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Now I'm really, really happy to announce Julian.
Julian is going to talk about biohack spaces and
is going to share their knowledge on them with us.
So please give a warm welcome, big applause to Julian.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Hi, okay.
That went faster than I thought.
Hi, I'm going to talk about biohack spaces.
This might be a little rushed because originally I had much more time in mind
when I applied for the talk.
I'm going to quickly tell you who I am.
I'm going to give you a very brief, like 120 seconds history of
how the hackerspace movement got its traction 16 years ago.
And then I'm going to go into biohack labs,
especially in the curious community labs, which I am a part of.
Talk a little about our projects.
And then I'm gonna tell you why this is all important and very dear to my heart.
Who am I?
I'm Julian.
Today I like to use they and then pronouns.
I'm 42, but I really don't have any answers for you.
I live in Hamburg and I'm part of the Curious Community Labs, which we founded
in 2020 out of a group of people who had been doing DIY biology before.
And I've also been part of the CCC for 20 years this year.
History of hackerspaces, and
I think this is sort of important to know your roots.
In 2007, who of you has been, went to the camp in 2007, or
who of you has been around in 2007?
In 2007, there was an inflection point because
there was, after the camp of 2007, there was a tour of European hackerspaces.
And a bunch of American hackers, most notably Dan Kaminsky,
we all dearly miss him, Nick Farr, Bree Petters, Mitch Altman,
a couple of others, did a tour around European hackerspaces and
visited the C-Base, MetaLab in Vienna, and Tropia in Karlsruhe,
Chaos Computer Club in Cologne, which was sort of the biggest and
most notable hackspaces around at that time.
And Joel and Poulon did a talk about hackspace blueprints.
And out of that came a whole explosion of hackspaces.
After that, NYC Resistor was founded in New York,
a noise bridge in San Francisco, and just, I don't know,
about 50 different hackspaces within the next 18 months.
So this entire explosion of hackspaces and
everything that has trickled down from there is sort of due to the camp in 2007
somehow, and due to these people I would like to give a shout out.
And also a shout out to the original sort of European hackspaces like C-Base and
MetaLab and Tropia, C4, and obviously don't forget the roots in the US as well,
like Loft and others.
The world is very different today.
The whole entire movement has changed, hackerspaces have changed, but this is,
I think it's quite important to know your roots and also understand that
small inflection points really can start a movement and can inspire others and so on.
I, after about 17 years in the hacker community in 2020,
started being very interested in growing my own mushrooms.
And out of that sort of started joining the biopunk movement,
which I'm going to quickly sort of give you an overview of what I mean when I say
that we very much about DIY grassroots biology, and
I understand that grassroots is a really funny word here.
We are very diverse and not entirely definable.
And just as you can't really grasp what nature actually is,
there's people doing stuff with DNA, there's people growing mushrooms,
there's people going foraging, picking stuff, fermenting,
playing with yeasts, inventing new foods, everything around that.
Very diverse, there's all sorts of projects all around Europe,
but very few actual dedicated biohack spaces.
We are curious about biology, we're curious about open source and sharing and
teaching and learning just as well as the electronics and computer based hack scene.
Some of us focus more on fungi, others on microbiology.
In Hamburg, we're very sort of fungi-focused group, but
we also do a couple of other things.
And we're sort of separate from what someone might understand as the sort of
old school biohacker body modification kind of scene.
People who work with their own body and try to optimize, and
so it's not really the same kind of people in any sense.
What we are more closely to is sort of the solar punk movement,
people are thinking about being autonomous, going off grid.
These kind of people, and then obviously we are sort of intertwined with the hacker
movement as well.
In Hamburg, we founded the Curious Community Labs, we have 42 square meters.
We have some extra areas, it's all in the Oberhafen in Hamburg.
If you ever come by, please have a look at us.
If you live in Hamburg, please come visit.
We have 23 members, and those numbers aren't made up, neither the 42 nor the 23.
And we have a bunch of gear standing around that we can use to do our own
DIY biology.
Some is very new, some is sort of foraged from industry,
from companies throwing out old hardware, and we give it a new life.
We grow mushrooms with a Flowhood, which is a sterile workbench.
We have a big massive autoclave, we have grow tents.
We have, someone sponsored us some DNA sequencing hardware.
We got a big grant to build the Garden of the Future,
which has a massive weather station and a greenhouse.
And we're certainly not the only biohack space around, but it's sort of hard to
grasp, and there's not really this sort of website collecting everything,
like there's on hackspaces.org.
So if you are part of your own biohack space, please contact me afterwards,
I'm happy to network.
There's a bunch of people around Berlin as well.
There's obviously online, there's a couple of groups and
people being interested in different topics.
Our lab looks a little like this.
