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One curious highlight of the Abandon Normal Devices 2012 festival was John O'Shea's Pigs Bladder Football project, which set out to create a soccer ball using pig bladder cells grown over a polymer matrix.
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The work, commissioned for the festival, has its roots in last year's event, where O'Shea taught visitors how to make a soccer ball using a pig's bladder stuffed with straw. The idea was to highlight the distance between the birth of the game and its current big-business, high-dollar state — a concept O'Shea has spent the intervening year investigating further.
"The origins of football are multiple," he says, using the term the rest of the world uses for the game Americans call soccer. "I'm not convinced that a global monoculture is the best or most interesting way football can develop. The fully synthetic football is a 30-year blip in history."
Twelve months of laboratory work in collaboration with the University of Liverpool, funded by the Wellcome Trust, has yielded proof of concept balls. Smaller than the standard size-five balls FIFA uses, the proof of concept models are made from a 3D-printed organic polymer and show the first signs of cell growth onto the scaffold structure.
The process, greatly simplified, involves harvesting the cells, which O'Shea collected from bladders taken from recently slaughtered pigs, and culturing stem cells. O'Shea then designed a ball-shaped "scaffold" or matrix on which the cells would grow, then printed that matrix on a Makerbot Cupcake 3D printer.
"With technological developments, new forms emerge," explains O'Shea. "We will go further down the line towards developing a functional football you can play with but I'd rather it took on a form appropriate to its technology, not simply the form we are used to."
While O'Shea digests the responses received over the course of the festival, what of the ethical questions? Would an organic football be classed as a living thing, and should we have reservations about booting it halfway down a field?
"I'd prefer to do it and then think about it," is O'Shea's response. "To raise the question [by creating] the reality."
Football 3D Print Test from John 0Shea on Vimeo.
