Liam, Interdisciplinary Sculpture, 2025
Liam Davis is a sculptor born in Flagstaff Arizona, he grew up in Eugene Oregon, and now lives in Baltimore Maryland. He is pursuing a BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture with a minor in Photography at Maryland Institute College of Art (expected 2025), and works making furniture for a design studio in Hampden.
Project Overview
This was an exercise in collaboration by me and HB101-pBRKan+pDept E. coli bacteria. I handed off a 2 dimensional drawing of a nightstand that I designed. The bacteria grew and expanded upon the lines that I gave. Then I took the resulting shape, and reinterpreted it back into a 3d design that could theoretically be fabricated.
A technical drawing was made up of the new nightstand that was made as a result of the collaboration at 1: 1 scale.
Process
I was interested in exploring technical drawings with the bacteria, and I wanted to reference the opacity and color of paper with my agar. So I mixed a batch of LB Agar with KIX additives with the that was standard except I added .4% calcium carbonate by weight (based on the amount of activated charcoal recommended in the lab protocol). This amount did give the agar a white case and make it more opaque, particularly in the photographic documentation, but it would be worth trying a larger amount of calcium carbonate in the future because the particles are bigger than the activated charcoal. The calcium carbonate also seems to settle more than the charcoal, rather than shaking the best method that I found for redistributing the powder without adding bubble was to tilt the bottle on its side and spin it in your hands until the powder becomes suspended again.
I used the blue bacteria because it felt like the color closest to ink. I considered using a blue Bic pen in my final technical drawing.
The technical drawing of the nightstand on the agar was made with the Lab Bioprinter. I made isometric curves of a nightstand that I had designed with the Make2d command in rhino, and then simplified them because I knew the fidelity of the printer was not very high. To make the gcode I used Ryan’s bioprinting grasshopper definition. I broke apart the curves that made up the design and ordered them in grasshopper with the merge node so that the printer would draw them in the order that I wanted.
The print was mostly successful, but the biggest issue that we ran into was that my agar was not very level. I had waited longer than I should have before pouring and it cooled, and the surface I was pouring onto was not very level. This led to some inconsistencies in the line, and that was something I embraced as part of the process.
With the print finished I put the plate in the incubator and the bacteria grew for about a week before I came back to check in. At this point I took photographs of the plates with a camera on a tripod and a ring light.
Next I took that photo into Rhino and began to trace the outlines that the bacteria grew into in 3 dimensions. I did this by placing the original model above the photo and rotating it so that from the top view the planes of the bacterial print and the model lined up. Then I was able to use the model to change the c plane and create 3 dimensional curves that made up the shape of the nightstand. This was imperfect due to some of the perspective and some manual tweaking, with the shear command as well as just grabbing points and even extrapolating points was necessary. However I did my best to remain faithful to the print.
Once I had the curves I tried a few different methods of creating surfaces from them. For the two side panels I settled on using sweeps by duplicating the outside curve and using a half circle to create a bulbous outside edge. For the top surface and the middle shelf I used lofts that made for a wavy surface, and then used a sweep on the front and back faces of the loft to keep a bulbous edge on the wavy panels.
With the new object model I used the make2d command again to make an isometric drawing, as well as a drawing from all the other sides of the object, except the bottom. I took these curves and used a pen plotting tool on a CNC router to make an 11 foot tall drawing of all these views of the object at 1:1 scale. This required two operations where I moved the paper in between. I chose a blue paint pen to match the bacteria, and Pacific Source cotton drafting vellum.