YouSaid · the spoken record

Neri Oxman

lines on the record: 149
first: 2023-09-01
most recent: 2023-09-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I totally agree that change is the only permanence, that imperfection is there if only to signal that we are part of a bigger thing than ourselves, that we are on a journey, that things are in movement. And if they were perfect, of course, when things are perfect, it is just so boring. We end up with stereotypes. And 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. When I was a child, my mother, who I love so much always explained to me how important it is to fall. To fail and to fight and to argue And that there is a way that there's a culture to. To failing and to imperfection. So I think it is.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I embrace them and I find gratitude and I say to myself, thank goodness, I'm so lucky to have the ability to be frustrated in this way. So I really, really embrace these frustrations. And I take them, I wrap them in a bubble and I look at it on the outside of my aware mind and I laugh at them. I smile at them.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. It was my destiny to start a company. And do I have mornings when I wake up and I ask myself, what the hell am I doing? Yes, I have those mornings.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very, very important for a creative life and for just maintaining this fresh mind to reboot, to begin again with every breath, begin again. And that can be confusing for some, right? For my team members, I like to change my mind. It's who I am. It's how I think. It's how I operate. You know, and they'll come and we found. I would much rather live life like if I had to pick sort of my favorite Broadway show to enter and live through it would be into the woods. It's not a specific fairy tale. It's not the sleeping beauty or little red riding hood or Rapunzel. It's all of them. It's sort of moving into the forest and seeing this wander and getting close and learning about that and then moving to another wonder. And life is really about tying all of these Little fairy tales together in work and also in life.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And according to Adler, it's to find power. And for Victor Frankl, it was about finding meaning. And when you let go of the titles and the disciplines and the boundaries and the expectations and the perception, you are elevated to this really special spiritual, but definitely very, very creative plane where you can sort of start anew. Look at the world through the lens of a bacterium or a robot or look at ecology through the lens of chemistry and look at chemistry through the lens of robotics and look at robotics through the lens of microbial ecologies and so on and so forth. And I feel that kind of rebooting, not every 10 years, but every minute, every breath”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whom the academic currency is not necessarily the citation index. And of course, in order to get tenure at MIT, you have to look at the citation index. But for me, it was not that. It was manifesting our work in shows and writing papers and writing patents and creating a celebration around the work. And I never saw a distinction between those ways of being. I also think that another kind of way of being or a modality of being that I found helpful is, Victor Frankl wrote this incredible book, Man Search for Meaning After the Holocaust, and he writes different people pursue life. for different reasons according to Freud, the goal of life is to find pleasure.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in medical school. I was in Hadassah and in the Hebrew university. And I remember I left medical school for architecture the day my grandmother passed away. And that was a moment of relief. And that was a door that was closing that opened other opportunities. But that, of course, required letting go of the great vision of becoming a doctor and letting go of the dream of being surrounded by wonderful patients and the science of medicine and the research associated with that science and letting go of that dream to accomplish another. And it has happened throughout my life in different ways. MIT was another experience like that where people pointed at me as, you know, the designer for”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think 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. I did so when”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I did say some time ago that you have to sort of reboot every 10 years. To keep creative and keep inventive and keep fresh.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, yes. And I always think of, you know, what I do as the culmination of energy information and matter and how to direct energy information and matter in the design of a thing or in the design of a life. I think living is very much a process of channeling these energies to where they need to go. I think that the manifestation or part of that manifestation is the pointing to the moon in order to get to the moon. And that's why manifestation is also directional. It has that vector quality to it that I think of agency as.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly And that sort of ends up defining you. Those tools, I think, when you let go, you sort of find, you give peace to your will, right, to a sense of will. And so I think that's very, very important. Design, but also in life.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“beginning again and beginning again beginning again and when you cannot let go you cannot be creative and you can't you can't 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're sort of associate themselves with definition of destiny or the inevitable A good friend of mine shared with me elegant definition of fate which is the ratio of who you are and who you want to be.