Neri Oxman is a designer and MIT Media Lab professor.
Her work combines art and architecture with biology, computing, and materials
engineering, specifically digital morphogenesis.
Born in Israel, she was surrounded by creative parents
and an artistic family. Both of her parents are architects and her younger
sister is an artist. She was largely influenced by her family and environment, spending
time in both her grandmother’s garden and in her parents’ architecture studio.
She is an accomplished woman and had an unconventional route to honing her
architectural skills. Like many of her Israeli peers, she served in the armed
forces and ended up ranking as first lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force.
Following her service, she entered the Hebrew University’s Hadassah Medical
School, and only switched to studying architecture at the Technion—Israel
Institute of Technology after two years of medical school.
After graduating from the London Architectural
Association School of Architecture, she moved to Boston and earned her
architecture PhD at MIT, later becoming an associate professor in the MIT Media
Lab. Of course, this is in addition to being a pianist and gardener.
Her work is an international sensation, being
displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Vienna’s
Museum of Applied Arts, the Smithsonian, and even at the Beijing International
Art Biennale. Aside from her artistic work, she has published papers on
parametric and contextual design, having developed engineering techniques, and
even developed an interdisciplinary research project called materialecology.
Oxman continues to draw from the world around her,
emulating her environment and other organisms by using a full range of colors
and boundaries. She even draws her inspiration from living elements, like the
glowing bacteria and silkworms constructing silk. Her work in pioneering the
field of Material Ecology rendered her numerous awards, including being named “Revolutionary
Mind” by SEED Magazine, “Best and Brightest” by Esquire, and FASCOMAPNY’s “most
creative people” and “10 most creative women in business”, to name a few.
Pneuma 1: 3D Print Lung Corset, 2012
Silk Pavilion II: Neri Oxman: Material Ecology at The Museum of Modern Art, New York exhibition, 2020
In her recent work, she has been experimenting with
melanin, which she is drawn to because it is found in all six “kingdoms of life”
and is a biomarker of evolution. She examines trends, like the era of global
warming, and claimed that “melanin is the new gold.” She is looking into
what it means to engineer melanin and how tissue repair and sun protection is
involved, but more closely examines the implications, be it philosophically,
practically, ethically, humanely, socially, or anthropologically.
Given the interdisciplinary nature of the field, she
frequently collaborates with other artists and scientists, and has an array of talented
students working with her in her Media Lab, including a biomedical engineer, a
glass blower, a material scientist, a computer scientist specializing in wet AI
(programming bacteria!), and architect, a marine biologist, and even a
beekeeper. She places great value in having her team, explaining their
collaboration with natural organisms like slime molds and silkworms render extraordinary
objects that can accomplish extraordinary things, saying they “can procreate
intellectually if not biologically”. She is an astounding woman and it is
important to recognize the work she puts out into the world and her progeny,
even if that is intellectual progeny, passing knowledge and fostering creativity
in her students.
If this work interests you and you are curious about more individual pieces, I highly recommend you check out her projects, exhibitions, and publications on her site in addition to watching her Ted Talk!
Sources:
https://neri.media.mit.edu/index.html
https://www.media.mit.edu/people/neri/overview/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neri_Oxman
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/06/style/neri-oxman-mit.html
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