Anna Burckhardt, Author at post https://post.moma.org/author/anna-burckhardt/ notes on art in a global context Thu, 08 Feb 2024 21:29:48 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.2 https://post.moma.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/cropped-favicon-32x32.png Anna Burckhardt, Author at post https://post.moma.org/author/anna-burckhardt/ 32 32 Is Corn Feeding a Lie? https://post.moma.org/is-corn-feeding-a-lie/ Wed, 04 Aug 2021 13:37:42 +0000 https://post.moma.org/?p=5045 Showing up in food, cosmetics, fuel, and medicine—and, by consequence, in much of the air we breathe—corn is a ubiquitous presence in our lives. Inspired by the first episode of MoMA’s Broken Nature Podcast, this text investigates how one single crop travels through our contemporary food system.

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Showing up in food, cosmetics, fuel, and medicine—and, by consequence, in much of the air we breathe—corn is a ubiquitous presence in our lives. Inspired by the first episode of MoMA’s Broken Nature Podcast, this text investigates how one single crop travels through our contemporary food system. Through the work of artists, academics, seed keepers, and more, curator and writer Anna Burckhardt argues that the ubiquity of corn is an example of the way in which the intangible infrastructures that surround us—made up of policy, trade routes, social networks, and behavioral codes—are intentionally designed.

In 1970, Steven Frykholm, a recent hire of the in-house graphic department at Herman Miller, was tasked with designing a poster to advertise the furniture company’s annual summer picnic. To illustrate a quintessential institution in the United States, Frykholm employed an equally “American” symbol—one that most adults and children would recognize as the ultimate summer barbeque side dish: corn on the cob (fig. 1). His poster—with its bright colors, glossy varnish, and Pop art references—proved so successful that the company asked him to design new versions each year until 1985. But what is it about corn—which was first domesticated in Mexico—that has made it an inherent symbol of the United States? And how has this vegetable/grain, and its wholesome associations with summer picnics and fun, come to exemplify a lot of the flaws in our contemporary industrialized food systems?

Fig. 1. Steven Frykholm. Herman Miller Summer Picnic August 21, 1970. 1970. Silkscreen with lacquer finish, 39 1/4 x 25″ (99.7 x 63.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Ivan Chermayeff

Showing up in food, cosmetics, fuel, and medicine—and, by consequence, much of the air we breathe—corn is a ubiquitous presence in our lives. Even those who avoid it as part of their diet inevitably come into contact with it several times per day. The proliferation of corn has had major consequences for our health and the environment. This text looks at how this single crop travels through our contemporary food system in surprising and sometimes invasive and devastating ways, and where models might exist for new (which might mean very old) approaches. This kind of systems thinking is key to Broken Nature, the exhibition and podcast series that inspired this text. Both projects explore human ties to nature and advocate for the concept of restorative design—a vision of design that is aware of its own role in the environmental crisis and engages in making things better for humankind, other species, and the whole planet. Design plays a central role in helping citizens become more attuned to the complexity of the systems that inform our lives as individuals and as communities.

Looking at food through the lens of complex systems requires investigating the different forces that have shaped our food landscape into what we know it to be today. The ubiquity of corn, for instance, helps us understand that the intangible infrastructures that surround us—made up of policy, trade routes, legislation, social networks, behavioral codes, etc.—are also intentionally designed. “It’s literally impossible [to avoid corn] without a hermetically-sealed environment,”1 says Bex who, living with an acute allergy to corn for several years, started a blog called Corn Allergy Girl to help those with a similar condition (fig. 2).

Fig. 2. Battle Bex vs. King Corn for the Fate of the World. Digital file. Courtesy Corn Allergy Girl

“The subtitle of my blog currently is ‘Party Like It’s 1899.’ [. . .] The safest way to live, if you’ve got this level of sensitivity to corn, is to grow everything yourself, if you can, and [to] buy things locally from people who grow things the way that you would.”2 And corn is not just something that we eat, as Bex’s blog demonstrates. It is present in hair products (shampoo and conditioner contain emollients, emulsifiers, and preservatives made from corn oil or corn dextrose, the cheapest source of fat); in the fuel that powers cars (ethanol is made from corn); and even in medicine (the most popular treatment for dehydration, for example, is dextrose IV—a corn sugar; fig. 3).3 Corn is virtually unavoidable unless one has the means to seclude oneself, and not everyone is able to so completely modify their lives. These realities are all signs of a system that was designed with certain corporations and interest groups in mind, and not with holistic consideration for the environmental, social, and cultural well-being of all.