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love that question because to some of us the loss of control is control. Design we're used to like extreme levels of control over form and the shape of a thing and how it behaves and how it functions. And that's something we've inherited from the Industrial Revolution. With nature, there is this diversity that happens without necessarily having a reward function, right? This is good or bad. Things just happen and some of them happen to have wings and some of them happen to have scales. And, you know, you end up with this incredible potential for diversity. So I think the future of design is in that soft control, is in the ability to design highly controlled systems that enable the loss of control and creativity is very much part of this because creativity is all about letting go.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think empowerment is a force with direction. It has directionality to it. Emergence is, I believe, multidirectional. Again, that depends on the application. Emergence is perhaps in terms of sort of a material definition is the isotropic spirit when empowerment is the anisotropic counterpart. I think they overlap because I think that Empowerment is a way of inspiring emergence. I think emergence does not happen without empowerment, but empowerment can happen without emergence.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is connected to the love question. Of course, everything is connected to the love question. To me beauty is agency. Meet something that has agency. It is beautiful. There is this special quote from Buckminster Fuller, which I cannot remember word for word. I remember the concept, which goes something like this. When I work on a problem I never think about beauty. But when I'm done solving the problem and I look at what I've created and it's not beautiful, I know that I was wrong. He's kind of an agency that speaks to quote unquote the objective function of the creation, right? Whether for Bucky it's useless or useful.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it is everything it is everything. It is why I love that expression and I forget who said this, but I loved my daughter more than evolution required. And I feel the same way towards my other half. And I feel that when you find that connection, everything and anything is possible. And it's a very, very, very magical. Magical moment. So I I believe in love and I believe in the one.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is actually the force that shapes the universe because it is like gravity, right? It attracts people, it is like light, it brings people together and connects between people. And it's all empowering. And so if you multiply it by the speed of light, you could really change the world for the better. And I call me a romanticist. I know you are too, which is why I so love being here. I believe in this. In love.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so. I think there is, and if I did not think so, oh my goodness, this would not be a nice world to live in. We all want love. I recently read this beautiful letter that was written by Einstein to his daughter and was discovered. Einstein asked his daughter to wait 20 years until she reveals these letters. And so she did. It's just one of the most beautiful letters I've ever read from a father to his daughter. And the letter overall is imbued with a kind of a sense of remorse or maybe even feelings of sadness and there is some kind of melancholy note in the letter where Einstein regrets not having spent enough time with his daughter, having focused on the theory of general relativity and changing the world. And then he goes on to talk about this beautiful and elegant equation of E equals Mc square. And he tells his daughter that he believes that love”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But now again, you're again all of this to go back to that human-centric notion of romance. But maybe there is another way to do romance, right? That we haven't yet, you know, that we haven't yet explored and maybe there's a way to tap into what happens to the rose when it's dreaming. Assuming that plants are sentient and assuming that we can tap into that sentence, what can we discover about what does the rose want? Like, what does it actually want? And what does it need? And what are the roses dreams?”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But Inspire I like the idea of providing nature with a choice, which is why I love that elegant mathematical equation of empowerment and agency”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important to understand the product in the context of the ecological system from which it's sourced and how it's designed. And that is the kind of thinking that is not only desired, but is required if we are to achieve synergy between humanity and nature.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For our computers, for the 3D printers that printed the pavilion. And, you know, and these were called energy calculations, right? Energy N materials. And when you think about a product and you think about a shoe or a chair or a perfume or a building, you don't stop at the object. You want to go all the way to the system. Again, instead of designing objects or singular embodiments of the will of the designer, you're really tapping into an entire system that is interconnected. And if you look at the energy budget that characterized the Project Aguja, it traverses the entire planet, right? Some of these shrimp shells were brought from places in the world we haven't thought of in terms of the apples and the shrimpshells and the tree pop. And so going back to fragrances, it's really, really...”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pavilion on the roof of Asif Moma, we calculated that for that pavilion we had 40,000 calories embedded into this pavilion that was made of shrimp shells and kaitisen and apple skins and cellulose from tree pulp. And we calculated that overall the structure had 40,000 calories. Interesting way to think about a structure, right? From the point of view of calories. But as you left the gallery, you saw these three clocks that were so beautifully designed by Felix on our team and these clocks measured temperature and humidity. And we connected them to a weather channel so that we could directly look at how the pavilion was biodegrading in real time. And in our calculations, I say this long-winded description of the pavilion to say that in the calculation, we incorporated how much electricity we used.