Sunday, November 8, 2020

Material Ecology: Neri Oxman and the Intersection between Design and Biology

 


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.

 

Neri Oxman

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.

 

Gemini chaise: 3D printed "acoustic" furniture, 2014

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.

 

  
Carpal Skin: 3D Print Wrist Splint, 2009-2010



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.

 

Radiofungi: Biological Pigments for Radioprotection: Experiment payload SpaceX CRS-20, 2020

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

https://www.ted.com/talks/neri_oxman_design_at_the_intersection_of_technology_and_biology/up-next?language=en

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