Markus J Buehler
Materials scientist and composer, MIT
Arachnophilia: Spiders and Spider Webs
Through storytelling, we describe a collaboration between science and art, focused on spiders and their complex webs, explore from multiple perspectives, and scales, on a journey from arachnophobia to arachnophilia. This work has spanned multiple institutions across the globe, and resulted in various outcomes ranging from computer models built off scanned webs, new sonification approaches, to instrumentation, and interactive installations, including jamming with spiders as partners in the creative process. By losing human language we explore the vibrational world the spider lives in, to understand nature in a non-human way. Looking to nature for insights and to bring back wisdom that has long been forgotten, we explore interfaces between human and animal intelligence, and explore the Anthropo-not-seen. We discuss relevant aspects such as effects of climate change, environmental change, and ecological aspects such as mass extinction events.
Markus J. Buehler is the McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, and a composer of experimental, classical and electronic music, with an interest in sonification. His work explores the creation of new forms of musical expression, such as those derived from biological materials and living systems. Using an approach termed "materiomusic", uses sound as an abstract way to model, optimize and create new forms of living matter. In recent work he created music based on proteins—the basic molecules of all life—to explore crossing species, scales and between philosophical and physical models. He is also interested in research to explore relationships between classical music, mathematics, and the physical and biological sciences, an in the mapping of models across systems and species. In recent work he has developed a new framework to compose music based on proteins – the basic molecules of all life, as well as other physical phenomena such as fracturing, to explore similarities and differences across species, scales and between philosophical and physical models.