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Connect with another organism? Is there a world in which you and I can go down to your garden and use a perfume that will interact with the rose garden downstairs? I've just been enamored with the statements that are being made in the media around oh this is completely biologically derived fragrance and it's bio-based. But when you look into the fragrance and you understand it in order to get to this bioderived fragrance, you went through, you blew through ten thousand bushes of rose to create five milliliters of a rose fragrance and all these ten thousand bushes of rose, they take space, they take water management and so much waste. Is this really what we want the future of our agriculture and molecular goods to look like? And so when we did the agohaco,”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is why our first product for this molecular space is going to be a functionalized fragrance. So here we're thinking about the future of fragrances and the future of fragrances and flavors. These products are in the industry as we know it today are designed for totally for a human-centric use and enjoyment and indulgence and luxury. They're used on the body for the sake of, I don't know, attraction and feeling good and smelling good. And we were asking ourselves, is there a world in which a fragrance can be not a functional fragrance? Because you could claim that all fragrances are functional. But is there a world in which the fragrance becomes functionalized is, again, imparted upon or given agency to”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know how every company has an image, like this one single image that embodies the spirit of the company. Think for Neuralink, it was to me that chimpanzee playing a video game, it was just unbelievable. But with plants, there potentially is a set of molecules that impacts or inspires. I like that word, the plant to behave or act in a certain way and allows still the plant the possibility of deciding where it or she or he wants to go.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Product in the scale of thousands of years, no, I'm not. And 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.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time dimension of the planned kingdom, and that, of course, requires all this humility where in a single capsule to design a biodiversity chamber, it will take years, not months, and definitely not days. And to see these products. And also that humility in design comes from simply looking at how we are today as a civilization, how we use an abused nature, like just think of all these Christmas trees, right? These Christmas trees, they take years to grow. We use them for one night, the holiest night of the year. And then we let them go and think about in nature to design a quote-unquote product, an organism spends energy and time.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember when we started the conversation talking about sort of definitions in the context of design and then in the context of being, that question requires, I think, a kind of a shift, a humility. That requires a kind of a humility towards nature, understanding that it operates on different scales. We recently discovered that the molecular footprint of a rose or of a plant in general during nighttime is different than its molecular footprint during daytime. So these are circadian rhythms that are associated with what kind of molecules these plants emit given stresses and given there's a reason why the jasmine field smells so, so delicious and 4 a.m. in the morning. And then there's There is peace and rest amongst, you know, amongst the plants, and you have to sort of tune into that.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For their own self perpetuation, but also for the foods and the pharma and the type of molecules that we're seeking to grow for the benefit of humanity. And so these languages that we are attempting now to quantify and qualify will really help us not only better nature and help nature in its striving to surviving, but also help us design better wines and better foods and better medicine and better products, again, across all scales, across all application domains.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has a kind of ecological intelligence that is focused on a particular timescale, and the timescale is very, very slow, slow, slow, slow timescale. So it is when we can melt these timescales and connect with these plants in terms of the content of the language, in this case molecules, the duration of the language. And we can start having a conversation. If not simply to understand what is happening in the planned kingdom, precision agriculture, I promise to you, will look very, very different, right? Because right now we're using drones to take photos of crops of corn that look bad. And when we take that photo, it's already too late. But if we understand these molecular footprints and things that they are trying to say distress that they are trying to communicate, then we could, of course, predict the physiological, biological behavior of these crops, both for”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The already is, you know, that when we cut freshly cut grass, I love the smell, but it's a smell of, actually it's a smell of distress that the leaves of grass are communicating to each other. So 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. We use language models. They use molecular models. At the moment where we can parse. We can decode these molecular moments is when we can start having a conversation with plants. Now, of course, there is a lot of work around plant neurobiology. It's a real thing. Plants do not have nervous system, but they have something akin to a nervous system.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Michael Levine calls this agential material, material that has agency, right? So this is of interest to us because this is sort of, again, this is emergence post-templating. You template until you don't need to template anymore because the system has its own rules. What we don't want to happen with AGI, we want to happen with synthetic biology. What we don't want to happen online and software with language, we want for it to happen with bio-based materials because that will get us closer to growing things as opposed to assembly and mechanically putting them together with toxic materials and compounds.