Neri Oxman: preference

Transcript context

…So, integrate technology with nature, and that’s a really difficult problem. I see parallels here with another company of Neuralink, which is basically like, I think you mentioned, Neuralink for nature. That there are short-term products you can come up with, but it’s ultimately a long-term challenge of how do you integrate the machine with this creation of nature, this intricate, complex creation of nature, which is the human brain. And then you’re speaking more generally, nature. You know how every company has an image? Like this one single image that embodies the spirit of the company? And I 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 plan the possibility of deciding where it or she or he wants to go. 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 in the industry as we know it today, are designed 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 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 that in order to get to this bio-derived fragrance, you blew through 10,000 bushes of rose to create 5 mL of a rose fragrance. And all these 10,000 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 Aguahoja pavilion on the roof of SF MoMa, we calculated that for that pavilion we had 40,000 calories embedded into this pavilion that was made of shrimp shells and chitosan 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, 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. d 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 for our computers, for the 3D printers that printed the pavilion. And these were called energy calculations, energy end 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 characterize the project Aguahoja, it traverses the entire planet. Some of these shrimp shells were brought from places in the world we haven’t thought of, in terms of the apples and the shrimp shells and the tree pulp. And so going back to fragrances, it’s really, really 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.…

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