SILKWORM PROJECT
2012 - 2019
Silkworm Project is a process driven body of work that began with an interest in examining how mechanic systems can embody and manifest behaviors such as those of natural systems. This work continues the artist's interest in transcending the boundary between the organic and the technological with the ultimate goal of producing hybrid systems that on a fundamental level couple and resonate with each other. The series consists of designed machine apparatuses, experimentations, documentation, and artifacts. The methodology of this work draws heavily from early British cyberneticians who treated object-making as an epistemic practice. Rather than imposing machine logic onto human behavior or organic systems, pioneers such as Stafford Beer and Gordan Pask experimented with alternative perspectives of complex-system-making where natural phenomena informed systems thinking. Andrew Pickering terms their approach and method ontological theatre, in which the rendering tangible of system hypothesis is crucial in staging and re-staging systems ontologies. In this process, objects become performative, practice becomes research.
Silkworm Project centers the biological being, in this case the silkworm, as its driver, where machine logic is constructed around insect perception and behavior, with special attention on the spinning phase of the silkworm's life cycle. The machine becomes an environment that houses this behavior, and by hacking into the worm's perceptual world, intervenes, disrupts, and alters its spatial orientation to guide the spinning of non-cocoon forms. The human is positioned as observer and facilitator within such a system, displaced from the central role of the artist. Poesis and potential emerge through the interaction between insect and machine environment, where the boundaries of insect technicity is tested and revealed. Creative production here is not measured by efficiency or outcome, but rather traced through the material evidence of worm spun structures.
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Through seven years of development of this work, the artist's research and practice metamorphosed through three distinct phases, made tangible by the machine apparatuses that emerged during these times. The evolution of these machines symbolize the artist's movement from cartesian space towards insect space. The machines themselves become silkworm cosmology in mechanic form.
See the artist's talk on the series at the Nonhuman Subjectivities conference held by Art Laboratory Berlin in winter of 2017.
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Also, see interview with the artist about the series produced by Kapeilica Gallery.
Silkworm Project, installation view.
Trees of Life exhibition, NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore.
MACHINE I : FLAT SPINNING
2014-2015
HISTORICAL RESEARCH INTO WEAVING AND COMPUTATION
It is well established that silk weaving technologies — most notably the Jacquard Loom — played a foundational role in the development of computational logic. Machine I proposes an inversion of this historical crossover: rather than textile machinery informing the architecture of computation, electrical information is used to influence the organization of silk, dispersed directly from the silkworm's mouth.​ In this first prototype, the design approach was largely mathematical and Cartesian in its orientation, drawing on historical and contemporary references. These early designs placed the silkworm, both metaphorically and literally, within a human-centered, industry-oriented frame of reference: the organism as commodity, the biological as subordinate to the technological.​
More specifically, the design of Machine I referenced the magnetic core memory, a dominant form of computer data storage from the 1950s through the 1970s, and the stacked racking systems used across Southeast Asia for silkworm rearing during the larval stage. The machine is modularly constructed — a removable strip of wood at the front functions as a locking mechanism that secures the control circuit plates in place, allowing individual panels to be repaired or replaced as needed. At the top of the machine sits a removable square loop, over which a piece of fabric or silk can be stretched to provide a spinning surface. This loop is placed onto an electrode stimulation matrix below, where the silkworm is guided through electrical stimulation within the bounds of the loop. The control circuits beneath provide individuated control over each electrode above. Conceived in the manner of an automatic embroidery machine, the silkworm functions simultaneously as input and output — the anticipated result inherently organic and unpredictable.
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The experiment was ultimately unsuccessful. What the design had failed to account for was the behavioral logic of the silkworm itself. As silkworms enter their spinning phase, they instinctively climb and wander — rendering the designed environment inadequate as a means of containment. They also purge the contents of their stomachs at the onset of spinning, introducing moisture into the machine environment that proved incompatible with the electronics. The electrical stimulation, too, failed to function as intended: establishing a reliable conductive interface between electrode and organism required dampness, which was detrimental to both the silkworm and the machine in equal measure.
Silkworm Project Machine I, machine design sketches and artifact.
