speclifebiolabtech

Biolab at In the Middle, a Chimera — May 5th – 18th

Brice Ammar Khodja, jacqueline beaumont, Vanessa Mardirossian, and Philippe Vandal will be presenting work at the Milieux Institute End-of-Year Exhibition and Symposium.

Fossilation: Nurturing Slow Expectations

The project’s design folio is out today at Riverside Architectural Press.

The Waste Cycle of Planetary Vision Infrastructures — April 22nd from 1:30-4pm

Within the context of Earth Day, the Concordia University Research Chair in Critical Practices in Materials and Materiality (dir. Alice Jarry) invites the Biolab community to join us for an afternoon of demos and roundtable conversations entitled The Waste Cycle of Planetary Vision Infrastructures at the Planétarium de Montréal on Friday, April 22nd from 1:30-4pm….

Inertia: Speculative Fossil — April 22 – June 13

A speculative work that crosses the disappearance of the Earth in the eye of the Voyager probes with the atmospheric and ecological situation in the east of Montreal.

Cooking and Culturing Colour Part IV

It’s results day! It’s only been 48 hrs since our last workshop and our plates and fabric samples are already brimming with pigmented bacterial cultures. Our fourth workshop session takes us through the final steps of bacterial dyeing textiles, which involves printing using the stencils we prepared on Tuesday and getting all the samples ready…

Cooking and Culturing Colour Part III

In the third instalment of this workshop series, we were able to see how well our bacterial plates and liquid cultures grew over the week. We then harnessed the pigment-producing abilities of this bacterium to colour both un-dyed fabric samples as well as some of the food waste-dyed fabrics from the first session. At the…

Cooking and Culturing Colour Part II

This week, Vanessa facilitated the second instalment of the Cooking and Culturing Colour workshop series. We were able to see the results of the food waste dyeing we did last week and experimented with modifying the colour of the fabric using different acidic, basic, and iron solutions. We used everything from soda ash to lemon…

Cooking and Culturing Colour Part I

On March 15th, Vanessa Mardirossian facilitated Part I of the Cooking and Culturing Colour workshop series. She introduced participants to dyeing with food waste and showed us how to prepare protein and cellulose fibres (using different mordants and pre-treatments) for the dye baths. We prepared dyes using onion skins, avocado pits and peels, black beans,…

[Workshop] Cooking and Culturing Colour — March 15, 22, 29, & 31

Vanessa Mardirossian to lead a 4-part hybrid workshop on how to create compostable dyes from food waste and bacteria

Dahlia Milon Leads Indigo Workshop from BioLab

On February 18th, the Textiles and Materiality Research Cluster, Studio Re-Imagine, the Department of Fibres & Material Practices, and the STAIN lab hosted textile craftsperson and dye plant cultivator Dahlia Milon for a conversation on local plant-based dyes followed by a workshop on indigo dyeing. From the BioLab and over Zoom, Dahlia was able to spend the afternoon taking us…