Earlier today i tweeted this replying to @aansari86's excellent thread on the atrocious upcoming exhibition "Broken Nature". The article mentioned that one of the commissioned pieces was from an artist "using melanin on an architectural scale". nytimes.com/2018/10/06/sty…
This artist is called Neri Oxman, and according to this NYT article she's a former first lieutenant for the Israeli Air Force and daughter of 'architectural royalty in Israel'. She runs a lab at MIT researching 'material ecology'.
The Media Lab is described in the article as "a playground of cutting-edge technology with a social conscience." Now peep these two choice quotes from the article: 
aside from the hilarious description of the Media Lab (I'd describe it more like a playground for venture capitalists but ok), this white woman equates melanin with gold, then in the very next sentence admits this is "charged territory". She knows exactly what she's doing.
her lab is openly talking about the material they are developing as a 'skin', as seen here:
the symbolism of this, particularly in in face of the increasing political power and support to white supremacists, is terrifying. A melanated architectural body, designed to serve the aesthetic desires of an intellectual and economic elite who wants to go out sipping champagne.
concurrently to the aesthetic pursuits of this elite, brown babies are being torn for their parents. Black folks are being killed by police. Brown and black folks are being likened to animals, and hunted by border patrol.
The. Fucking. Nerve.
The. Fucking. Nerve.
speculative design and critical design belong in the trash. Non-recyclable. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
