|Santiago de Chile, Chile|
"The Digital Biofabrication Node project consists in the design, documentation and dissemination of a creative Open Source laboratory that assists the manufacture of biomaterials and bioproducts, from waste from the local food network. The Node is designed to be located near where the waste is generated, integrating itself into the social and agricultural fabric of the place, making the material diversity linked to the territory appear.
The laboratory incorporates a set of low-cost, desktop-format tools and technologies to address different biofabrication processes, such as 3D printing, rotational molding, and thermoforming of biomaterials. The Biomixer, the heart of the node, today works by interspersing digital and analog operations, with the aim - and unlike industrial production - of keeping the user embedded throughout the process, which we could define as a collaboration between machine, human and natural agents.
But beyond allowing the replicability of formulas and dispensing with precision, the greatest potential that we recognize in this technology from the Global South lies in being able to articulate collective intelligence networks, where communities of small distributed but connected bio fabricators can directly execute formulas and share findings, properties and processes around the manufacture of biomaterials and bioproducts that integrate a local narrative.
Biofabrication in networks, using abundant ingredients such as those left over from other vital actions such as human nutrition, could be one of the many ways to behave in a more systemic, symbiotic and collaborative way, just as the other agents of nature do.
"