Tomás Saraceno
Artist
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.
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.
Tomás Saraceno is an Argentine artist whose projects, consisting of floating sculptures, international collaborations, and interactive installations, propose and dialogue with forms of inhabiting and sensing the environment that have been suppressed in the Capitalocene era—human and nonhuman alike. Collectively calling for environmental justices that enable interspecies cohabitation, Saraceno’s artistic collaborations open renewed relationships with the terrestrial, atmospheric, and cosmic realms—particularly through his community projects, Aerocene and Arachnophilia.
