04 When yeast becomes your beast
Sept 2023
Baker’s Yeast is a complex organism whose cells behave closely to ours; it greatly helped the discovery of DNA codification and cellular mechanics, other than being one of the oldest known domesticated mycelium. The main common feature is autophagy, or the capacity of recycling dead cells. With an uncertain future for food that ties into politics and economics, finding a way to hybridize bodies to create new sources of energy from what's discarded seems to be appealing. The enormous quantity of waste produced by the food industry to keep up with the marketal principles, made me want to imagine an approach more in line with autophagy. I was able to create a working prototype of a wearable sourdough incubator enhanced by a programmed speaker that was projecting the sound of my heartbeat while asleep.
This incubator is capable of mimicking the dynamics of a pregnancy, sharing bodily heat and the heartbeat sound, which when relaxed produces a frequency around 60 mh found to be helpful to maximize yeast growth. This container was worn everyday for a week and it produced enough sourdough to create 50 kg of bread, shown and eaten during a performative dinner.
This incubator is capable of mimicking the dynamics of a pregnancy, sharing bodily heat and the heartbeat sound, which when relaxed produces a frequency around 60 mh found to be helpful to maximize yeast growth. This container was worn everyday for a week and it produced enough sourdough to create 50 kg of bread, shown and eaten during a performative dinner.
Liks to studies and researches:
- Lahue C, Madden AA, Dunn RR, Smukowski Heil C. History
and Domestication of Saccharomyces cerevisiae in
Bread Baking. Front Genet. 2020 Nov
- Parzych KR, Klionsky DJ. An overview of autophagy:
morphology, mechanism, and regulation. Antioxid Redox
Signal. 2014 Jan
- Das G, Shravage BV, Baehrecke EH. Regulation and function of autophagy during cell survival and cell death. Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol. 2012 Jun 1;4(6):a008813. doi: 10.1101/cshperspect.a008813. PMID: 22661635; PMCID: PMC3367545.
- Harris A, Lindsay MA, Ganley ARD, Jeffs A, Villas-Boas SG. Sound Stimulation Can Affect Saccharomyces cerevisiae Growth and Production of Volatile Metabolites in Liquid Medium. Metabolites. 2021 Sep 7;11(9):605. doi: 10.3390/metabo11090605. PMID: 34564421; PMCID: PMC8468475.