Cultivate

Cultivate is a work of speculative fiction that imagines what our new brand and consumer product landscape might look like in a future where the advances in biotechnology have afforded us the ability to grow our own materials and not deplete the planet's precious resources. It imagines a time when biotech has left the lab and is now commonplace in our homes and studios, leaving earth to breathe again.   

Cultivate is set up as a fictional eCommerce website for a Wetware store, the evolution of today’s hardware store. Here, one can buy the tools and wetware to cultivate one's own materials and receive the necessary support and guidance throughout the process. 

The project's outcomes also delivered a real “recipe” book that can be used today to show readers how to grow and create their own materials and products using safe and sustainable chemicals and materials readily available in our kitchens or in local hardware shops. This book shows that this future is not that far away. 

It shows the reader how to create biopolymers from mycelium, hydrocolloids from algae, mineralized tissue, and animal-based materials, exploring the boundaries between life and matter.

*All the materials were grown, created or repurposed by me, mostly using the techniques and recipes I wrote for the book.