From March 1 through July 31, 2018, Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences presented the exhibition Aguahoja: Hexes by Neri Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group, MIT Media Lab. This catalog documents the exhibition. Nature made us half water. With water, the biological world facilitates the customization of an organism's physical and chemical properties—through growth and degradation—as a function of genes and environmental constraints. Designed goods, however—including garments, products, and buildings—contain little or none of the fluid that gives life. More than 300 million tons of plastic are produced globally each year, leaving harmful imprints on the environment: our seas, our trees, our bodies. Less than 10% of this material is recycled, and the rest becomes waste, dumped into landfills and oceans, where they leach out toxic chemicals and take thousands of years to degrade. Oxman and The Mediated Matter Group at MIT Media Lab aim to subvert this cycle. Their Aguahoja series features structures that are digitally designed and robotically fabricated out of the most abundant materials on our planet—the very materials found in trees, crustaceans, and apples. Cellulose, chitosan, and pectin are parametrically compounded, functionally graded, and digitally fabricated to create biodegradable composites with functional, mechanical, chemical, and optical gradients across length scales ranging from millimeters to meters. The structures are designed as if they were grown; no assembly is required. This exhibition featured four structures from the series.
6 pages
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8.5 x 11
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ISBN Ebook: 0-309-72586-0
National Academy of Sciences. 2018. Aguahoja: Hexes: The Mediated Matter Group, MIT Media Lab. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
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