System Synthetics

Interviews with Maurizio Montalti and Han Wösten about artwork System Synthetics

Designer Maurizio Montalti cooperated with the Kluyver Centre for Genomics of Industrial Fermentation in order to study the possibilities of production of the bio fuel out of the degradation process of the plastic waste. In this scenario one of the two fungi (filamentous fungus) would break down plastic waste and the other fungus (yeast) would produce bio-ethanol out of it. It may sound easy to us, but in fact it is a really complicated biotechnological procedure that can take years to accomplish because it includes the creation of a new organism. Though we don’t know when the final goal will be accomplished, when this finally happens, it will definitely have the potential of improving our waste-based society.

Furthermore, we have to emphasize the interesting correlation between different aspects of design included in this project: on the one hand there is a classic design of the object (bioreactor) and on the other there is a design and construction of a new biological system not found in nature. The designer becomes the creator of both living and non-living thing, and because of that the installation gets new annotations concerning the aesthetics. In order to find out more about this interesting project and it’s possibilities we will put a few questions to designer Maurizio Montalti and scientist Han Wösten from the Kluyver Centre.

Hello, Maurizio, can you, please, tell me more about your project and whether you have achieved your goal?

The project is about the possibility of combining the specific skills of two fungal organisms, which belong to the same kingdom – one filamentous fungs and yeast. The first is found to be capable of degrading plastic materials; it literally feeds on the materials and, by using them as a source of food, it neutralizes the toxic compounds and it transforms them into bio-mass. On the other hand, there is a yeast, a model organism in scientific research, which has been largely exploited over centuries because of its ability to ferment food and drinks. Nowadays fungi are widely studied in the labs as one of the main industrial cell factories for the production of enzymes, antibiotics, etc. and yeasts are tested for the production of bio-ethanol because they in fact consume sugars and produce alcohol and carbon dioxide as waste…So, the initial idea has been to combine these two organisms…The inspiration came from the endosymbiotic theory – it is a process where one microbe takes over another microbe and they get fused together.

According to this theory the mitochondria of eukaryotes evolved from aerobic bacteria living within their host cell. So, the humans, who are also eukaryotes, actually originated from two bacteria that somehow got together and got to share the same nucleus. Instead of letting this process develop in a million years, I wanted to influence it by using a man made symbiosis (with the help of synthetic biology) in order to solve one of the major dangers of our contemporary society– the fact that there is more and more plastics in the world. I am not attacking plastics as a bad material, it has a lot of advantages and, luckily, nowadays, there are new methods of productions and new applications already created, but, looking at the old kind of plastics, which we still keep producing largely, we are not completely aware of the heavy burden they put on ecology and ultimately on ourselves. Only during the last 10 or 20 years our eyes have slowly started to open…

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