GMU:DIY Biolab “Driver’s License”/Suna Yoo

From Medien Wiki

File:suna-mycelia-paper.pdf

Well, this is my Biolab diary now.

1. Day in the Lab, I heard the introduction and had to leave earlier because of the Fachschaft plenum. So i didn´t learn how to cook the first medium, the one for bacteria.

2. Day. Take pictures of everything you do, said Miga. But my phone cam was broken. Instead i took this picture with my analogue „exacta135“ (1). That day we cooked medium for euglena and amoeba, but i´d got a very bad cold, my nose was running away and i was afraid of contaminating everything just by breathing. I went earlier because i was so tired, eventhough the other members of the fachschaft said that i can come later. Because uni goes first.

Someone-making-photos.jpg

3. Day. I think the first courseday i really participated. I thought about not even going to the course, i was so stressed off my other courses, that took place the first time that week, just thinking about them made me worry about how to survive that semester. But than i quit all of them except biolab and decided to do another projekt. That was good. And than i met Azuzena in the M18 garden and realized that she was our teacher today. So i went. It was very interesting, Mycelium and slime molds are not as little as the other organisms. You don´t have to look through a microscope to see them. We could nearly touch them and smell them, imagine their consitence. You don´t need to have programming skills to do art-work with them. Azuzena showed us, what other people had already done. What stuck in my mind, was that you can heat mycelium and it will keep it´s form. For example in bricks or leather. Under the instructions of Azuzena i inoculated my first medium with spores. It was 15 minutes boiled cardboard. The container we used to store it, was ironically a blue supermarket Champignon box. After the Inoculation, wich in this case only means, to put a peace of wood with spores in it, between two or three sheets of hot cardboard. And then leave it in the oven, that is not called oven.

4. 31.10. Halloween. Motivated by the experiences in the last lesson, i started doing something at home. This time i wanted to experiment with growing mycelium in coffee mold. I already had collected some for a time, because on my travels during the summer i had learned to use it instead of dish-soap. In addition i had plucked some fungi caps out of my garden, put them on a piece of paper and waited for them to drop their spores, facing their dead by drying out in my room. So i took put on my new rollerskates (2) and desinfected the whole kitchen with Korn (3), a typical thuringian alcohol. Then I boiled the coffee mold (4) for 15 minutes, maybe longer and put it in a bowl to let it cool down (5). Then i desinfected an old paprika sauce glass with Korn and put the boiled mold inside (6) rotatory with pieces of the dropped spores (7&8-10) and tapped it with kitchen paper. In the end i heated my oven to 50 degrees, let it cool down and then stored the glass in it with circulating air (11). Later that day i went to the lab to put in in the real machine.