Abstract
Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions, Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions and the Cosmic Dust Web Orchestra are pioneering and visionary projects by artist Tomás Saraceno that fold his long-term research on spider webs into the realm of vibration and sound, to develop playful and experimental systems for interspecies communication. Working at the intersection of art, architecture and science, for these projects Saraceno transformed spider webs into musical instruments that play upon the incredible structural and mechanical properties of spider silk, and also tune into the spider’s sophisticated forms of vibrational communication. Exhibited at Saraceno’s first solo show in SE-Asia at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art in Singapore, Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions was developed in collaboration with experts from various fields of knowledge—and extends upon Saraceno’s earlier bioacoustic projects. With this interdisciplinary team, Saraceno created a musical system for translating the spiders’ vibrations into acoustic rhythms: amplifying the spiders’ biotremological signals and web pluckings, and making these substrate-borne vibrations audible to humans. During the exhibition, musicians and sonic artists were invited to attune and respond to the spiders’ vibrational signals through the multispecies instruments that Saraceno created via three live performances (jam sessions), creating a collective and immersive interspecific orchestral composition. The exhibition space was thus transformed into an interactive sound and visual installation: a process-driven laboratory for experimentation that pushed the boundaries of interspecies communication. During the First International Symposium on Biotremology in San Michele all’Adige, sonic excerpts from Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions were played to a scientific audience.
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Notes
- 1.
Originally developed specifically for this artistic project, this technique is now used by scientific collaborators at MIT (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering), and at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, Konstanz.
- 2.
A team of researchers and students at MIT have been using Saraceno’s scanning system to experimentally investigate the deformation mechanism of spider webs, applying different loads (e.g. point, wind, stretch and combination) to the webs and analysing the stresses on individual fibres. This analysis will assist in understanding how the location of each fibre impacts upon the load, and the overall architecture of the web (Buehler and Saraceno 2017).
- 3.
Sociality in spiders takes a number of forms. ‘Social’ spiders are considered as those forming ‘family-group territories’ and building communal webs, where colony members cooperate in raising their young and foraging for food. Around 60 spider species are considered ‘colonial’—living in aggregations, but foraging and raising their young alone (Lubin and Bilde 2007).
- 4.
There are documented examples of a hybrid webs in ‘nature’ that were built in an abandoned mammal burrow in South Africa and incorporated the webs of coexisting spiders from Agelena, Euprosthenops and Smeringopus species (Heidger 1988). However, these spider species live in a close geographical proximity to one another—at the level of niche specificity. Saraceno’s Hybrid Spider Web sculptures bring together webs spun from geographically distant spiders, for instance, incorporating webs from Nephila senegalensis (sub-Saharan Africa, from Senegal and Yemen to South Africa) and Psechrus jageri (Thailand, Laos) species, or Nephila edulis (Australia) orb webs in co-compositional structures with webs woven by Larinioides sclopetarius (Europe, North America and Asia).
- 5.
In other vibratory spider signals, such as those produced by stridulation, or when a spider drums on a surface such as a dry leaf, a portion of the signal is airborne, and thus potentially audible to humans without technical amplification (Lahee 1904).
- 6.
The ‘cosmic dust’ in this installation is materially represented by dust particles that Saraceno generated from crushed meteorites (chondrites). True cosmic dust and interplanetary dust particles, while originating in outer space, are also prevalent on Earth; cosmic dust enters our atmosphere at a rate of somewhere between 5 and 270 tonnes per day.
- 7.
This tracking system was developed in a research collaboration with Loopbio GmbH principal John Stowers and Max Hofbauer.
- 8.
The vibrational communication channels in social webs are not well understood. Parawixia spiders are known to use ‘web bouncing’ to signal to web intruders (Wenseleers et al. 2013), and these bounces might act as perceptible visual indicators of imperceptible biotremological signals.
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Acknowledgments
Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions, Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions and The Cosmic Dust Spider Web Orchestra arose from strong and lively collaborations involving Saraceno and his studio team, and numerous arachnid and human collaborators, to whom we would like to express our gratitude. In addition to the team at Studio Tomás Saraceno—particularly Sofia Lemos for leading the Spider Salon program and Dominik Hildebrand for his technical expertise in developing the web sonification devices—we thank the following members of the extended Interspecific Network (in no particular order) for their ongoing contributions, enthusiasm and dialogue: Friedrich G. Barth, Markus Buehler, Hannelore Hoch, Peggy Hill, Peter Jäger, Alex Jordan, Yael Lubin, Matthew Lutz, Zhao Qin, Jutta Schneider, Andreas Wessel, Jonas Wolff, Christof Wulff and Samuel Zschokke. In the development of the Arachnid Orchestra, we would like to thank sound engineer Frgmnt Grys, and sound artist Odysseus Klissouras. Thanks to the musicians and writers who jammed with the spiders: Bani Haykal, Joyce Beetuan Koh, Brian Massumi, Brian O’Reilly, Elizabeth Povinelli, David Rothenberg, Etienne Turpin and Evan Ziporyn. We would also like to thank Ute Meta Bauer, Anca Rujoiu, Julie Hyun, Syaheedah Iskandar, Magdalena Magiera, Jegan Vincent de Paul, and Isrudy Shaik at NTU CCA Singapore for their tireless work and assistance in realising the Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions project. Many thanks also to Claus Andersen, Antonella Berruti, Tanya Bonakdar, Francesca Pennone and to Esther Schipper for their commitment. Of course, none of these works or inspirations would exist without all of the spiders, whose diligent work makes these research projects possible. A huge and warm thanks to all of these arachnid species, particularly Nephila senegalensis and Cyrtophora citricola.
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Saraceno, T., Bisshop, A., Krell, A., Mühlethaler, R. (2019). Arachnid Orchestras: Artistic Research in Vibrational Interspecies Communication. In: Hill, P., Lakes-Harlan, R., Mazzoni, V., Narins, P., Virant-Doberlet, M., Wessel, A. (eds) Biotremology: Studying Vibrational Behavior . Animal Signals and Communication, vol 6. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22293-2_24
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