Art and Spiders: TOMÁS SARACENO: COSMIC JIVE. THE SPIDER SESSIONS

Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions, 2014

“Even though spider webs have been around for at least 140 million years, we have never managed to preserve and display their webs in a three dimensional form. In fact, there is no single museum in the world with a collection of this kind. Tomás Saraceno’s spider web sculptures are a breakthrough in both science and art, and thanks to his methods new fields of studies have been opened.”

(Peter Jäger, 2015)

“[…] (R)emarkable feature of Saraceno’s work is that such a visual experience is not situated in any fixed ontological domain, nor at any given scale: you can take it, as I do, as a model for social theory, but you could just as well see it as a biological interpretation of the threads that hold the walls and components of a cell, or, more literally, as the weaving of some monstrously big spider, or the utopian projection of galactic cities in 3D virtual space. This is very important if you consider that all sorts of disciplines are now trying to cross the old boundary that has, until now, distinguished the common destiny of increasing numbers of humans and non-humans.”

(Bruno Latour, Some Experiments in Art and Politics, e-flux journal, #23, 03/2011)

Saraceno is a multidisciplinary artist from Argentina who currently lives and works in Berlin. The images above are select images from his Cosmic Jive installation, featuring sculptures containing the webs of spiders that have been illuminated by bright lights in a dim room. As beautiful as the work is, it's equally valuable as a scientific investigation. No museum has a collection of real and complete spider web structures. These webs, whole and authentic, are a fantastic display of webs construction that provides scientists with a specimen for study. Not only for aesthetic enjoyment, Saraceno himself has studied, scanned, mapped, and re-constructed the webs. He has created a 1:16 scale model of the web of a Latrodectus mactans (Black Widow) spider as an installation work with the help of a team of scientists and advanced imaging technology. Other applications of this series, including musical and sonic creations as well as intensive scientific exploration are talked about in great detail on the project page for this work, found here.