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The projects selected for the exhibition are demos for a
library of originally conceived materials and processes that
will in the future be available to all architects and designers.
NERI OXMAN: Each project will be displayed alongside videos that highlight
the science behind it and its production process. The objects
MATERIAL ECOLOGY and structures are all designed as if grown—no assembly
The Museum of Modern Art required. Together, these projects celebrate a new age in
which biology, architecture, and design join forces to build
the future.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is Oxman’s Silk Pavilion
II, a site-specific commission on view for the first time at
The Museum of Modern Art announces Neri Oxman: Material The Museum of Modern Art, which continues Oxman’s
Ecology, an exhibition featuring the work of architect, research on the relationship between digital and biological
designer, and inventor Neri Oxman, on view from February 22
through May 25, 2020. The exhibition will include seven major
projects that Oxman has created in the course of her 20-year
career. Through her work, Oxman has pioneered not only
new ideas for materials, objects, buildings, and construction
processes, but also frameworks for interdisciplinary - and
interspecies - collaborations. Neri Oxman is organized by
Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture
and Design, and Director, Research & Development; and
Anna Burckhardt, Curatorial Assistant, Department of
Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art.
Oxman is a professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT
Media Lab, where she founded and directs The Mediated
Matter Group. She has coined the term “material ecology” to
explain her process of bringing together materials science,
digital fabrication technologies, and organic design to
produce techniques and objects informed by the structural,
systemic, and aesthetic wisdom of nature. Integrating
computational form-generation with in-depth research of
natural phenomena and behaviors, material ecology operates
at the intersection of biology, engineering, and materials-
and computer science. By means of this methodology and
approach, the observation of, for instance, the configuration
of the bark of birch trees, the characteristics of crustaceans’
shells, the behavior of silkworms, the expressions of melanin,
or the flow of human breath have generated new design
and production processes. While each research project is
individually groundbreaking, taken as a group, they constitute
a new philosophy of designing and making - and even
unmaking - the world around us.
Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group. Totems. 2018. Produced by
Stratasys, Ltd. Totems has been 3-D printed to include six distinct liquid
channels and pockets. Each pocket contains melanin from a different species,
from bird to cuttlefish. Courtesy Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group
36 WORLD of ART