Fig. 3. Iowa State University, Center for Crops Utilization Research. Corn Processing and Utilization Poster. 2019. Digital file. Copyright © 2019 Center for Crops Utilization Research

This didn’t happen by mistake. Humans “designed” corn thousands of years ago—originally in Mexico from a plant called teosinte—to be the versatile crop it is today.4 We have also built the infrastructures, through subsidies and free trade agreements, that allow us to give it a thousand different lives, produce it at a mass scale, and ship it all over the world, altering local ecologies. Cultural anthropologist Alyshia Gálvez is interested in the ways that food and trade policy in the United States has had profound and reverberating impacts on Mexico’s food system. “I began to see that in the last twenty-five years, there had really been a shift in how people were able to access food, what they were able to access, and the resulting health outcomes in [the] communities.”5

She attributes this change to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which, enacted in 1994, privileges efficiency of production over the specific needs, circumstances, and ecologies of the countries that signed it: “We [the United States] produce more corn than anybody ever wanted, and then we have to come up with all these Frankensteinian methods for getting rid of it, which includes doing new things in a chemistry lab to use the starches and sugars. But it also includes dumping it around the world and ruining the chances that small-scale producers in other countries have of selling their corn, which we could argue is real corn.” Mexican people not only invented corn, but also have made it a staple of their diets for centuries. And yet native corn—and the foods that are made from it—is becoming increasingly inaccessible as the incentives for farmers to grow it are decreasing. This is not only endangering the thousands of varieties of corn indigenous to the country, but also the bodies and health of the people for whom processed foods—made with “engineered” American yellow corn—are more easily accessible than what is grown locally. “It’s become increasingly more difficult for people to consume what we call the milpa-based diet, which is the diet based on native corn and the things that are grown with corn, like beans, chilies, and squash. Those foods, which are such a staple part of the millennial cultures of Mesoamerica going back thousands of years, are really becoming almost elite consumer goods (fig. 4).”6

Fig. 4. A woman cooking with elements of the milpa-based diet. Image courtesy of Alyshia Galvez

How do we resolve this imbalance? Are there actions that we can take to resist an oppressive globalized system? Artists throughout Latin America have long explored corn’s economic, nutritional, and symbolic power within the region, and the ways in which colonial and imperialist practices might disturb bodies, ecologies, and economies. In Epitome o modo fácil de aprender el idioma Nahuatl (Epitome or Easy Method of Learning the Nahuatl Language, 1996) by Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata, five thousand human teeth and hair are embedded in wax in the form of a corn cob (fig. 5). While the work focuses particularly on language—each tooth represents a lost Nahuatl word—it also stresses the intricate ties between food and bodies, and underscores the ways in which corn acts as both a cultural symbol and a dietary staple.7

Figs. 5. Laura Anderson Barbata. Epítome o modo fácil de aprender el idioma Náhuatl (Epitome or easy method of learning the Nahuatl language). 1996. Sixty-two Campechian wax figures with human teeth and hair on bamboo structures with rope. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist
Figs. 5. Laura Anderson Barbata. Epítome o modo fácil de aprender el idioma Náhuatl (Epitome or easy method of learning the Nahuatl language). 1996. Sixty-two Campechian wax figures with human teeth and hair on bamboo structures with rope. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist

Similarly, Alguna vez comimos maíz y pescado (We Once Ate Corn and Fish, 2012–19) by María Buenaventura’s explores two elemental traditional foods from the region of the Bogotá River around Colombia’s landlocked capital: native corn and Capitán fish. Both food sources have disappeared from the diet of the population as the city embarked on a violent process of modernization and the pollution of the river reached extreme levels. Working with a seed keeper named Fabriciano Ortiz, Buenaventura created a large-scale installation made of adobe bricks in which she displayed and honored the intricate structure of the different kinds of native corn that used to grow in the area but have progressively disappeared as yellow corn has taken over (fig. 6). Since 2006, Colombian law mandates that campesinos and agricultural producers exclusively use patented seeds, which not only benefits multinational corporations such as the Monsanto Company and DuPont,8 but also has led the Instituto Nacional Agropecuario, the country’s national agricultural institute, to destroy thousands of native seeds.9 In this context, Buenaventura’s work highlights the revolutionary work of individuals such as Ortiz, who has dedicated his life to preserving seeds that are under constant threat by a system that protects the interests of corporations over those of individuals and regional ecologies.