2016-2017
MACHINE II : SPATIAL SPINNING
BIOLOGICAL RESEARCH INTO THE SPINNING BEHAVIOR AND SPATIAL PERCEPTION OF THE SILKWORM
In 2015, Neri Oxman and the Mediated Matter Group at MIT Media Lab unveiled Silk Pavilion, a work that proposed a fundamental reorientation of digital fabrication through the lens of biomimicry. Departing from the additive logic of conventional 3D printing, the project instead modeled a form of outward, encompassing construction in three-dimensional space — drawn directly from the silkworm's own spinning behavior. Through extensive spatial experimentation with live silkworms, the team sought to understand how physical restraint and spatial variation could influence the geometry of the spun outcome.​ This work offered a new conceptual entry point. Where the premise of Machine I had been to design with the silkworm — positioning the organism within a human-defined technological framework — the inquiry now shifted toward designing for it. Rather than instrumentalizing the silkworm's behavior toward a predetermined output, the new investigation turned inward: toward the silkworm's own spatial logic, its perception of the world it spins within. This reorientation became the design premise for Machine II.
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Spatial spinning experiments were conducted to observe how silkworms navigate space both individually and collectively. For the collective studies, silkworms producing multi-colored silk were cultivated through two methods — the Singaporean practice of feeding pigmented feed to the larvae, and the use of genetically engineered silkworms developed by Japanese researchers. By tracking color differentiation, it was possible to observe the spatial negotiations between two worms spinning within a shared environment, and the manner in which each built upon the other's existing structure.
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Further research into sensory ecology and animal architecture provided a framework for understanding what was being observed. In insects that construct, the relative simplicity of the neural architecture is compensated for by a precise reliance on body morphology — size, shape, and physical proportion function almost as an embodied measuring instrument, allowing the organism to anticipate and map its immediate spatial environment. Refined over thousands of years of evolutionary process, this relationship between form and function reaches a degree of calibration so precise that the behavioral processes it generates can remain mechanically simple while producing results of extraordinary complexity and consistency.
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The design goal of Machine II was to disrupt this equilibrium — to introduce spatial disorientation into the silkworm's perceptual field, and to make that disruption legible through the silk structure the organism produces in response. The vertical spinning chamber is sized in precise relation to the body of a fully developed, healthy larva — each dimension calibrated to just exceed the worm's natural reach. The curvature of the glass interior deliberately eliminates corners and angles, the architectural references the silkworm relies upon to establish the three-dimensional framing of its construction. The chamber's slow vertical rotation introduces a continuous shift in gravitational orientation, undermining the organism's sense of spatial direction. The resulting silk structures, when successful, do not simply document the silkworm's behavior — they trace the negative space of its perception, mapping the edges of confusion and the process of adjustment that follows.
The silkworms's body can be functionally divided into front and back two sections. The hind legs stabilize the worm on a plane, while the more flexible head and front arms allows the worm to explore a point outside of that plane for silk attachment during the spinning process.
Silkworm spinning methodology breakdown video, created in 2019 from footage taken of silkworms reared in New York in 2012.
Example of silkworm spun specimen within a hand rotated horizontal circular chamber. 2017.
Silkworm Project Machine I final form. Installation view from Trees of Life exhibition, NTU Center for Contemporary Art, Singapore.
MACHINE III : LEVITATION
2018-2019
INSECT SPACE
Machine III: Levitation opens a new chapter in The Silkworm Project. This final installment speculates on a new bionic system logic — one in which worm and machine together form a rotatory ecosystem. A circular capsule, functioning as a spinning chamber for the silkworm with no edges or corners. Originally conceived as a levitated space with artificially generated magnetic fields controlled and modulated by electronic circuits, the chamber rotates and spins in arbitrary directions through three-dimensional space. It preposes a form of co-production between insect and machine that is simultaneously spatial, biological, and open-ended.
This final work returns to an essential question at the heart of Silkworm Project: how do we design bio-machines? Levitation proposes an answer not through dominion or instrumentation, but through a speculative utopia — a state of equilibrium between the artificial and the natural, where production can be at once digital and biological, and where the machine does not impose upon the organism but forms itself around the insect's perspectives and possibilities.
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The final machine artifact was unfortunately unable to achieve magnetic levitation on the scale that was needed to house the spinning silkworm. In the final prototype, a glass capsule suspended within a wooden structure, driven by magnetics and motors. The prototype operates across two spinning modes. The first produces a slow, continuous rotation in a single direction, with adjustable speed. The second alternates between thirty seconds of slow directional rotation and thirty minutes of stillness, cycling continuously.
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Levitation was developed with funded support from Art Laboratory Berlin.
Silkworm Project Machine II final form.
Silkworm Project Machine II installation view at
Silkworm Project solo exhibition, Kapilica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia. 2019