There's also a bunch of equipment standing around that and
stuff that you can't see because it's sort of distributed.
And we have a bunch of projects.
Currently, most prominent is the Stadtpilze, or city mushrooms,
which got sponsored by the city of Hamburg.
We do some mushroom lamps, we build the Garden of the Future,
as I just said.
We go on foraging trips, we do food experiments and
experiment with all sorts of new ideas of ways of fermenting things and
growing yeasts and inventing new ways of doing things with
combining mycelium with grains.
And then we also have people who build a little company building
acoustic absorbing mycelium based composite materials and so on and so on.
So it's very diverse, and I really have to rush through there a little,
because I'm going to end the project a little more in depth now.
The Stadtpilze is basically idea of taking a bucket that you can get at
any restaurant you like, because they throw them out.
Filling it with cardboard, with coffee grounds,
with different other substrates, straw, and so on and so on.
And we built this whole brochure that makes it very accessible for
people to grow their own mushrooms.
And this looks like, come on, this.
Which is a pink oyster mushroom, which you can then grow yourself
on your windowsill and eat, and it's very delicious.
So being sustainable about your own food is sort of one part of what motivates us.
Then we work with novel mycelium based materials, most notably the mushroom lamp
which Matti built, which is a, and I'll show you how this stuff is made in a second,
but it's basically, it feels a little like polystyrene.
It has sort of a light weight, but it's very firm, and you can use it.
It's 100% biodegradable, and it is built out of straw and buckwheat and mycelium.
And then this becomes a lampshade.
We grow mushrooms.
We have our own grow tent, which looks about a little like this.
And we do this in a sterile work environment, so you need a flow hood or
some other way of keeping your environment sterile.
This puts pressured air through a HEPA filter, so
you disinfect obviously, but that allows you to keep the stuff clean.
I don't know if Sebastian is around?
No? Okay.
Sebastian has the project with building a planktoscope,
which is a high speed photography plankton analyzing water and
seeing what lives in there, and with raspberry pie and some high speed photography.
I think 8,000 pictures per second, and then you can see what flows through there and
what is actually in there, and count what is in there.
We have group activities.
We go out and forage mushrooms and prepare them and also learn about them,
understand how to identify them, etc., etc.
We go out into nature, which I know for some might be scary, but
we actually love to do this kind of stuff.
And then I'm going to talk a little about my own little project to
illustrate a little more what can be done, and
also because I know the most about what I do myself.
So last year I started playing the trumpet again,
which had been a hobby when I was like a child.
And then I stopped and then I started playing again, and
I live in the middle of the city.
So obviously my neighbors are not too happy about this.
Now, you can buy mutes and stick them in the trumpet, but
they restrict the airflow and that's sort of not really fun.
Or you can buy these things for about 500 euros, which is sort of a barrel
with some sound insulation, and you play inside and it's quiet and
nobody gets disturbed and it's quite nice, but it's also 500 euros.
And these things are made of plastic and not entirely great.
However, I still bought one because I needed one urgently.
And then I thought, well, I think I can make this myself.
So act one, I got myself a metal barrel and cut off the top.
Act two is that I 3D printed a mold that I could use to create
the waveform that reflects sound.
Act three is that I grew a bunch of mycelium.
And the way you do this is you take some carbohydrates like rye,
you sterilize it, you inject some liquid mycelium or spores in there.
You let it grow under good conditions and
then you mix it up with some substrate.
For example, in my case, I used rapeseed straw and
I used buckwheat shells and I mixed them in a two to one relation and
mixed it all up with mycelium and then I used reishi mushroom,
which is a medicinal mushroom.
But it also has incredible propagating properties,
like this stuff grows like crazy and
it's very hard to get any molding or rotting in there.
So I used that and then I shredded it all and ran it through a clean shredder.
And then I placed it all together and
placed it all together and let it grow for about a week.
And then I had this and then I took out the mold and then I dried it and
now I can play my trumpet into this and it is 100% compostable.
It is completely DIY and it also keeps my neighbors from complaining.
So that is what I built this winter.
So you can have a lot of fun and there's a million of applications of growing your
own mushrooms, of understanding nature around you, building your own food,
working with different kinds of components.
Also building tools and software and
hardware to help to make this even easier and
create less, what do you call it,
you don't have to throw that much away, for example.
Or understanding more about the strains you're building,
and microscopic stuff, organizing the different samples, etc, etc.
So there's a bunch of things to do and it's incredibly fun.
And I have only been at it for, if you're honest, about two years.
So there's a very, very steep learning curve in just doing your own stuff and
understanding a little more about what surrounds you.
And that's why I think this is important.
First of all, this planet is burning and this is very urgent.
We need to find solutions.
And we need to find big solutions but also small ones.
