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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

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