Neri Oxman calls her design approach Material Ecology—a process that draws on the structural, systemic, and aesthetic wisdom of nature, distilled and deployed through computation and digital fabrication. Throughout her twenty-year career, she has been a pioneer of new materials and construction processes, and a catalyst for dynamic interdisciplinary collaboration. With The Mediated Matter Group, her research team at the MIT Media Lab, Oxman has pursued rigorous and daring experimentation that is grounded in science, propelled by visionary thinking, and distinguished by formal elegance.

 

Published to accompany a monographic exhibition of Oxman's work at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Neri Oxman: Material Ecology features essays by Paola Antonelli and Hadas A. Steiner. Its design, by Irma Boom, pays homage to Stewart Brand's legendary Whole Earth Catalog, which celebrated and provided resources for a new era of awareness in the late 1960s. This volume, in turn, heralds a new era of ecological awareness—one in which the genius of nature can be harnessed, as Oxman is doing, to create tools for a better future. 192 pp.; 220 illus.