Introduction: Cry for AI: Bio-Material

This documentation was created as part of the course MAS.S60 Critical Matter: Emotive Design from Fashion to Urban Scale, taught by Dr. Behnaz Farahi at the MIT Media Lab, Fall 2025.

Team members: Saetbyeol Leeyouk, Yanchen Shen, Sophia Liao


Introduction

This Instructable forms one component of the fabrication workflow forCry For AI: A Nature-Controlled Wearable Powered by Electricity, Water, and Tears, with a primary focus on the preparation of the project’s bio-material.


Conceptual Intent

The bio-material in this project acts as a moisture-dependent interface layer that conceptually and physically links human emotion (tears), environmental humidity (nature), and computational systems (AI).

Unlike typical silicone or TPU wearables, this material is intentionally sensitive, degradable, and dependent on water, emphasizing:

  1. The fragility of AI when embedded in ecological and emotional systems
  2. A reversal of typical power relations: the AI becomes dependent on the wearer’s tears
  3. Material ethics: the wearable becomes a slow, breathing, unstable substrate rather than a sealed technological object

This material thus performs both functional sensing and critical commentary on the resource dependencies of emerging AI systems.

Supplies

Material Preparation

  1. Moss
  2. Sodium Alginate
  3. Pectin
  4. Glycerin
  5. Chitosan
  6. Calcium Chloride (cross-linking)

Step 1: Mixing Ingredients

Measure the ingredients and mix them thoroughly. Label all the samples prepared for crosslinking in CaCl2.

Step 2: Extruding

Extrude the mixture into the CaCl2 solution and onto different surface conditions to test its formation.

Step 3: Forms Library

Sample Results.