Oxman's Mediated Matter research group uses computational design, digital fabrication, 3D printing, materials science and synthetic biology for large and small structures. The group developed its own methods and printing platforms, and worked with a range of 3D production systems. Projects have ranged in scale from enclosures and large furniture, to artwork and clothes, to biocomposites, artificial valves, and DNA assembly. Production methods include taking images of a biological or natural sample, developing algorithms to produce similar structures, and developing new manufacturing processes to realize the results.
Projects include wearable clothes and tools,
solar-powered and biodegradable designs, new artistic techniques, and construction of surfaces, walls, coverings and load-bearing elements.
The Silk Pavilion, an installation designed in 2013, was noted for its fabrication method as much as its final form. It was woven by 6,500 free-ranging silkworms on a nylon-frame dome. Experiments with the silkworms identified how they would respond to different surfaces, and what would encourage them to spin onto an existing structure rather than spinning a cocoon. The frame of a large polyhedral dome was loosely woven by a robotic arm out of thin nylon threads, and suspended in an open room. The dome was designed with gaps where it would be warmest. Silkworms were released onto the frame in waves, where they added layers of silk before being removed. This involved engineering, sericulture, and modeling sun in the room. The resulting pavilion was hung so that people could stand inside it. This was reprised in 2020 for Silk Pavilion II, installed as part of the Oxman exhibition at MoMA.
The Synthetic Apiary, a room-sized installation built in 2015, studied the behavior of bees in an indoor environment, including how they built hives in and around different structures. This was developed in collaboration with a beekeeping company, as a way of testing possible responses to colony loss, and exploring how biological niches could be integrated into buildings.
In 2012, Oxman printed a set of body-sized wearables, Imaginary Beings, inspired by legendary creatures. She also collaborated with van Herpen and materials scientist W. Craig Carter on Anthozoa, a cape and skirt evocative of marine life.
In 2015, she designed the Wanderers collection, inspired by interplanetary exploration, in collaboration with Christoph Bader and Dominik Kolb. The collection included the Living Mushtari chestpiece, a model digestive tract filled containing a colony of microorganisms that could sustain life in harsh environments. The collection was described by Andrew Bolton as "defined by neither time nor place".
In 2016, she produced Rottlace, a 3D-printed mask for Björk, based on a 3D scan of the performer's face. Björk wore it in the world's first 360° virtual reality livestream. Oxman also developed Lazarus, a project designed to capture the wearer's last breath, and began work on Vespers, a collection of 15 death masks. The masks were divided into past, present, and future, and embedded with minerals and bacteria.
In 2014, she collaborated with Carter on Gemini, a chaise longue with a milled wood frame and 3D-printed upholstery designed for both structural and acoustical properties, designed to recreate a calming womb-like environment. It was produced with a combination of additive and subtractive printing. SFMOMA acquired the piece the next year. This work gave rise to a model for a larger scale Gemini Cinema.
Mediated Matter also prototyped new platforms and tools for printing. These included a printer that can print entire sections of rooms, a glass printer, and a quick-curing printer that can make free-standing objects without support structures.
In 2014, they developed G3DP, the first 3D printer to produce optically transparent glass. At the time, sintering 3D printers could print with glass powder, but the results were brittle and opaque. G3DP was a collaboration with MIT's Glass Lab and the Wyss Institute, emulating traditional glass working processes, with a kiln and annealing chamber. The process allowed close control of color, transparency, thickness and texture. Certain settings turned the printer into a "molten glass sewing machine". Two generations of the printer, G3DP and G3DP2, produced collections of vessels that have gone on exhibit as Glass I and Glass II.
A 10-foot glass and light sculpture printed by this platform, YET, was installed at the 2017 Milan Design Week.
Also in 2014, the group developed Aguahoja, a project involving a water-based fabrication platform that built structures out of chitosan, a curable water-soluble organic fiber similar to chitin. Structural pillars or long leaves could be made by varying how the fibers were deposited. The resulting combination of hard and soft structures could change from solid to willowy over the length of a branch or leaf, using the same base material. This was demonstrated in a pair of installations, Aguahoja I and II, featuring a central 15-foot tall sculpture resembling "enormous, folded cicada wings".
In 2016, the group developed a large-scale robotic printing system, the Digital Construction Platform (DCP), which printed polyurethane foam molds with a robot arm based on the Altec aerial work platform. DCP v2 was able to print a section of a dome 15 meters across and 4 meters high.
Starting in 2018, the Mediated Matter lab developed the Totems project, exploring ways to extract melanin from different species and embed it in 3D-printed structures. This led to a concept for buildings with facades that respond to sunlight, such as a proposed architectural pavilion initiated by Ravi Naidoo and introduced at his Design Indaba conference.
From 2017 to 2020, a new Silk Pavilion was developed, Silk Pavilion II, exploring new potential models for gathering silk from silkworms without needing to boil cocoons and end the silkworm's lifecycle.
In 2020, the lab produced a new Aguahoja installation, Aguahoja III, identical to the first but stored in a climate-controlled gallery. This is intended to serve as a long-term control against which to compare the original, in measuring how chitosan degrades or is influenced by environmental changes. The lab stopped active work in 2021.
