We’ve been experimenting with making bioleather from SCOBY for our Strange Intelligences Lab
It is a plant-based alternative to animal leather but made out of SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast).
If you want to know more about SCOBY’s and kombucha (the fermented drink that is the by-product of this strange intelligence there are a few different sites – as always, we recommend starting your search with human-sourced Wikipedia.
Professor Frances Joseph and Claudine Naselu were the first to introduce us to this concept via their Future Fibres seminars at BIOS last year.
The Bioleather Process
Thanks to a gift from Kombucha expert and artist Chris Brady, we have been cultivating SCOBY for over a year now.
Kim needed to clean out and repurpose the kombucha jars (of which there were many) and, in the process, took out large, thick amounts of SCOBY and laid them to dry on a rack.
Seeing the weather turn extremely miserable and wet, I used my own experiments with biomaterials and bioplastics to put the SCOBY into a dehydrator.
It took a long time to dry—about 25 hours of forced drying in total. If we hadn’t done that, we would have had very mouldy, non-formed, or set SCOBY.
As soon as the drying was done, I placed the results into a sealed container until I photographed them in a lightbox.
Our next step is to use them in various creative ways.
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This experiment is part of the Strange Intelligences Lab
