Neri Oxman is simultaneously a hardcore ecologist, evocative futurist, meticulous artist, and abstract scientist. The 43-year-old Israeli-American designer, architect, inventor, and MIT Media Lab professor embodies the same dualities that her work hinges upon. Oxman’s multifarious projects transcend the digital age; Oxman’s multifarious projects transcend the digital age; instead, she’s pioneering the “Biological Age” through “material ecology,” which fuses biology and technology, nature and culture, and the grown and made. Among her works are energy-generating photosynthetic wearables, a geometric dome spun by a robotic arm and completed by a swarm of silkworms, and sinewy masks modeled, in part, after the wearer’s own anatomical and physiological makeup—projects as functional and ideologically ambitious as they are beautiful.
Outstanding in their aesthetic rigor, Oxman’s brainchildren have caught the attention of leading museums, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. This fall, she will receive SFMOMA's 2019 Contemporary Vision Award, and her next exhibition, “Material Ecology” at MoMA (on view from Feb. 22 to May 25, 2020), organized by Paola Antonelli and Anna Burckhardt, will present eight works from throughout her 20-year career—most notably an updated version of “Totems,” an array of vehicles for synthetically engineered melanin that debuted earlier this year in the Antonelli-curated “Broken Nature” exhibition at the Triennale in Milan.
Having pursued architecture after dropping out of medical school, Oxman went on to study at the Architectural Association in London and, later, at MIT, where after earning a Ph.D. she stayed on to become a professor and now leads the pathbreaking Mediated Matter group. On this episode of Time Sensitive, Oxman and Spencer Bailey delve into motherhood, “fossils of the future,” robotic queen bees, death masks, and more.
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Xiye Bastida on Why “Stubborn Optimism” Is Pivotal to the Climate Movement
Rachel Comey on Meeting Her Customers Right Where They’re At
Céline Semaan on Why Slowing Down Is Essential for Our Collective Survival
Baratunde Thurston on Humility as a Path to Wisdom
Jhumpa Lahiri on Translation as a Path to Self-Discovery
Jancis Robinson on the Wondrous World of Wine
David Broza on Making Music That Transcends Borders
Deborah Needleman on the Humble Joys of Making Baskets and Brooms
Bethann Hardison on Pushing Fashion Forward and Toward “Complete Diversity”
Paola Antonelli on Solving the World’s Biggest Challenges Through Design
Alfredo Jaar on Bringing Reality Into Focus
Dan Barber on How Seeds Will Revolutionize Our Food System
John Hoke on Technology as a Co-Conspirator in Creativity
Claudia Rankine on Confronting Whiteness Head-On Through Language
Kenny Schachter on Taking the Art World to Task
Reginald Dwayne Betts on How Freedom Can Begin With a Book
Rerun: 12. Maggie Doyne on Uplifting Children and, In Turn, the World
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