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Tomás Saraceno

With “Cosmic Jive: Tomás Saraceno. The Spider Sessions” at Villa Croce, Genoa, the Argentinian artist continues to explore the complex world of spider webs.

For his exhibition at Villa Croce, Tomás Saraceno continues to explore the complex world of spider webs, which he has extensively investigated for some years.

Featured as the central theme of major environmental installations (Galaxy Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web at the Venice Biennial in 2009 or 14 Billions (Working Title) at the Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm in 2010), the spider web and its architectural, engineering, social, cosmological and symbolic values are the focus of further investigation for the artist's project in Genova.

“Cosmic Jive: Tomás Saraceno. The Spider Sessions” is a project specifically designed for Villa Croce by Tomás Saraceno and the Saraceno Studio in collaboration with biologists, musicians, architects, and electronic engineers to develop the artist's research on spider webs from the perspective of sound and vibration.

The exhibition weaves together the different spaces of the 19th century villa. The first floor features an interactive sound installation: the visitors’ movement activates a series of acoustic responses thanks to passive motion sensors installed in the rooms. Depending on their location in the museum, visitors will hear different compositions.

“Cosmic Jive: Tomás Saraceno. The Spider Sessions”, photo Nuvola Ravera Courtesy Studio Saraceno

The left speakers emit the sounds of the semi-social spiders playing on pre-existing solitary webs. The right speakers play the solitary spiders on the web that was built by social spiders. Depending on where they are in the room, the public will hear more either the right or the left speaker. Will they become active political listeners?

The sounds consist of the vibrations emitted by different species of spiders as they weave their cosmic webs, mate, or capture their prey and were recorded using laser Doppler vibrometers and other transducers. They are combined with extraterrestrial sounds/vibrations captured by several space agencies.

The public will therefore create an ever-changing and unstable soundscape where the unpredictable relationship between movement and sound will create an invisible acoustic spider web interwoven through the museum’s rooms. As spiders interpret reality through air pressure and vibration, rather than through sight or images, in the same way visitors will move through a semi-dark space learning to communicate and orient themselves through the movement of their bodies and their sense of hearing.

In this undefined environment, visitors will establish temporary relationships with other visitors and they will play with their bodies this invisible spider web. Within this sensitive and vibrant context, visitors will discover, sense and experience, new forms of collaboration. As in other installations by Tomás Saraceno, a new temporary community will take shape, raising a series of considerations on the social models of our present and future.

The first floor also features two hybrid web-instruments woven by three different species, Cyrtophora citricola, Nephila kenianensis, and Cyrtophora moluccensis. These layered constructions are built collaboratively by the spiders although each species has a different degree of sociability: solitary (living alone on a web), social, and semi-social (living together in big communities on a single web). Each hybrid web is a three-dimensional arachnid collaboration where the webs interlink, morph, and shift orientation resulting in webs that do not exist in nature. For Tomás Saraceno, the hybrid webs are instruments for communication, cooperation, and seduction.

The first artwork Work in Progress: Hybrid-web Instrument Centaurus A, constructed by the solitary Nephila kenianensis for three weeks, with Live performance by the quintet of semi social Cyrtophora citricola is eponymous with the title. It is left open, suspended in mid-air, and illuminated by spotlights to reveal the fragility and complexity of the instrument and its players, but also a breathable cosmic dust. Since the Cyrtophoras will continue its weaving performance for the duration of the show, this web-instrument will continually change and evolve.

The second hybrid web-instrument, Hybrid semi-social musical instrument NGC 2976 is exhibited in a glass vitrine. The web was first built by a Cyrtophora citricola for three weeks and afterwards reconstructed by a group of semi social Cyrtophora moluccensis that wove it for four weeks. The second species of spiders was only added after the entire carbon frame was turned 180 degrees on its Z axis towards the ISS, thereby reorienting the force of gravity on the web instrument and players.

A team of researchers from PAVIS Department at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, in collaboration with Saraceno Studio, has elaborated the means for the construction of a three dimensional image of a real spider web. Illuminating the web in its height and depth with an emitter of sheets of laser light, they acquired a series of images in sequence using a digital camera. The photographs have then been elaborated and colour coded in a three-dimensional reconstruction of the web.