And we need to do this urgently and
without the sort of belief that capitalism can save any of this.
We need to go in there and do little quick projects to iterate and
to share our knowledge and to become more resilient.
We need to learn to grow our own stuff.
And we need to learn how to forage and preserve food and make it delicious.
And go out into nature and understand what surrounds us.
I think the idea that we are somehow as humans separate from nature is a deeply,
deeply patriarchal, colonialist, extractivist idea and this has to change.
We are not in any way separate from nature.
We are very much part of nature and we need to understand what surrounds us.
If we still believe we can somehow force nature under our will,
we will go under.
So please decolonize yourself.
Please understand that the idea of somehow conquering the world is a really,
really, really dreadful one.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you.
And now you, hackers, people who are interested, we need you.
Many projects that we do require knowledge of computers and electronics.
Require an understanding of physics and mechanics.
And there's so much to discover and learn and share.
And there's so much fun in this because at the end, often it's very delicious as well.
And, or useful, or anything.
And it, you know, what we do usually is very, very sustainable.
Doesn't require shipping parts from the other part of the planet and
then throwing them out because you, you know, did the wrong solder.
You can't, as I said, you can't change the fundamental laws of nature.
But if you really start listening, nature can start changing you and
that is what we need as a society.
So please join a space, start your own, talk to us,
start doing some in your own hack spaces.
We offer some support.
We offer network.
We are open for networking to others.
You know, you can just reach me.
You can reach me after the talk.
You can go to our website, curious.bio.
You can write to me.
You can talk to me.
And I rushed through all of this to have two and a half minutes of questions.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Thank you so much, Julian, for
sharing your experiences and showing off this great mold you grew.
So if you have any questions, there is a wonderful angel with a microphone that
is smaller that you can go to and queue and ask maybe one or two questions.
So please shoot.
>> Hey, curious if you're doing anything with genetic engineering or
trying to figure out how to get approval to be allowed to do that within
the European Union.
>> No, we don't do it.
I know there's projects who do this kind of stuff.
It is obviously dangerous.
It also requires a shit ton of equipment that we do not have.
I have no idea about the approval.
That's why we grow mushrooms.
I mean, there's also a huge, most of the stuff we do is patented, so
you can't actually commercialize it.
But you very much can do your open source version of it.
And that's sort of for now.
I know there's some projects, but we don't.
>> Hello, how resistant is this material against humidity and this kind of-
>> Humidity, not so good.
Fire, quite good.
I don't know the exact specifications, but there's been a paper on fire
resistance and it doesn't burn, it just smolders, so it's decent.
Yeah, you don't want to put this stuff in your basement or outside.
That's just not, it's going to draw water.
And it needs to dry.
You need a drying chamber because it dies, the mycelium dies at 70 degrees.
So you need to get it to 70 degrees, often dry it for a while to get it really dry.
But once it's dry and it's in your home, it's great.
And if it's a little moist in your home, it'll just absorb moisture and
then just let it go once it stops being moist.
>> You almost answered my question already, but 70 degrees, that's centigrade?
>> Yes, yes, 70 degrees centigrade.
>> What do you think is the density?
Is it more like styrofoam, like very light, or is it more like cardboard?
>> It's more like polystyrene.
It depends on the, on very many factors.
You can tweak this.
You can play around with the substrate composition.
You can, the longer you let it grow, the denser it becomes, so
you have to stop it at a certain point, etc., etc.
So it really depends on what you, on what you, yeah.
>> And tweak it up and down.
>> You can tweak it up and down, yeah, you can totally do that.
>> I was wondering if there's a way to get more specific details on how to make
the audio tunnel?
>> On, yeah, it's, yeah.
>> There is, okay.
>> It's a 3D model I built basically by asking around on the Internet and
figuring out and asking, actually going on YouTube, seeing something similar,
talking to the guy who made the tutorial and asking me how he did it, and
he did the tutorial for me.
>> Okay, so it's all accessible online essentially.
>> Yeah, sort of.
I'll talk to you later.
>> Thank you.
>> We're done?
Thank you very much.
>> Oh, a question.
>> Yeah, but we are, we are over time.
Okay, here's the question.
>> Yeah, I just have a question to connect with people.
I'm looking for experienced people who have experience in DIY
hormone production for HRT.
So if you want to find me later, I'm at Art and Play over there, and
I will stay here a while and also post it on a bulletin.
>> That is super important.
I know there's a couple of projects around there.
There's none where we do, but I know this is a very, very important thing.
>> Just because it's biohacking here.
Yeah, thank you.
>> Hormone replacement therapy.
>> Replacement therapy, often for trans people, but also for women and menopause.
Yeah.
>> Okay.
>> I'll answer your question after the talk.
Thank you very much, everybody.
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