Black Goop

2013

Recently Austin and I found a video of silly putty that looked and acted like the symbiote from Spiderman. The putty moved towards the magnet and engulfed it. As soon as we watched it, we knew we had to try to replicate what they did.

We gathered up all the supplies and gear we needed to get this project going and set about making a silly putty symbiote. Once we started to combine the putty and powder, however, the putty just wouldn't get black.  It was this weird grayish color.  We kept adding more powder until we finally got it black, but then the putty was not malleable.

Scratching our heads to try to figure out why the putty was acting the way it was, we decided to double check the instructions to make sure we did everything right. We had, so we moved into the sun thinking some warmth might loosen the putty up.

The sun was of no help to us, but we were not ready to give up on the grand prize of watching black goop move, so we got over the fact that the putty wasn't shiny like in the video and moved on to seeing if it was magnetic. The putty was as still as a summer night and didn't even twitch when the magnet got close.

At this point we're both frustrated so we decided to call it a failed experiment. I suggested maybe the video was sped up and it may actually take a long time for the putty to engulf the magnet. I left the plate with our hard, dull putty out over night to see if when we woke up it would have moved over the magnet. In the morning it sat there as lifeless as ever.

It was a failed experiment in that the putty didn't do what we were expecting it to, but it wasn't a total loss. We wanted to make a new toy and went about gathering the supplies to make it happen, we experimented with different ways to get our symbiote to work and when our original plan wasn't working we kept trying different options.

In the end we came to a conclusion our putty was probably old, but the experiment was still fun and worth revisiting another time.

Not really a loss at all when you think about it.