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plants with that extra dimension of bandwidth that they do not have. They're just last week. I came across a paper that discusses the in vivo neurons that are augmented with a pong game. And in a dish, they basically present sentience and the beginning of awareness, which is wonderful, like that you could actually take these neurons from a mouse brain and you have the electrical circuits and the physiological circuits that enable these cells to connect and communicate and together arrive at sort of swarm situation that allows them to act as a system that is not only perceived to be sentient, but is actually sentient.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You could create an environment of plants talking to each other. And the robotic referee, and you could set objective function. And let's say for the transaction driven individuals in the world, let's say the objective function is carbon sequestration. And all of those plants are implemented with a gaming engine and they have these reward system, right? And they're constantly needing to optimize the way in which the carbon sequest. We read out the bad guys. We leave the good guys and we end up with this ideal ecology of carbon sequestering heroes that connect and communicate with each other. And once we have that model, this biodiversity chamber, we send it out into the field and we see what happens in nature. And that's sort of what I'm talking about augmented.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not. It's never been done before, and these capsules have never been designed before. So when we first decided these are going to be environmental capsules people thought were crazy. What are you building? What are you making? So the answer is that we don't know, but we know that there has never been a space like this where you have basically a wet lab and a grow room at that resolution, at that granularity of control over organisms. There is a reason why there is this incredible evolution of product in the software space. The hardware space, that's a more limiting space, that because of the physical infrastructure that we have to test and experiment with things. So we really wanted to push on creating a wet lab that is novel in every possible way. What could you create in it? You could create the future.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biodiversity chamber where you can program the exact temperature, humidity and light combination to emulate the environment from the past. So Ohio 1981, December 31st at 5 a.m. in the morning. What did tomatoes taste like to all the way in the future 200 years ago? These are the environmental inputs. These are some genetic regulations that I'm testing and what might be the food of the future or the products of the future or the construction materials of the future feel like test-like behave like, et cetera. And so these capsules are designed as part of a lab. That's why it's been taking us such a long time to get to this point because we started designing them in 2019 and they're currently literally, as I speak to you, under construction.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nutritional dispensing and these little capsules could be stressed. They're sort of an ecology in a box and they could be stressed to produce the food of the future or the products of the future or the construction materials of the future. Food is a very interesting one obviously because of food insecurity and the issues that we have around both in terms of food insecurity but also in terms of the future of food and what will remain after we can't eat plants and animals anymore and all we can eat is these false bananas and insects as our protein source. So there we're thinking can we design these capsules to stress an environment and see how that environment behaves? Think about a kind of an ecological biodiversity chamber, right? A kind of a time capsule that is designed”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Light, etc. Light humidity and temperature while doing bottom-up genetic regulation. So it is a wet lab, but in that wet lab, you could do at the same time genetic modulation, regulation, and environmental templating. And then again, the idea is that in one of those capsules, maybe we grow transparent wood, and in another capsule, transparent wood for architectural application. Another capsule, we grow a shoe. And in another capsule, we look at that language, you know, large language model that we talked about, and there's a particular technology associated with that, which we're hoping to reveal to the world in February. And each of those capsules is basically a high throughput computational environment, like a breadboard that has, think of sort of physical breadboard environment that has access to oxygen and nitrogen and CO2.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally computationally, obviously, in the lab with the hero organism, the hero bacteria. And what's happening today in Echromicrobial synthetic biology, synthetic biology that lends itself to ecology? And again, all of these fields are coming together. It's such a wonderful time to be a designer. I can't think of a better time to be a designer in this world. But with high throughput directed evolution and I should say that the physical space in our new lab will have these capsules which we have designed that are, that they are designed like growth chambers or grow rooms. And in those grow rooms, we can basically program top down environmental templating, right? Top-down environmental control of lights, humidity.