Fish!

04 July 2011

With the Institute of Making’s formal acquisition phase now underway, a couple of our first entries just happen to share one thing in common: fish.

For example, a fish-scale-plastic by artist Erik de Lauren is made of 100% fish scales. Attempting to make the most of the garbage generated by the fishing industry, de Lauren produced this plastic-like material by fusing the scales together using heat.

Meanwhile, the Nano Gold Fish, was created using gold nanoparticles and a 4% PVA solution: to be precise, each gold nanoparticle is 13nm in diameter, and is composed of more than 500,000 atoms of gold. Made by Andres Tretiakov (Science Technician at St. Paul School London) to introduce students to the interesting properties of gold and silver nanoparticles, this fish’s interesting optical properties makes it a welcome addition to our collection.

These, plus, the many many other fascinating items in our collection will be housed in the Insitute of Making's Material Library, to open in early 2012.

 

Nano Gold Fish is made of gold nanoparticles

 

 

Fish-scale-plastic is made of 100% fish scales