Neri Oxman

We kind of want the same thing.

We want more, but we want order, right?

And this goes back to your conversation with Josje about stochastic versus deterministic languages or processes.

His definition or the definition he found was that an agent

is empowered if the entropy of the distribution of all of its states it's high while the entropy of the distribution of a single state given a choice given an action is low meaning it's that kind of um

Yeah, duality between opportunity, like starting like this and going like this, opening and closing.

And this really, I think, is analogous to human empowerment.

Given infinite wide array of choices, what is the choice that you make to enable, to empower, to provide you with the agency that you need?

Yeah.

And the cool thing is it can apply to a human on an individual basis, or a silkworm or a bee or a microbe, a microbe that has agency.

Or by virtue of a template.

But it also applies to a community of organisms like the bees.

And so we've done a lot of work sort of moving from... You've asked how to grow things.

So we've grown things using...

where we're digitally fabricating with other organisms that live across the various kingdoms of life.

And those were the silkworms and bees.

And with bees, which we've sent to outer space and returned healthily, and they were reproductive.

So we built what we called a synthetic apiary.

And the synthetic apiary was designed as an environment that was a perpetual spring environment for the bees of Massachusetts.

They go on hibernation, of course, during the winter season, and then we lose 80% of them or more during that period.