In our joining, we stumbled across a Science article titled “The Mud is Electric”. It told the story of the scientists who first documented the existence of electrically active bacteria and started playing with their possibilities. It turns out these bacteria are found everywhere in oxygen-starved soils, from salt marshes to backyard ponds and deep sea trenches. And their capabilities can be harnessed to generate power.

For us, this was very intriguing. Is there a way to generate electricity by growing bacteria? What if we could create a material that could power our devices and go back to the soil at the end of its use? That’s the idea behind Electric Skin. A Self-Powering Material. Beautiful, growable, compostable.

Straddling speculative energy futures and current innovation, we are developing a new biomaterial device that can generate electricity from the humidity in the air, using pili: the protein appendages from bacteria Geobacter sulfurreducens. These proteins form nanowires that can create an electrical charge using the surrounding moisture when linked together.

We imagine a radically sustainable energy future, where our power generation and our electronics are growable and compostable. Where our energy is grown - not extracted.