Neri Oxman's Inventions Could Enable Human-Nature Communication
London, August 2024
Written by Alex Bäuml
Neri Oxman is a visionary designer and architect known for her pioneering work at the intersection of art, science, and technology. She explores how materials and biology can inform design, creating innovative structures and products that work symbiotically with nature’s processes. Her approach — often described as “material ecology” — emphasises sustainable design through the use of advanced technologies.
Neri works from her laboratory and design practice OXMAN alongside a multidisciplinary team of scientists on pioneering projects — from perfumes that make flowers happy to creating buildings that can re-wild natural ecosystems.
One of our favourite interviews of all time is her episode on the Lex Fridman Podcast in 2023, where they traverse a series of topics from love, beauty, and nature, to God, evolution, and life in general. It’s fascinating, inspiring, and reinstalls a sense of hope in humanity.
The episode lasts 138 minutes. Here are our favorite moments.
On believing in something larger than ourselves:
“I want to believe that I believe in reincarnation.”
“Yeah, that’s my relationship with God. I like to believe in believing. Most great things in life are second derivatives of things, but that’s part of another conversation.”
“That notion of, I want you to want, or I need you to need. There’s always something, a deeper truth behind what is on the surface. So I like to go to the second and tertiary derivative of things and discover new truths about them through that.”
On creativity:
“Creativity is all about letting go and beginning again and beginning again and beginning again. And when you cannot let go, you cannot be creative and you can’t find novelty. But I think that letting go is a moment that enables empowerment, agency, creativity, emergence, and they’re all connected. They sort of associate themselves with definition of destiny or the inevitable.”
On faith:
Lex: “Is there are things you’ve done in your life where just doors opened?”
Neri: “I think everything, everything, everything good I’ve found in my life has been found in that way of letting go and suspending my sense of disbelief. And often you will find me say to the team, suspend your disbelief. I don’t care that this is impossible. Let’s assume it is. Where does it take us?
And that suspension of disbelief is absolutely part and parcel of the creative act.”
On fire as the first technology:
“And that goes back to the fireplace, right to the first technology. What was the first technology? It was fire, first technology to have built community. And it emerged out of a vulnerability of wanting to stay away from the cold and be warm together. And of course, that fire is associated with not only with comfort and the ability to form bio relevant nutrients in our food and provide heat and comfort, but also spirits and a kind of way to enter a spiritual moment, to enter a moment that can only be experienced in a community as a form of a meditative moment.”
On being human:
“As humans, but I think just in general as living beings, we’re here to find meaning and that meaning cannot be found without struggle and without seeking to, not to perfect, but to build towards something better.”
On industrialization:
“The way of being in the physical world today is really not in tune with the time dimension of the natural world at all, and that needs to change. And that’s obviously very, very hard to do in a community of human beings that is, at least in the Western world, that is based on capitalism. And so here, the wonderful challenge that we have ahead of us is, how do we impart upon the capitalist movement? We know that we need to produce now products that will enter the real world and be shared and used by others, and still benefit the natural world while benefiting humans? And that’s a wonderful challenge to have.”
On fate:
“A good friend of mine shared with me an elegant definition of fate, which is the ratio of who you are and who you want to be.”
Other miscellaneous favourites:
“What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud? […] think Neuralink for nature.“
“the furthest you go in evolution by natural selection, the more egoism you find in creatures.”
“Nature wants to increase the information dimension and reduce entropy. What do we want? We kind of want the same thing. We want more, but we want order.”
“You know that when we cut freshly cut grass, I love the smell, but actually it’s a smell of distress that the leaves of grass are communicating to each other. The grass, when it’s cut emits green leaf volatiles, GLVs. And those GLVs are basically one leaf of grass communicating to another leaf of grass, “Be careful. Mind you, you’re about to be cut.” These incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than ours.”
“I think empowerment is a force with direction. It has directionality to it. Emergence is, I believe, multi-directional.”More from Neri: