Buy Plastified Body Parts to be Fashionable

Did you ever think about owning a plasticized human being? Or wearing 'horse penis slice earrings'? You can fulfill your wishes now!

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Products such as these are now offered by 'Plastinarium Guben', a company founded by mister 'Body Worlds', Gunther von Hagens. I read an interview today in an Austrian newspaper in which he stated the potential of these products to be supporting female beauty for example.
I always found sections - through plant or animal tissue - very beautiful and can't help but finding these earrings and other products on the website on one hand extremely intriguing but as well far reaching. Is that what makes an artistic product? The products of Plastinarium are surely something to distinct yourself from others. Im curious where I will run into the first person using a 'bull penis walking stick' (for about 2500 €).

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Regarding the issue of wheater or not to use animal and human bodies for these purposes: According to von Hagens human bodies are only sold to referenced buyers who use them for educational purposes. At least you know what is in these products and you can see animal/biological beauty and showcase it on your own body. There are numerous items produced with animal ingredients of which you have no idea about so a well referenced, transparent and controversial item is by far better. Moreover, using plastified bull penisses as walking sticks may allow us to start a dialogue about body, beauty, decay, life etc. which may be much deeper than a dialogue arising from wearing a Svarovski crystal on your ear. ;)

 

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Mycelia Digested Materials for a Better World

I was very excited today during a TED talk of Eben Bayer, CEO of the company 'ecovative design', who presented ecovative's decomposable materials made with the help from fungi mycelia. Two materials are on the market already, 'ecocradle' for packaging and 'greensulate' for insulation purposes.

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The process is as smart as it is easy and environmentally benign. A wide array of lignocellulosic feedstock can be fitted into molds where its overgrown by the fungal mycelium which is partly processing the material and gluing it together. It takes five days to produce small packaging elements with a fraction of the energy used to produce a comparable styrofoam element. Ecovative materials are as well a perfect example of the 'craddle-to-craddle' concept as they can be readily composted in your backyard (if available) or centrally after collection. The 'ecovative' business model for global expansion foresees distributed production facilities which each use a local lignocellulosic feedstock.

There are some untold benefits as well. Carbon is stored temporarily in the products and it is easy to imagine how many CDEs can be put into a slower carbon cycle while being used as packaging material. From an urbanistic point of view these materials can be, amongst others, a way to enhance urban soils by decomposing a fraction of the material inflow to cities, thereby saving considerable amounts of primary energy used today for production and disposal of packaging products. The landscape field should be wide opened for these materials as well. There are so many materials used in landscape construction which would actually function in a better way if they became over time a structural component of the soil. hm...lets imagine.

It is good to know that a market-ready product is out there to compete with today's environmentally adverse packaging materials. I wish the team of ecovative all the best in their future development and am curious about more products which can be developed from mycelia-molded lignocellulosic materials. !!!