how to give them new life. So I gave this food waste to my classmates and watched them throughout the day how they turned them into materials in different shapes and forms.

After the class we got a gorgeous package of every equipment we needed fo making Bio materials at home. So this week when I will be able and come out of my room with a negative test to not infect my other IAAC roommates, we will experiment on home wast in the context of: using already existing materials for a rounded lifecycle and to create new kind of “hybrid-living, self-growing” materials in the means of bacterial cellulose.

So now that I was able to come out of my room, which mostly means I was able to come out of fever, because coming out of my room is still strictly in mask and washing hands regularly, because of still being positive, me and my roommate dived deep in our own kitchen, in bio materials. We tried all of the recipes with food waste we collected throughout our isolation and with some plants we were collecting on the way of my obligatory mental health walk.

This was a very interesting process to finally implement all the knowledge we acquired through the online classes. We used the kit we got from the team from school and made different kind of materials, with grounded cocoa bean waste, onion and garlic peels, papaya seeds, egg shells, squash seeds and flowers. Later on we used very similar materials to our project we are developing for the Remixing materials class part. Read about our developing project with Pippa in the next reflection of mine.