Figs. 6. Maria Buenaventura. Alguna vez comimos maíz y pescado (We once ate maize and fish). 2012–20. Thirty plates with maize seeds reconstructed grain by grain on acupuncture and gold needles; three adobe tables. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist
Figs. 6. Maria Buenaventura. Alguna vez comimos maíz y pescado (We once ate maize and fish). 2012–20. Thirty plates with maize seeds reconstructed grain by grain on acupuncture and gold needles; three adobe tables. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist
Figs. 6. Maria Buenaventura. Alguna vez comimos maíz y pescado (We once ate maize and fish). 2012–20. Thirty plates with maize seeds reconstructed grain by grain on acupuncture and gold needles; three adobe tables. Dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artist

Indeed, indigenous and peasant communities are at the forefront of the fight to protect traditional foodways and practices, as community organizer Yira Vallejo notes. Vallejo serves on the executive committee of the annual Feria de la Agrobiodiversidad, a native-seed exchange that brings together more than 450 campesinos from indigenous communities across the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.10She and her husband, artist Jonathan Barbieri, have also been working with filmmaker Gustavo Vazquez to produce a documentary film called Los Guardianes del Maiz (The Keepers of the Corn), which describes the deep bond between ancestral corn and the Mexican people (fig. 7). The Feria “is an event that brings together families where they exchange not only seeds, but also knowledge,” Vallejo explains. “The roots [of the event] are very old,” adds Barbieri, who continues: “For thousands of years, people have come together from one village to another in certain regions to exchange two things: knowledge and seeds. Knowledge is the culture and the methodology and everything else. The seed is the genetic packet. And by exchanging seeds and trying them out in their own different places, respective villages, the seeds themselves are in constant evolution. This is a coevolution between human beings and a grain that they invented (figs. 8, 9).”11

Fig. 7. Excerpt from Los Guardianes del Maíz (The Keepers of Corn), 2020 documentary directed by Gustavo Vazquez. Courtesy of Yira Vallejo and Jonathan Barbieri

At the center of these initiatives are the close bond that exists between humans and corn, and the understanding of the intricate threads—ecological, cultural, and social—that need to be nurtured and repaired in order to create a food system that nourishes rather than depletes. While there is no single solution to a systemic problem, seed keepers like Fernando Otriz, or the communities working with Vallejo and Barbieri, present alternative approaches that are echoed by several kindred initiatives related to native crops in other parts of the world. These endeavors are attempts to reconnect communities with their own culture and environment for the benefit of all. Some of them—rooted in an understanding of the complexity of the ties that connect us to the environment and to each other, and explored at length in a MoMA-produced podcast episode as part of the Broken Nature series—could be blueprints for national and international policy regarding agriculture, trade, and the environment.

Figs. 8–9. Corn displays at the Feria de la Agrobiodiversidad. From Los Guardianes del Maíz (The Keepers of Corn), 2020 documentary directed by Gustavo Vazquez. Courtesy of Yira Vallejo and Jonathan Barbieri
Figs. 8–9. Corn displays at the Feria de la Agrobiodiversidad. From Los Guardianes del Maíz (The Keepers of Corn), 2020 documentary directed by Gustavo Vazquez. Courtesy of Yira Vallejo and Jonathan Barbieri

