Neri Oxman

This is like heaven.

But really those silkworms are not, yes, they're not designed to be like humans, right?

They're not designed to connect, communicate and build things that are bigger than themselves through connection and communication.

That's a really great question.

What happens is that at some point, the templating strategies, and as you said correctly, there were geometrical templating, material templating, environmental templating, chemical templating, if you're using pheromones to guide the movement of bees, etc.

in the absence of a queen, where you have a robotic queen.

But whenever you have these templating strategies, you have sort of control over nature, right?

But the question is, is there a world in which we can move from templating, from providing these computational...

material and immaterial physical and molecular platforms that guide nature, almost guiding a product almost like a gardener to a problem or an opportunity of emergence where that biological organism assumes agency by virtue of accessing the robotic code and saying, now I own the code.

I get to do what I want with this code.

Let me show you what this pavilion may look like, or this product may look like.

And I think one of the exciting moments for us is when we realized that these robotic platforms that were designed initially as templates actually inspired, if I may, a kind of collaboration and cooperation between Silkworms that are

not a swarm-based organism.

They're not like the bees and the termites.

They don't work together and they don't have social orders amongst them, the queen and the drones, et cetera.

They're all the same in a way, right?

And here, what was so exciting for us is that

These computational and fabrication technologies enable the silkworm to sort of to kind of hop from the branch in ecology of worms to the branch in ecology of maybe human-like intelligence where they could connect and communicate by virtue of technology.

feeling or rubbing against each other in an area that was hotter or colder.

So the product that we got at the end, the variation of density of fiber and the distribution of the fiber and the transparency, the product at the end seems like it was produced by a swarm silk community.