In Focus: Neri Oxman

DANAE
DANAE
Sep 7, 2018 · 5 min read
Neri Oxman, Qamar, Luna’s Wanderers, multi-material 3D Print, 2014. © Yoram Reshef

With London running its 2018 edition of the design festival (15.09–23.09), it is only natural that we look at the winner of this years’ Design Innovation Medal. The event, which previously awarded the likes of Es Devlin, Zaha Hadid, and Thomas Heatherwick, has since 2014 dedicated a prize to international entrepreneurship and the merge of design and technology. American-Israeli Neri Oxman couldn’t be more worth the award, bringing both an excellent take on digital technologies and a refreshing contribution to the creative industry.

Neri Oxman © Noah Kalina, 2017.

Architect, designer, and professor at the MIT Media Lab, Neri Oxman leads a design think-tank called “the mediated matter group” whose mission is to blend the natural and the artificial. She approaches both concepts of form and function at once as she analyses the multi-purpose parameters of natural matters like egg shells or silk. This attitude towards design moves away from the logic of object-making found in traditional manufacturing and assembly methods to define environments that are grown, printed, and biologically-augmented as part of a process. For Oxman, nature and human-developed technologies have complementary abilities that can benefit from each other through symbiosis. As she explained in her interview for the London Design Festival:

“We need to shift from consuming nature as a geological resource to editing it as a biological one. Over time we will see technologies that focus on the integration of functions rather than discrete applications.”

The whole procedure, which she named “material ecology,” bridges generative design, computation, digital fabrication, materials science, synthetic biology, and ecology. Fields of application are diverse and apply to projects of different scales from product and fashion design to architecture.

Neri Oxman, Daphnë, winged corset, multi-material 3D Print, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2012. © Yoram Reshef

Imaginary Beings: Mythologies of the Not Yet (2012). This series of nature-inspired human augmentations, primarily collected by the Centre Pompidou, stems from the idea that myth and fantasy could become a reality through design, material, and technological advancements. With credits to Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings and its 120 mythical beasts, Oxman developed 18 prototypes empowering human bodies with super-natural functions. For instance, Daphnë, a 3D-printed winged corset and prosthetic knee socket, takes inspiration from Ovid’s Metamorphoses where the nymph is transformed into a laurel. The corset maintains arms in a vertical position mimicking how Daphnë’s body held stiff into a branching tree structure. Other examples include Minotaur Head with Lamella — a shock absorbing flexible helmet — Medusa 1 — a protective helmet exploring form-generation processes — and Leviathan — an armor for a chest as ‘hard as a lower millstone’ (Book of Job).

Mediated Matter Group, Silk Pavilion, CNC Deposited Silk Fiber & Silkworm Construction, 2013. © Markus Kayser

Silk Pavilion (2013). Through this project, Oxman aimed to demonstrate that in the absence of a vertical framework, silkworms create spinning patterns by superposing layers of flat fibers. This study allowed for a better understanding of the material organization and natural computation and the data collected was then used to design a geodesic dome. The mediated matter group first produced polygonal surfaces of dense fiber structures emulating silkworms’ techniques with CNC weaving. Elements were then assembled following a layout built through 3D-modeling. Most interestingly, the team then added a large number of silkworms to the dome so that they could complete weaving the structure resulting in an intricate biologically-processed pattern.

Mediated Matter Group, Mushtari, Jupiter’s Wanderers, multi-material 3D Print, 2014. © MIT Media Lab

Wanderers, An Astro-biological Exploration (2014). This series draws from the idea of human-enhancement behind Imaginary Beings, yet departs from structural and anatomical additions to focus on biological prosthesis allowing humans to sustain life in extreme other-worldly environments. All wearable artifacts work with both 3D-printing and synthetic biology, and help generate biomass, water, air, and light depending on the requirements of destination planets and satellites. As such, Luna’s Wanderers, Qamar, provides with a pneumatic surface for generating and storing oxygen, while the wearable for Saturn, Zuhal, converts hydrocarbons into consumable goods, and Jupiter’s Mushtari functions as an external digestive system for the increased production of biomass.

Mediated Matter Group, Mushtari, Jupiter’s Wanderers, multi-material 3D Print, 2014. © MIT Media Lab

Vespers (2016–18). Now on show at the London Design Festival, this collection consists of three series of 3D-printed masks augmented with pigment-producing micro-organisms. While the first series reinterprets ancient world’s death masks as cultural artifacts and carrier of person’s soul and last breath, the third series looks at the mask as a technology-enhanced product sustaining life to a higher level. The idea behind the whole project is for people to adapt to any environmental change immediately. Face covers work as architectural skins that are digitally-fabricated, and propose adaptive and responsive interfaces fitted to a person’s specific shape, DNA, material and chemical functioning.

Mediated Matter Group, Vespers Series I, II and III, 3D-printed masks augmented with pigment-producing micro-organisms, 2016–2018. © Yoram Reshef

With a discourse critical to both sciences and art history, Neri Oxman is collected worldwide in institutions like the Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, and Boston’s Museum of Science. She has lectured and published extensively on her research subject. A large set of articles is available on her website.

New media, current trends and art historical perspectives.

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