[SUMMERCAMP] Fiber Fever 2025: Dialogues

Biomaterial production
with the ecosystem in mind

If making isn’t just a solitary act, but something that emerges from relationships — between people, materials, nature, heritage, the digital and analogue, across time and space, then making is by nature a shared, open-ended growing experience.

Fiber Fever Summercamp 2025 brings together engineers, artists and designers to create hybrid forms that merge traditional and digitally crafted biomaterials.

Over the course of 10 intense days, 15 participants come together to work, eat, sleep, and play, forming a temporary community. They gather around 4 focal topics on the production of biomaterials, taking the entire ecosystem in mind. 

- How to deal with unpredictable resources in standardized production?
- How to build an open, adjustable process that is still viable?
- What is the impact of biodegradability on the value of the application?
- How to create a inclusive workspace for biomaterial production?

History

Fiber Fever is a series of summercamps within the framework of Timelabs summercamps since 2009. Timelab team developed a format of intens gatherings that bring together designers, artists and engineers in reciprocity. To know more about how, read the blog and manual. 

From 2009 until 2016 these summercamps were mainly focused on individual creations towards an end presentation that helped the artists to present in front of an audience of curators. From 2016 on, a group of artists (sprinters) redefined the format towards a more commoning approach. They questioned the competitive and individual focus and drafted a series of uncommon formats for summercamps. 

From 2022 until 2025 the summercamps are taking again a new turn. Building upon the knowledge of organising over 10 years of summercamps, Timelab invited a group of affiliated designers and engineers to co-organise the camp. This series is called Fiber Fever and focuses on the topic of fibers (textiles and composites), which connected the format to the ongoing project of Critical Biomass (previously called Knotplex and Knotfactory)