bacterial brickbats knit textile collection sets bacterial cellulose as artifact and co-designer

Bacterial Brickbats Explores Human-Bacterial Collaboration

Carolina De Lara’s project, Bacterial Brickbats, explores the interaction between bacterial cellulose (BC) and knit textiles to challenge traditional, human-centered design in fashion and textiles. The project negotiates human/non-human liaisons by proposing a study where sharing agency between designer and bacterial cellulose produces a material library illustrating differing needs, creative or biological, resulting in a rich expressive range and dimensionality.

Investigating the essential nature of this living material actively interacting with knit, the project explores bacterial intelligence and identifies designable textile qualities achieved through human-bacterial collaboration, progressively applying these findings toward situated artifact creation. Technique, method, and design expression come together in a speculative provocation of fashion in more-than-human contexts.

all images courtesy of Carolina De Lara

examining bacterial cellulose’s Self-Assembling Potential

Artist Carolina De Lara’s Bacterial Brickbats explores reassembly as a subsidiary property of BC’s natural growth and self-assembling potential through a comprehensive material library. This library consolidates the understanding of BC as a living textile and acknowledges its organic intelligence as capable of designerly agency by rooting the design method in biological growth and BC’s behavior toward knitted textile. From human perspectives, these textiles probe for color, texture, and form studies exploring the optics of textile translation into artifact. Later stages speculate around situated artifact creation and body applications, emphasizing transparency and light interaction as unique properties to BC-based composites.

Bacterial Brickbats explores the fusion of bacterial cellulose and knit textiles

Carolina De Lara’s work Navigates Multi-Species Design

‘Designing toward regenerative economies transcends the purely technical,’ shares De Lara. Bacterial Brickbats negotiates this systemic leap by focusing on the knowledge and workflow derived from the design method. It suggests what can be accomplished with selected techniques and available materials, but encourages openness with its investigations, materials, and techniques, and deepening exploration of those results. ‘The weight of the designer’s hand implies a slow fashion process, and although it is an arduous journey, it is a labor of love,’ she continues.

Hence, an attachment is formed between the designer and bacteria, encouraging human-material connection beyond mere artifact creation. Proferring concurrence between bacterial processes and human design conventions, this multi-species approach heeds both human and non-human roles in the design process by progressively and gradually shifting design agency between both parties, affording the human the chance to observe, understand, and design in synchrony with BC’s morphology and behavior.

the multi-species project produces a material library with creative and biological outcomes