"In Studio Scilicet, our recent research involves prototyping systems from biodegradable silk circuitry, experimenting with alternative energy sources, and considering how machine systems can respond not just to commands, but to physiological states, environmental rhythms, and embodied gestures."

Silk fibroin — the structural protein of the Bombyx mori cocoon — is the hinge of this research. Extracted in the studio from cocoons raised in residence, the protein is biocompatible with the human body and, when processed, becomes programmable: a materials-science lineage in which silk has been demonstrated as a substrate for dissolvable electronics, protein optics patterned at the nanometer scale, and flexible devices that degrade at controlled rates rather than persisting as waste. The studio's contribution is aesthetic and relational — a conductive drawing ink of silver microparticles bound in bioresin and silk fibroin; circuit boards whose substrate was spun by a living collaborator; the interior of the sensor, the neural architecture of all computation, opened as a surface for drawing.

Where conventional electronics are etched, these are grown, cast, and drawn — chimeric in the precise sense: one body made of several organisms.

"I'm particularly drawn to the Bombyx mori, the domesticated silkworm. Over the years of hosting them in my studio, I've witnessed their life cycle from egg to larva, cocoon to moth."

The silkworm enters the work as collaborator, muse, and protagonist — a framing that extends the practice of embodied collaboration through ideas of diasporic nature and metamorphic systems. Its metamorphosis suggests that a kind of death takes place not at the end of life but in the middle of it: a dissolution as a prelude to becoming. Paradoxically, both an ending and a new beginning. Decay is just evolution in reverse.

Silk is one of the oldest technologies of the Chinese diaspora — delicate yet remarkably strong, ancient yet central to emerging biotechnology. Raising Bombyx mori in residence makes the studio a site of care as much as fabrication: the machine system is reimagined as habitat, and husbandry becomes part of the artistic method. The inquiry began on stage with Realm of Silk (Singapore International Festival of Arts, 2023) and now runs through every strand of the research.

Regenerative AI. Low-compute, locally run models with an eco-conscious carbon footprint — an AI understood as embodied sensing or proto-organism, closer to living tissue or a reflex arc than to a remote algorithmic service.

Experimental robotics. Nature-inspired soft machines in alternative materials — silk fibroin, biopolymers — powered by regenerative energy sources (soil, sun, experimental batteries) and engineered for collaboration and adaptation rather than automation.

Organic computation. Tissues, cell networks, and bioelectric fields treated as computational media — systems that process information and make decisions about growth, repair, and form. Intelligence recast as something distributed across scales, offering a theoretical bridge between biological morphogenesis and artificial systems: artworks that operate like living diagrams of cognition-in-matter.

Underlying all of this is one of the most unusual datasets in contemporary art: two decades of the artist's own mark-making; ten years of human–machine co-aesthetic artefacts across seven generations of robotic systems; 1,314 curated drawing and biosignal sessions; the Spatial Meridian motion-capture dataset; and a live EEG pipeline refined across three generations of performance. "In building these systems, I've had to become machine-readable. It's a paradox: to move beyond the self, I've had to rigorously quantify the self."

The archive is not documentation — it is the instrument. Each generation of D.O.U.G. is trained on the accumulated gesture of every generation before it, making the research program itself recursive: a body of work that studies its own transmission.

Beyond the dedicated studies, sixty-plus publications discuss the work at length. Sofian Audry’s Art in the Age of Machine Learning (MIT Press, 2021) describes the training of D.O.U.G. on two decades of drawings; the field survey When Creators Meet the Metaverse (Lee et al., 2021) devotes a passage and a figure to the robots; Collective Wisdom (Cizek & Uricchio, MIT Press, 2022) carries a named spotlight, “Sougwen Chung and DOUG”; and Studies in Art Education (2023), the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Improvisation (2021), Global Media Arts Education (Palgrave, 2023), Leonardo (2024), and AI & SOCIETY (2025) each take the practice as a working example of what collaboration with machines can mean.

The work also feeds back into the technical literature it draws from — a traversal few practices make. It is cited and discussed in the field’s flagship venues, and beyond engineering in legal scholarship, policy, and sustainability research on creative AI. The cover of Cosmotechnics (Angelaki / Routledge), the field-defining volume on technology and cosmology, carries the studio’s image.