Bootstrapping DIY Materials Culture with Mycological Phantasms
Bootstrapping DIY Materials Culture with Mycological Phantasms
Submitter: Nic Lee, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nah6cz@mit.edu
Abstract:
Fox Harrell (2013) calls for the study of the formation in the mind of imaginative collections of cultural references that shape how people act on and through computational systems. He calls this mental nexus a phantasm. We understand Harrell’s work as a call for scholars to think of media study as a phantasm generator that breaks down the user-programmer divide, prompting care for mental life through a robust idea of interdependent conscious, non-conscious, nonhuman, and technological cognizers (Hayles 2017). Nic Lee, Sabrina Shen, and Will Lockett are currently undertaking a semester-long experiment, cultivating mycelium and doping printable bio-polymer substrates with it. We combine multiple bio-polymer materials and then design print geometries that allow the mycelium to grow inside the bio-polymer framework, thus facilitating mechanical testing of these hybrid materials that will stand up to scientific scrutiny. One outcome for the project is that it could provide alternatives to plastic filaments commonly used in 3D printers in maker space contexts. At 4S, a set of sketches adumbrate the kinds of mycelium colonized bio-polymer parts—mycelium bread boards; mycelium Raspberry Pie cases—that could help shift maker space phantasms away from print resolutions, etc., and toward life cycle analysis of DIY materials.
Areas of STS Scholarship: Environmental/Multispecies Studies, Engineering, Method and Practice
Authors/Participants: William J Lockett, New York University
Nic Lee, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sabrina Chin-yun Shen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
