Week 1 HW: Final Project Ideas

Biomanufacturing process to support the physical editioning of digital cyanotype artwork using biological systems and biological materials for bio-shielding (marks) and toning (color shifts)

– Matt Griffin, NYC, USA

1. What do you want to make?

I’m looking to develop a production-ready system for delivering a combination of combination of living organisms and extraction from living organisms that will be layered over a cyanotype process as a living “print edition” of an artwork. There have been projects exploiting microalgae and mycelium/fungal proteins that can either act as a bio-shielding layer or have a color toning influence over the cyanotype process, but most that I have seen with artistically exciting results have been extremely laborious one-off artworks. I want to explore leaning on living systems and automation to achieve a repeatable “print edition” process that could permit a series run of even ten, but ideally 100+ works on paper.

2. What living system could make it?

I’m currently reading science and art materials papers that have explored this territory to try to pick which living systems make the most sense that stay within the means of my biofabrication kitchen lab at NYU ITP (what lacks incubation facility for most bacteria and doesn’t permit mammalian cell usage). This limits me to cyanobacteria, micro and macro algae, some plants/plants materials, and mycelium and fungal organisms and materials. But within this grouping are a number of ready-to-explore light and process intervention options for cyanotype work ranging from those that rely on live collaboration with the organisms and systems and those that work just fine with extracted proteins and materials from these biological sources.

My current focus is on these candidates:

• cyanobacteria such as chlorella, spirulina
• a few plants and mushrooms that can produce useful tannins for either bio-shielding or color toning
• a few candidates within the wider algae material catalog from alginate, to agar, to carrageenan, including possibility of exploiting some materials properties from microalgae instead of extracts from macro algae.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, I’m looking to see what seems most promising for a decently matching repeatability, as again most of these papers and artworks exploiting these materials either produce small one-off artworks / proof of concepts, or are a means of creating materials batches ahead of hand-application of the materials (ie painting/sketching!).

I’m looking to learn from the HTBAA community what organisms and easy to obtain or produce modified organisms might support this process in a scalable manner.

3. How could automation help you make it?

My advantage for undertaking this is a fleet of custom FRESH 3D Bioprinters that I produced with my students at NYU ITP that I can use to deliver materials into a suspension gel. This kicks off the first key objective to produce a design that can be captured as a digital process and then executed repeatably. The build area is really small currently, unless we build a bigger dedicate thin-construct bioprinter, so this automation is still VERY hands-on intensive and the materials preparation for these systems take time, even if the protocols can be locked down to be pretty easily repeatable and tunable.

So….I’m actually looking to learn more from this class about routes for liquid handling and microfluidics that could help automate and make more repeatable (and digitally captured) more segments of the materials production, delivery, cyanotype processing, and process intervening.

I don’t have access to much of the automation systems featured in this course, but have contacts at OpenTrons and will be reaching out to them to learn and find ways my students can learn from them and we can potentially run some scaling processes on the biological system or materials extraction stages.

In summary, I am choosing this actually obtainable target project with less ambitious biomanufacturing scaling to learn and rebuild segments to move further towards the goal of a repeatable print-edition of a biological system and material driven artwork.

4. What would it take to make it at a meaningful scale?

How much would you like to make?

I am aiming to deliver most of the “marking” intervention to be UV bio-shielding in nature, and achievable by producing bioplastics such as gelatin, alginate, agar, etc., so that I already have the sources needed to make the bulk of the materials, probably on order of 300-500 mL per print.

The new components - living bio-shielding, color toning proteins - are aimed to be a very small part of the resulting delivered materials, because they will likely be the most costly (time, steps, and costs) of the intervention materials. I’m expecting in the 40-80 mL target range for these, unless I find a really productive biological system for making what I need that isn’t difficult to extract from.

How long would it take?

Basically, I’m trying to find ways to shift from processes that usually might have taken more than one day (and in many cases more than one week) to produce a single artwork, to one that leans on automation and efficiencies of scale (including parallelization of any curing / waiting phase), to bring this down to a print a day, and then find ways to optimize further.

I have four bioprinters currently, and am anticipating I would but them all to work on either layers or patches of a single print to get the most out of a small build envelop. It currently might not be possible to produce the need materials for more than one print in a single calendar day. But ideally, I’ll find ways to speed this up or just make even smaller pieces.

My aim is to target a print edition of 10. And should that be achievable, then scale up to a print edition of 100.

Right now, focusing on an edition of 10, i’m expecting 3-5 days of materials production and extraction to produce the sources for the edition, and one day per print. I’m thinking that 5000 mL of the main bio-shielding materials (non-living) and aiming to extract 400-800 mL of biological system derived either toning of “specialty property” bio-shielding material.

But ideally I’ll do better than this for time and materials, to make an edition of 100 possible.

5. What don’t I know yet?

I’m still in the research phase for which biological systems and which extracted biological materials are the most dependable candidates for producing serially with some degree of matching from batch to batch. This leaves me with more open questions about the specific organisms/products that I will use, and I hope to limit this down further in another week to rein in that uncertainty.

Here are my primary overall questions:

• Q1: What size of print makes sense to get me closest to the aim of not requiring as much manual intervention each time as just creating the work again with a brush?
• Q2: What degree of variation should I commit to as “within the edition” and also “rewards of collaborating with biological systems and materials”?
• Q3: What chemistry can I commit to for the paper and cyanotype preparation, so that I can have clear boundaries to guide the exploration of biological materials and organisms?
• Q4: What effects can be contributed by the bioprinters (ie 3D constructs vs 2D syringe layers) that make the role of these automation system truly contributing to the final work instead of just limiting it / adding technical complexity?
• Q5: Can I be satisfied with UV bio-shielding ask the masking method for the process, or color toning via biological tannins and similar chemistry, vs a combination fo the two?
• Q6: What should be the original artwork or design pattern to derive the “marking” lines and regions for the rest of the process?

I’m looking forward to exploring these topics and moving forward with this research in parallel with this class!

Final Project