It used to be that every time a past vision of a far-flung future became the present, it was hard not to think that the line between science fiction and reality was blurring a bit. That fantastical scene once shared only by the pages of a weathered book and your imagination would materialize, catapulting you into a déjà vu-like “what will they think of next” state. These days however, the mad scientist toiling away in his laboratory, manipulating life and technology, is a pretty standard approach to experimenting, and thus it takes a lot to knock our socks off.

 

So when we learned that working together with a team of tissue generation specialists from the University of Twente and Leiden in the Netherlands, Dutch designer Joris Laarman is prototyping a bioluminescent lamp coated in genetically modified hampster cells that light up like a firefly without electricity, we were pretty excited.

 

Our never ending quest to find more energy-efficient ways to create light has had scientists and engineers researching for some time now how to biomimetically adapt a firefly’s ability to generate light. With an incomparable luminous efficiency (the percentage of energy used to create light rather than giving off heat) in comparison to an incandescent (5%), a halogen (9%), a CFL (20%), or even an LED (20%), the firefly approach seemed destined to be our saving grace. 

 

Currently, the cells in Laarman’s “Half Life Lamp” are only able to be kept alive for a short period of time under a glass dome on a diet of luciferene, a liquid nutrient. And while they haven’t quite been able to figure out how to override the biorhythmic nature of the process—the cells capture light during day and glow at night so that you have no control over the “on/off” switch—Laarman’s lamp reminds us that even a yet-to-be-perfected technology has the ability to capture our minds with possibility and how essential experimentation, and failure, are to the process of innovation. As Laarman told The New York Times, “if products can be grown in a lab, we wont have to use natural resources…it’s the most perfect production method out there.”

 

The Half-Life Lamp is just one of the projects in development on view in Joris Laarman Lab, an exhibition at Friedman Benda gallery in New York City. Along with new versions of his much lauded Bone Chairs, developed originally in 2007 from 3-D algorithms, Laarman is also experimenting with tiny robots to create highly complex miniature furniture from steel. The future, according to the young designer? Robots making full-scale furniture and other types of objects from a variety of materials, including plastics.