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.
Tom Kundig on the Parallels Between Mountain Climbing and Architecture
Ibrahim Mahama on the Great Potential of Art to Change How We Look at the World
Julia Watson on the Power of Indigenous Technologies to Transform Our Planet
Dustin Yellin on His Quest to Reimagine Learning in the 21st Century
Nathan Myhrvold on the Art and Science of Food
Gabriela Hearst on Why Making Things That Stand the Test of Time Matters
Tony Fadell on Leaving Silicon Valley to Help Build a Healthier Society, Online and Off
Suketu Mehta on the Positively Profound Impact of Immigration on the Planet
Lidewij Edelkoort on Why Doing Less Is More
Craig Robins on Why Nature Is Our Greatest Luxury
Christian Madsbjerg on Why “Design Thinking” Is Bogus
Eric Standop on the Art and Science of Face Reading
Rashid Johnson on Escapism and Upending the Notion of the “Monolithic Experience”
How RoseLee Goldberg Reshaped the Landscape of Performance Art
Daniel Brush on Making Some of the Most Extraordinary and Exquisite Objects on Earth
Inge Solheim on Fighting Off Fear and Breaking Bad Habits
David Duchovny on the Climate Crisis, the Drawbacks of Technology, and the Craft of Writing
Why Jesse Kamm Finds the Phrase “Global Expansion” Nauseating
Wu-Tang Clan “Whisperer” Sophia Chang on Becoming the “Baddest Bitch in the Room”
Kim Hastreiter on the Art of Connecting Culture
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