1    Corn Allergy Girl, interview by Paola Antonelli, Broken Nature Podcast, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 26, 2021, https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/542.
2    Ibid.
3    Corn Allergy Girl, “Where’s the Corn?,” Corn Allergy Girl (blog),June 2, 2013, https://cornallergygirl.com/category/tips/hidden-corn/.
4    Barbara Fraser, “Ancient DNA Reveals the Surprisingly Complex Origin Story of Corn,” Discover,December 13, 2018, https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/ancient-dna-reveals-the-surprisingly-complex-origin-story-of-corn.
5    Alyshia Galvez, interview by Paola Antonelli, Broken Nature Podcast, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 26, 2021, https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/542. For more information, see Alyshia Galvez, Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies, and the Destruction of Mexico (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).
6    Galvez, interview by Antonelli.
7    Madeline Murphy Turner, “We, a part of them: Laura Anderson Barbata and the disassembly of border regimes,” Burlington Contemporary, issue 4: Art from Latin America (June 2021): 7.
8    Grupo Semillas, “Las leyes que privatizan, controlan el uso de las semillas y criminalizan las semillas criollas,” Revista Semillas, nos. 53–54 (December 2013), https://www.semillas.org.co/es/las-leyes-que-privatizan-controlan-el-uso-de-las-semillas-y-criminalizan-las-semillas-criollas.
9    “El ICA destruyó semillas en todo el país,” Noticias Canal 1, September 1, 2013, https://noticias.canal1.com.co/noticias/el-ica-destruyo-semillas-en-todo-el-pais/.
10    CONABIO (Comisión Nacional para el Conocimiento y USO de la Biodiversidad), “Feria Estatal de la Agrobiodiversidad: Documento Ejecutivo para Tomadores de Decisión,” https://www.biodiversidad.gob.mx/corredor/pdf/PROFORCO/14-Documento-ejecutivo-tomadores-decision.pdf.
11    Yira Vallejo and Jonathan Barbieri, interview by Paola Antonelli, Broken Nature Podcast, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, April 26, 2021, https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/542.

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A New Materiality: Neri Oxman’s Craft for the Biological Age https://post.moma.org/a-new-materiality-neri-oxmans-craft-for-the-biological-age/ Wed, 01 Jul 2020 15:28:21 +0000 https://post.moma.org/?p=1004 The exhibition Neri Oxman: Material Ecology shows the architect’s practice at the intersection of nature and computation. Her dynamic approach, though rooted in the modernist tradition, brings together material science, digital fabrication technologies, and organic design.

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The exhibition Neri Oxman: Material Ecology, currently presented as part of MoMA’s Virtual Views series, shows the architect’s practice at the intersection of nature and computation. Her dynamic approach, though rooted in the modernist tradition, brings together material science, digital fabrication technologies, and organic design. Focusing on the process rather than the final product, Oxman creates new spaces for interdisciplinary—and even interspecies—collaborations and offers new ways of thinking around the built environment, bringing it closer to ever-evolving natural and biological form.

Fig. 1 Installation view of Neri Oxman: Material Ecology, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 22, 2020 – October 18, 2020. © 2020 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Denis Doorly
Fig. 2 Installation view of Design and the Elastic Mind, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 24–May 12, 2008. © 2008 The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Jonathan Muzikar

“How can we learn from an organism or a natural process and how can we collaborate to create a co-authored piece of work?”1 This is how architect and designer Neri Oxman described her approach to design during a recent conversation with Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, in conjunction with the exhibition Neri Oxman: Material Ecology2 (Fig. 1). Featuring seven projects and series of projects from Oxman’s twenty-year career, the show focuses on the materials and processes that she has developed along with her team at The Mediated Matter Group—a multidisciplinary group of researchers based at MIT’s Media Lab.3 At the core of all the projects is Oxman’s theory of Material Ecology, which she defines as “the study and design of products and processes integrating environmentally aware computational form-generation and digital fabrication.”4 The field, she states, operates at the intersection of biology, material science and engineering, and computer science. Both a design approach and an associated collection of tools and techniques, Material Ecology seeks to bring the built environment closer to the natural and the biological environment. It attempts to create buildings and objects that are alive, directly responding to their natural surroundings and changing as they age.

