User:DanielleCreger/sandbox

Annelie Koller

General Information

Annelie Koller is a South African Artist, Feminist, and Environmental Activist who is also an architect, design researcher, critical designer, biologist, author, and works closely with material technology.

Although Born in South Africa, Koller does currently reside in Brooklyn, NY. Koller attended two universities, one in South Africa and one in the United States. She received her Masters in Architecture at the University of Pretoria and MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons School of Design in New York. As an ecologist, Koller employs design strategy to innovate new models of success for cities, brands, organizations, product, materials and people. The industries of involvement include: Biotech, Materials, 3D printing, Wearable Tech, Performance Sport, Lifestyle, Luxury, Personal Care.

Career

Modern Meadow

Koller is involved as a Senior Designer in a startup called Modern Meadow which is creating leather in a lab setting, that way being able to grow leather material instead of using animals for fashion needs, while still keeping the product 100% natural. The company hopes that the growth production of faux, lab –grown leather is only the beginning in their endeavors and can further invent and discover numerous types, forms, and product in a similar way. This is the first company to grow sustainable collagen-based materials in a lab based setting. The ultimate goal is to have a new future materialize, one where humans make the material and ultimately, the animals roam free. The company runs on biology and materials science for the foundation, engineering and analytics, and design. The hopes for this company is to solve the world’s biggest sustainability challenges in more than production of lack of resource for clothing and high demand fabric. Modern Meadow spent the 20th century mastering chemistry to turn oil into high-performance, tunable synthetic materials. During this process, it was learned how proteins fold. This brought the company the availability to have sequenced their own genome and learnt to read and write with DNA. Now, they’re able to use those tools to build the high-performing, biological materials of the 21st century. Overall, the company’s strive is towards harnessing the collective power of design, biology and engineering to bio fabricate a new material age. The company is the first of its kind and has gotten recognition from over 12 different high-brand media names including Forbes, The New York Times, The Times, so on and so forth.

Lady Tech Guild

This company aims to empower women in the emerging manufacturing industry, that emerged in 2014. It is a collective group of professional women who are 3D artists, designers, biohackers, educators, and entrepreneurs in the 3D industry, with decades of experience and specialized knowledge in each specific field. The overall goal of this joining is to further support like-minded girls and women to become resourceful, inspired, and creative professionals by connecting them to technology and to each other. The Tech Guild is for female manufacturers to prepare to staff the next Industrial Revolution through construction of robots, 3 D printing, and high-tech machining. The Lady Tech Guild has nine founding women, that of including Annelie Koller.

Cultivate – A Material Evolution

Cultivate is the world’s first wetware store and bio fabrication learning center. Koller also wrote a book titled Cultivate. The book supports Cultivate’s ethos and shows how to grow your own materials from scratch for design and other applications. (Category: Art & Photography. Published September 15th, 2015.) It is described that when you ‘Cultivate’ you move away from inert materials that are detached and immobilized from life to an environment filled with renewal and impetus. The whole idea around this subject and wetware store is so that you become part of the material that forms your environment. And your material surroundings contain the intelligence to create a place where all participants grow and cycle together. Cultivate’s purpose is to no longer need to harvest, waste or kill to create the perfect environment or to feed a family, rather to be able to simply grow it.

Parson School of Design

Koller holds a part time lecturing post at Parsons School of Design where students can sign up to attend lectures that further include students in the production of natural and ecological – saving methods through biology and mixing of material that are reproducible without harming diminishable resources. Parson School of Design is also where Koller received an MFA in Design and Technology, after receiving her M. Arch degree from the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

Technique and Study

Bio-fabrication

Koller co-produces the summit that showcases the current world of biologically grown materials for consumer application. Koller also will sporadically provide events where people can register at the Parson School of Design and are also offered for NCSU students. Here, Koller is attempting to expand the knowledge of producing material from manufacturing and materials that don’t include the resource-depleting methods that are currently in use. The materials that would be in use are different organisms such as bacteria, yeast, and mushroom mycelium. She also assisted in organization the first Bio fabricate 2014 conference in New York which featured Genspace as the Pop-up lab. She is currently a member at Genspace researching biopolymers for architectural applications using mycelium and algae. She is also involved in the development of public outreach programmer focused on bio design.

Works

The Precognitive Selfie of Annelie Koller

Due to the ever-growing relationship between natural and artificial, mind and computer, Koller wanted to create a “Posthuman self” through a self-portrait that included views of herself from the physical, biological, precognitive affected, and perceptive self. The way Koller views self-portraits plays into the making of her own. To Koller, the tradition of the self-portraiture is of self-promotion and preservation of a version of the self that one feels is best represented. In this piece, she wanted her image to present who she became through technology, biology, and consciousness. Koller brings whole new meaning to bacteria and comments on how it is hyper-specialized and intelligent; making it able to cure cancers, filter poisons, and resist the most extreme conditions. Using a 3D scanner, she cut her build into layers of acrylic sheets and on each layer added agar on which bacteria is grown. She collected the bacteria from her daily routines and rituals (i.e. touching subway handrails, windowsills, bathroom floors, inside her own mouth, etc.) Following, Koller kept the bacteria in an incubator at 37 degrees for optimal growth. Finally, what was left was as sculpture made up of living organisms to present a metaphor for what a self could become.

Sources and References

http://wip.genspace.org/portfolio-item/annelie-koller/

http://www.blurb.com/b/6467828-cultivate

https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/events/making-space-multiscale-design-from-bacteria-to-buildings-with-annelie-koller

https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/workshops/intro-to-biomaterials-for-design-workshop-with-annelie-koller

http://www.modernmeadow.com/about-us/

https://vimeo.com/174865218

https://www.linkedin.com/in/anneliekoller/

http://ladytechguild.com/members/

https://pgte5200e.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/the-precognitive-selfie-of-annelie-koller/

http://ladytechguild.com

https://vimeo.com/ladytechguild

https://www.bizjournals.com/denver/bizwomen/news/profiles-strategies/2016/02/tech-guild-for-female-manufacturers-prepares-to.html?page=all

http://techonomy.com/2017/03/at-eyebeam-tech-meets-poetry-and-aesthetics/ Category:Artists

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