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Sue Archer

Oh god. I just saw this in the other place. A startling new concept, shoes and clothes made from 100% biodegradable material, no plastics or petrochemical. Made from a lab-grown biological filament.

I mean this is an utterly new concept, and such a material has never before grown on a plant or the back of a sheep, eh?

oxman.com/projects/o0

Fully biodegradable products that embody the life cycles of natural ecosystems. Enabled by OXMAN’s platform for biomaterial design and digital fabrication.

@artcollisions

Trawling the website, I can see references to a lab in New York...

@suearcher Cool, thanks! I could not figure out where to find a physical place.

@artcollisions

The website is, in my opinion, awful. The text is a complete word salad. Like, why use one ordinary word, where you can use eight fancy ones. All of which makes me suspicious of the actual output.

As far as I can make out, they are producing a filament from chemicals naturally made by bacteria from environmental carbon, which sounds good, but we do wonder how much energy input is involved.

@suearcher Oh, definitely. I was like, did AI create this website? Those pictures look too clean, right?

But hey, maybe it will work out.

@artcollisions

If it's genuinely carbon neutral, and could be entirely powered by renewables, I can see the point. Especially if the material could be recycled and reprocessed into fibre again.

But I fear the "it's fully biodegrable!" aspect will lead to people thinking "hey, it's fine to have 10 pairs and then throw them away after a week...."

And they really need to put some proper comprehensible writing on the website.

@artcollisions

The thing that bugged me over on Twitter was people going "hey this is a game changer, there's never been a biodegradable material for clothes and shoes before!" when until the last 100 years or so, every material for clothes and shoes was biodegradable!

@artcollisions @suearcher I distinctly remember the Really Unfortunate Idea that was paper prom/wedding dresses (duct tape and brown bag masterpieces notwithstanding)

@wcbdata but like, that's maybe more ecologically friendly than whatever soupy goop this thing is touting. @suearcher

@wcbdata @artcollisions

Well, you'd hear the bride coming down the aisle alright!

@suearcher@toot.wales @artcollisions@vis.social It's clearly bait for venture capitalists. The product doesn't have to make sense, work, or even exist, as long as it's 'innovative'.

@kim @artcollisions

Yeah that was our feeling. Alfred said, if they were on Dragons' Den with that kind of writing, the dragons would be saying "Right, shut up and tell me what you do in plain English".

@artcollisions @suearcher It's California, which I doubt will come as a surprise, and if the website gave you the prickly-thumbed feeling that architects can't be far away, you wouldn't be at all wrong.

But though the website's artful flannelish reads like something you might find on the back of a flipchart at the abandoned conference centre of a lost civilization, the Wikipedia page* is quite the journey.

* en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neri_Oxm

en.wikipedia.orgNeri Oxman - Wikipedia

I saw an exhibit about a similar project at @sheffielduni.bsky.social #FestivalOfTheMind... it's amazing what they can do with bacteria... I think it was even from sewage... mind blowing and wonderful to see...

Bluesky SocialThe University of Sheffield (@sheffielduni.bsky.social)Changing lives through education and research since 1905. On Bluesky since today

@helenintgarden.bsky.social

I'm sure there's potential, but I baulked at the techno-language, and the implication in the tweet that a biodegradable fibre was a totally new thing, when we had nothing but biodegradable fibres until the last 100 years or so.

The sight of trainers... that looked like ones people actually wear... but are fully biodegradable and can be reused to make other things... and were a byproduct of sewage was pretty good to see... I totally agree about the fabrics... but could accept if it had a lower impact on resources...

@suearcher this sounds like a background universe description in an Ursula Le Guin story. Could very well be the subversive element in the narrative.