Fig. 3 Rendering of a phase of the draft angle analysis tool that generates Raycounting’s design. The computation takes into account the angles between the surface and a light source. Image courtesy Neri Oxman
Fig. 4 Rendering that explores the varying thickness of the object. Image courtesy Neri Oxman

The Materialecology series (2007) was the first set of objects to materialize Oxman’s approach. Shown for the first time in a museum setting in 2008—during MoMA’s Design and The Elastic Mind exhibition curated by Paola Antonelli (Fig. 2), and acquired into the permanent collection shortly after—the series is composed of four projects, Cartesian Wax, Monocoque, Raycounting, and Subterrain, that explore natural phenomena and the ways in which computation can act as a tool to recreate and enhance them at larger scales.5 Each of the objects that make up the series is a demo of the process that Oxman is developing. Raycounting, for example, is a computational code that generates 3D-printed objects by measuring the intensity and orientation of light rays (Fig. 3 and 4). Inspired by nineteenth-century photo sculpture, this process allows the designer to relinquish a certain degree of control, working instead with the computational code, which manipulates the object’s material properties such as thickness and curvature, and with the natural phenomenon, which dictates its shape. The result is a process that creates, as Oxman describes it, “sunshades perfectly suited to their environmental conditions”6 and which can be employed at the product and architectural scale (Fig. 5). 

Fig. 5 Neri Oxman. Raycounting. 2007. Silk-coated nylon (center) and acrylic-based polymer (right and left), 17 × 11 × 10 in. (43.2 × 27.9 × 25.4 cm) and 19 3/16 × 10 × 6 in. (48.7 × 25.4 × 15.2 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the Contemporary Arts Council. © 2020 Neri Oxman
Fig. 6 Frederick Kiesler. Endless House Project, Plan. 1951. Marker and color pencil on tracing paper, 14 × 17 1⁄2 in. (35.6 × 44.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. The Endless House, a vision of a free-form, continuous living space, was designed to challenge the rectilinear modern architecture that dominated in the 1950’s.

With the Materialecology series, Oxman cemented her position as a designer, in both the practical, conceptual, and historical realms. She stands firmly within the modernist tradition, citing architects such as Friederich Kiesler and R. Buckminster Fuller as key influences (Fig. 6), while simultaneously questioning and expanding it. Modernism, she has said, advocates for static design that is reliant on mass manufacturing, the homogeneity of material properties, and centralized fabrication. Material Ecology in turn proposes a dynamic approach to design in which the merging of computation and nature can allow for mass customization.7 While the assembly lines of modernity dictate a world made of parts, Material Ecology envisions a world in which we might not be able to differentiate between what is made and what is grown.8 This is Oxman’s idea of a new materiality9: one in which the novel computational technologies that emerged during the recent Digital Age allow designers and architects to transition into what she calls the “Biological Age.”

Fig. 7 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) with Pierre Jeanneret. Villa Savoye, Poissy-sur-Seine, Model. 1932. Wood, aluminum, and plastic, 16 x 34 x 32″ (40.6 x 86.4 x 81.3 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / FLC. Purchase. Le Corbusier conceived la VillaSavoye, a country house outside of Paris, as a sequence of special effects. Le Corbusier’s design for Villa Savoye incorporates what he calls “the five points of architecture”: pilotis (reinforced-concrete columns), the free plan, the free facade, horizontal bands of windows, and the roof garden.

Oxman further frees herself from a classic homogenized modernism—rooted in Le Corbusier’s open plan and the use of steel and concrete (Fig.7)—by grounding Material Ecology equally in technology and craft. “That matter is secondary to shape constitutes the fallacy of design after craft,” she writes, drawing on Gottfried Samper. “By nature, and in its rite, the material practice of craft is informed by matter, its method of fabrication, and its environment.”10 The idea that craft is able to interweave process, material and form is a key factor in The Mediated Matter Group’s process-first approach to making. The team’s goal is not to produce a beautiful finished object—although each one of their works is indeed beautiful. Instead they begin by developing a technology that will allow them to achieve a material process through which they, and eventually all architects and designers, can create a variety of forms that are informed by and react to their environment.11 This vision echoes architect and academic Malcolm McCollough who, already in 1996, argued that the digital had the potential to restore craft’s relevance within architecture and design. “In digital production,” he wrote, “craft refers to the condition where people apply standard technological means to unanticipated or indescribable ends.”12 In this context, to craft involves a partnership with technology that can open the door for customization at a much larger scale. 

