Parlor of Futures @futureparlor - Tumblr Blog

We have found the following procedure to give the best and most repeatable results when it comes to our paper Microfluidics.

1. Pattern Design

When designing the microfluidic channels in inscape we found that .9 mm walls with 1 mm channels give the best results. In order to get full penetration through the paper with the wax we printed a solid black fill on the reverse side of the paper, this effectively halves the thickness that the wax on the pattern side has to penetrate.

2. Baking

We used a laminator on the 3mm setting and rand the printed design 2-3 times through the laminator sandwiched in between parchment paper. Using a laminator is more efficient and repeatable then using a stove or hotplate as it heats both sides of the paper and heat coverage is uniform and consistent.

the process of kombucha leather making #biotechisgodzilla

Petri dishes with human-computer bacteria for The Empress tarot card: a swab from a computer keyboad; somewhat clean and healthy looking swab from a human mouth, and Denisa's throat infection.

The purple cauliflower that acted like a perfectly fine piece of vegetable for Organic Militias but turned out to be just dyed with stuff. Pure food mimicry (as the card XVIII. The Moon predicts). Food Tarot reality check.

The future will (not) be edible. At least the cards say so.

Trial and Error and Error and Error Pt. 1: Fruitless Beginnings.

Like any project, especially one with complexities such as water flow, the learning process is that of trying a million things until you find one that works. I thought it helpful to document that process in a series of posts. After obtaining the printer, we went off Whitesides’ instructions(https://gmwgroup.harvard.edu/pubs/pdf/1060.pdf) reproducing a similar pattern to that in figure 3. D and E in the paper. The results as seen below were not very successful. Even after trying different “baking times” (in seconds written on the individual patterns) on a 150C kitchen pan, all seemed to have the water leak outside the boundaries. Looking back the main two issues that I believed caused this was too large of a reservoir with walls not thick enough and the wax not penetrating fully through the paper. As will be seen in future parts of this series of post some of these problems will be pervasive and some will be solved.

Stormy's microfluidics design for card XIV Temperance connected to a circuit with SMD parts glued with silver epoxy... breaming the barrier between paper, electronics & biotech on the card which is all about mixing and balancing various worlds.. . Nick Lauer and Yair Reshef, bravo!

#FutureParlor #microfluidics #papermicrofluidics #SFIStarot #21centuryTarot #tarot cards

Dedicated to Louise Michel & her Cosmographic Comparator

I had learned to dream in stone and steel" Louise Michel, 1895 (Every Society Invents the Failed Utopia it Deserves)

We dedicate these prototypes of Tarot cards performing various present circuits, materials and technologies to Louise Michel, a 19th century anarchist and member of the Paris commune, who was also one of the first speculative designers and futurists. She imagined and through her alter-egos, Marie Violette Tranchot and Octave Obdurant, described prototypes, which combine creative ways of thinking about the past and future with political activism. Her “Cosmographic Comparator” together with the “speculative crown” and the “utopian umbrella” are tools, which help us understand how to integrate the possible with the actual, science and poetry, which both change our ways of experiencing and envisioning the world. These magical tools have many properties similar to what researchers nowadays describe as scenario methods and future techniques with one important difference. The anarchist scientist and geeky heroine of Michel’s novel, Marie Violette, uses them to start revolutions around the world or how she describes this with a feminist metaphor - “snipping the umbilical of the globe”. The sociopolitical astrolabe (Conducteur à Comparaisons Cosmographiques) is a utopian calculator, a machine for future scenarios, which contaminates our future with history, but also traces in the history hopes for the future, because “history without utopia is dead in spirit and fact, but that the future cannot live on dreams alone; that any science worthy of the name has no other purpose than the visionary improvement of life on earth.” We hope that also our cards can serve as such machine for future making creatively connecting our past with the future, science and technology with poetic imagery, recollection and anticipation, “the unveiling of heaven while in hell. The dream inseparable from the suffering which gave it life”. We also want to wonder with Marie Viollete about the “ burlesques of abundance or simplicity” in history and the “hidden variables… the law connecting real conditions and the wild scenarios to which they gave birth.”

#FutureParlor #louise michel #prototypes #design fiction #scenarios

Fluorescein on the paper microfluidics - detail of card XIV, Temperance, which also mixes fluids....

#FutureParlor #papermicrofluidics #design fiction

First experiments with fluorescein blobs on paper microfluidics working with the Temperance card XIV as designed by Stormy for the SFIS Tarot cards...

#FutureParlor #microfluidics #papermicrofluidics #design fiction #fluorescein

Voynich manuscript women in the wells turned into micro-channels exploring capillary action of liquids... "deciphering" old manuscripts through fantastic prototypes, projecting the future into the past!

#FutureParlor #microfluidics #papermicrofluidics #design fiction

Speculative design fiction: What if the Voynich manuscript is just book on microfluidics explained through pornography? We also designed a circuit with cupper tape to connect it with the paper microfluidics.

#FutureParlor #papermicrofluidics #microfluidics #design fiction