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in a way, if you think about it, they create the matter that we consume and then And then reincarnates or dissolved into the soil and then creates a tree. And then that tree creates more bacteria. And then that bacteria, I mean, again, that's why I like to think about not recycling but reincarnating because that assumes a kind of imparting upon nature that dimension of agency and maybe awareness. But yeah, lots of really interesting work happening with bacteria. Directed evolution is one of them. We're looking at directed evolution. So high throughput directed evolution of bacteria for the production of product. And again, those products can be a shoe. Wearables, biomaterials, therapeutics.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, with silkworms, absolutely, let's not modify it genetically. Let's not modify genetically. And then some, because why did we get there to begin with 4,000 years ago in the Silk Road? And we should never get to a point where we evolve life for the service of mankind at the risk of these wonderful creatures across the kingdoms, across the kingdom of life. think about the same kind of ethical range when I think about bacteria.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely right. And by the way, the gray area is, you know, is where some of us like to live and like to thrive. And that's okay. And thank goodness that there's so many of us that like the black and white and that thrive in the black and white. My husband is a good example for that.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a transgenic operation. And we said no. And that was for us a clear decision that, no, we will work with these organisms as long as we know that what we are doing with them is not only better for humans, but it's also better for them. And again, just remind you. I forget the exact number, but it's around a thousand cocoons per single shirt that are exterminated in India and China in those seri culture industries that are being abused. Now, yes, this organism was designed to serve the human species and maybe we should, maybe it's time to retire that conception of organisms that are designed for a human-centric world or human-centric set of applications. I don't feel the same way about E. coli. Not that I'm agnostic organism agnostic. But still, I believe there's so much for us to do on this planet with bacteria.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not bees, but we're templating bacteria at a much, much more finer resolution. And now instead of templating using a robot, we're templating using a printer. But compute is very, very much part of it. And what's nice about bacteria, of course, is that from an ethical perspective, I think there is a range, right? So at the end of the silk pavilion, I got an email from Professor in Japan who has been working on transgenic silk and said, well, if you did this amazing silk pavilion, why don't we create glow in the light? Silk dresses. And in order to create this glow in the light silk, we need to apply genes that are taken from a spider to a silkworm. And this is what is known.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With pigments, can we do this with antibiotics? If we can do this with antibiotics, could we do it with melanin? And what are the implications? Again, this is a platform technology now that we have it, what are the actual real world implications and potential applications for this technology. And we started a new area. One of my students, Rachel, her PhD thesis was titled After this new class of materials that we created through this project Vespers, Hybrid Living Materials, HLMs. And these hybrid living materials really paved the way towards a whole other set of products that we've designed like the work that we did with Melanine for the Mandela Pavilion that we presented at SFMOMA, where, again, we're using the same principles of templating, in this case not silk.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Future meets the past. From the surface to the volume, from death to life to death to life to death to life. And that, again, is a recurring theme in the projects that we take on. But from a technological perspective, what was interesting is that we embedded chemical signals in the jet, in the printer, and those chemical signals basically interacted with the pigment producing bacteria, in this case E. coli, that were introduced on the surface of the mask. And those interactions between the chemical signals inside the resins and the bacteria at the surface of the mask at the resolution that is native to the printer, in this case 20 microns per voxel, allowed us to compute the exact patterns that we wanted to achieve. And we thought, well, if we can do this.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are imperfections by design. All of these forms and shapes and distribution of matter that you're looking at was entirely designed using a computational program. So none of it is manual. But long story short, the first collection is about the surface of the mask and the second collection which you're looking at is about the volume of the mask and what happens to the mask when all the colors from the surface yes enter the volume of the mask inside, create pockets and channels to guide life through them. They were incorporated with pigment producing living organisms. And then those organisms were templated to recreate the patterns of the original death masks. And so life recycles and rebends and so on and so forth. The past meets the future.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They look symmetrical, but they're not. This is intent. We intended for you to be tricked and think that they're all symmetrical.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And again, if I had access to these technologies today, I would totally reincorporate my grandmother's last breath in a product. So it was like an air memento. So with Vespers, we actually used E. coli to create pigmented masks. Masks whose pigments would be recreated at the surface of the mask. I'm skipping over a lot of content, but basically there were 15 masks and they were created as three sets. The masks of the past, the mask of the present, and the mask of the future, the masks, there were five, five, and five, and the masks of the past were based on ornaments, and they were embedded with natural minerals like gold. Yes, yes, yes.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source