At the time of McCollough’s writing, however, there was still a concern with whether the digital tools available then allowed for enough direct manipulation—a term coined in 1983 by software designer Ben Schneiderman to describe the interaction between user and software through the computer mouse, and which has expanded to include other forms of dialogue between the two—for the process to be considered craftsmanship.13 This has grown less relevant with the development of more advanced technologies, but more important in this case is the fact that Neri Oxman and The Mediated Group easily overcome this concern by expanding the nature of their collaborations beyond those between the (human) user and the digital technology to include other biological agents. Here, animals, bacteria, and robots can be direct manipulators.14

Fig. 8 Installation view of the Silk Pavilion II (2019), in Neri Oxman: Material Ecology, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, February 22, 2020 – May 25, 2020. © 2020 The Museum of Modern Art. Photo: Denis Doorly

In the Silk Pavilion II (2019)—a site-specific installation commissioned for the Material Ecology exhibition at MoMA—17,532 silkworms worked together with The Mediated Matter Group to produce a hyperboloid structure, in a process that questions the role of the architect or designer as the sole form giver (Fig. 8). The project was a continuation of the research started with the Silk Pavilion I in 2013, when the team found that, by varying the environmental and spatial conditions, they were able to direct silkworms to spin in specific patterns. More accurately, they realized that when silkworms were able to reach an altitude of 13/15 inches (21mm) they would spin three-dimensional cocoons, but at a lower altitude they produced flat patches (Fig. 9).15 The primary structure of the Silk Pavilion II, therefore, consisted of a jig made of stainless steel and wire rope with a rotating mandrel (Fig. 10). The secondary structure was a water soluble textile in which the silkworms were placed (Fig. 11). For ten days, the animals moved horizontally over the textile—aided by the rotation of the jig—spinning their silk within a rearing facility in Abano Terme, Italy.16 As in previous experiments conducted by the group, the density of the silk varied depending on the environmental factors surrounding the structure. A chemical reaction caused by the silkworms’ excretions created holes in the knot fabric, thus releasing some of the structure’s tensile stress, and creating a “metabolic canvas of organic waste.”17

Fig. 9 An experiment in which silkworms were placed on surfaces with central rods demonstrated that when the rod was taller than 13/16 in. (21 millimeters), the worms would spin three-dimensional cocoons. At lower heights, they produced flat patches. Image courtesy Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group

The process behind this project promotes a fairer and more sustainable method for harvesting silk, which is traditionally harvested by boiling the cocoon to dissolve the adhesive that attaches the silk to the layers below. This kills the larva, disrupting the development of the organism. The silkworms working on the Silk Pavilion projects, on the other hand, were able to complete their life — turning into moths at the end of their spinning cycle and laying eggs, which could allow for the construction of more structures.18 The research behind it also highlights the increasing importance of collaboration in Oxman’s work. In the Silk Pavilion I—where the shape of the structure was dictated by the designer and inspired by Buckinster Fuller’s geodesic dome (Fig. 12)—the silkworms acted as construction workers; in the Silk Pavilion II, they are not only architects and designers but also artisans. They provide the skilled hand and, through it, are able to determine the shape and physical properties of the result in a process that advocates for a different way of making and building in the context of climate change. “What all crafts share,” McCollough writes, “is not just technique or hard work on form, but also a probing of their medium’s capacity, a passion for practice, and moral value as an activity independent of what is produced.”19 By rooting their work in craft, Oxman and her collaborators propose an alternative modernism: one in which modern tools and technologies allow architects and designers to step away from the limelight, and instead embrace new, more sustainable, collaborations with animal and robotic hands.

Fig. 10 The kinetic jig-structure on which 17,532 silkworms were placed. Image courtesy Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group
Fig. 11 The base of the structure, a water-soluble mesh dissolves when it comes into contact with the silkworm’s liquid excretions. The worms’ last excretion before spinning created holes and spaces that they would then fill with silk. Image courtesy Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group
Fig. 12 The construction of the Silk Pavilion I (2013), a dome in the shape of a large biological cocoon, required both a robotic arm and 6,500 silkworms. Image courtesy Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group

