Neri Oxman

The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap, right?

It's just saliva and...

feces and some soil particles that are built to create these incredible termite mounds at the scale that, when compared to human skyscrapers, transcend all of buildable scales, at least in terms of what we have today in architectural practice, just relative to the size of the termite.

But when you look at the silkworm,

The silkworm has zero connection and communication across silkworms.

They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other.

They're sort of a human-designed species because the domesticated silk moth creates the cocoon.

We then produce the silk of it, and then it dies.

So it has dysfunctional wings.

It cannot fly.

And that's another problem that the sericulture...

industry has is why did we in the first place author this organism 4,000 years ago that is unable to fly and is just there to basically live as, to serve

a human need, which is textiles.

And so here we were fascinated by the computational kind of biology dimension of silkworms.

But along the way, by the way, this is great.

I never get to tell the full story.

I'm so great.

I always, I'm always, like people say, I always speak in Nietzschean paragraphs.

They're way too long.

And this is wonderful.