1    The Museum of Modern Art, “Neri Oxman: Material Ecology – Live Q&A with Paola Antonelli and Neri Oxman”, YouTube video, 1:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUjlAGhukhE
2    Neri Oxman: Material Ecology, curated by Paola Antonelli and Anna Burckhardt, is on view at The Museum of Modern Art from February through October 2020.
3    The Mediated Matter Group, founded by Oxman in 2010, currently has 18 full-time members: “two computer scientists focusing on computational design and artificial intelligence (Christoph Bader and Jean Disset), a multimedia designer (João Costa), a product designer (Felix Kraemer), three architects (Nic Lee, Joseph Kennedy Jr., and Ramon Weber), a biologist (Sunanda Sharma), a biomedical engineer (Rachel Soo Hoo Smith), a mechanical engineer (Michael Stern), an artist (Ren Ri), a marine scientist (James C. Weaver, as a research affiliate), and a weaver (Susan Williams).” Antonelli, Paola. “The Natural Evolution of Architecture” in Paola Antonelli with Anna Burckhardt (eds.), Neri Oxman: Material Ecology(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2020), 14.
4    Neri Oxman, “Material Ecology,” in Rivka Oxman and Robert Oxman, eds., Theories of the Digital in Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), essay available here
5    Antonelli, “The Natural Evolution of Architecture” in Paola Antonelli with Anna Burckhardt (eds.), Neri Oxman: Material Ecology (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2020), 13.
6    Oxman, “Raycounting” in Paola Antonelli with Anna Burckhardt (eds.), Neri Oxman: Material Ecology (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2020), 52.
7    Oxman’s unpublished email response to questions posed by curators, July 17, 2019
8    The Museum of Modern Art, “Neri Oxman: Material Ecology – Live Q&A with Paola Antonelli and Neri Oxman”, YouTube video, 1:00, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUjlAGhukhE
9    Oxman writes: “Today, perhaps under the imperatives of growing recognition of the ecological failures of modern design, inspired by the growing presence of advanced fabrication methods, design culture is witnessing a new materiality. . . . Examples of the growing interest in the technological potential of innovative material usage and material innovation as a source of design generation are developments in biomaterials, mediated and responsive materials, as well as composite materials.” Oxman, “Material Ecology”
10    Oxman, “Material Ecology”. See Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings (1851; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
11    In her article “Rapid Craft: Material Experiments Towards an Integrated Sensing Skin System,” Oxman states: “In his writings, David Pye distinguishes between “regulated” and “free” craftsmanship, the latter as he claims provides for creativity in the process of making (Pye 1968). Inherent to this distinction is the idea that craft promotes the ability to recreate and reinvent the association between tool, material and application beyond it serving as a form of execution” Oxman, “Rapid Craft: Material Experiments Towards an Integrated Sensing Skin System,” in: ACADIA 07: Expanding Bodies: Art, Cities, Environment, Proceedings of the 27th Annual Conference of the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) Halifax, Nova Scotia, October 1-7, 2007, ISBN 978-0-9780978-6-8, 184. See David Pyne, The nature and art of workmanship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968).
12    McCollough, Malcolm. Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 21.
13    “What good are computers, except perhaps for mundane documentation, if you cannot even touch your work? The fact that traditional craft endures at all is because it satisfies some deep need for direct experience—and most computers are not yet providing that experience”, McCollough asked himself in 1996. Ibid, 25.
14    For more examples of these types of collaborations see: Rachel Soo Hoo Smith et al., “Hybrid Living Materials: Digital Design and Fabrication of 3D Multi-Material Structures with Programmable Biohybrid Surfaces,” in Advanced Functional Materials, published ahead of print, December 18, 2019, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adfm.201907401
15    Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group, “Silk Pavilion I” in Paola Antonelli with Anna Burckhardt (eds.), Neri Oxman: Material Ecology(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2020), p. 99.
16    Oxman and her team write in the exhibition catalogue: “We turned to this well-equipped European facility [in Abano Terme] as the source of our animal collaborators for several reasons, one of which was that the silk industry has never quite developed in the United States the way it has in Italy or China. The result is that most of the few silkworm-rearing facilities in the U.S. raise the worms as food for reptiles or as classroom specimens, and therefore in fairly small batches; a considerable amount of labor is required to care for a large number of worms. In addition, nuclear polyhedrosis virus (BmNPV) continues to plague Bombyx mori in the U.S., and mulberry leaves—the worms’ sole diet—are difficult to find.” Ibid, 108.
17    Ibid, 109.
18    Ibid, 108.
19    McCollough, 29.

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