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Arachnid Orchestras: Artistic Research in Vibrational Interspecies Communication
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.
... spider webs | construction | silk | mechanics | art-science S piders are among nature's most efficient and prolific engineers: they design, build, use, and maintain high-performance and lightweight silk webs. They have inspired applications in the field of biomedicine (1), structural engineering (2), electronics (3), optics (4), art (5,6), and music (7). Spiders produce silk fibers with outstanding mechanical and biological properties; they are strong and extensible while also being biodegradable and biocompatible. ...
... σ y = d × 5.18 × 10 4 + 0.07719, [3] T y = d × 5.445 × 10 4 − 0.05103, [4] σ z = d × 2.491 × 10 4 + 0.115, [5] T z = d × 4.109 × 10 4 + 0.008784, [6] with σ and T, web strength and toughness along the x-, y-, and z-axes, and d, density. The web strength increases more with density along the y-axis because more fibers are aligned in the y direction. ...
Significance
Spiders, silks, and webs have survived and prospered for millions of years, making them an evolutionary success. Learning how spiders used their silks and webs to adapt to environmental pressures have fascinated many fields of research such as biomedicine, biology, and engineering. Because of silk’s nanoscale size and the complex web architecture, little is known about the architecture and mechanics of three-dimensional (3D) spider webs during construction. This work comprehensively investigates the structure, mechanics, and functionality of a 3D spider web under construction, using consistent imaging and computational simulations methods. This work could inspire efficient spider-inspired fabrication sequences or fiber geometries in engineered materials, as demonstrated here for 3D-printed prototype materials.
Starting from Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of meaning, the article explores the semiotic functions of the spider’s web, examining in depth its material characteristics and relationship to communication. This study reinterprets the biologist’s concepts, highlighting the vibration of webs as a mode of interspecific communication. By inquiring into the physical composition of spider webs, the research proposes artistic performances that seek to extend material vibration by exploring subjective experience. Thus, a performance-based biosemiotic and materialist approach is proposed to recreate the umwelt of the spider, bridging the human and arachnid realms through minimalist constructions by focusing on vibrational communication processes. In conclusion, the intricate interplay between material manifestations and subjective interpretations in the spider’s ecological niche will be outlined.
Since 2007, Tomás Saraceno has been developing a project that aims to break out of the anthropocentric understanding of communication and coexistence with other animal organisms. In this article, I point out the importance of using modern visualization technologies to analyze and investigate the structure of communication frameworks and their modalities in the animal world, specifically using the example of spiders. The visualization of what is normally invisible to the eye and inaudible to the ear rearticulates the realm of the visible and the audible, which Saraceno then uses for art-critical purposes, with the aim of forming a new type of posthuman attunement to the environment and other animal species. The condition for outlining and articulating Saraceno’s artistic vision is the use of the latest technologies of visualization, which operate on the principle of digital and algorithmic code. They synthesize different planes of affectivity and transform, modulate, and combine the different modes of signs into a single technical-organic complex: they offer new ways of seeing and feeling the world. Thus, hybrid ecology in Saraceno’s case does not imply a return to primordial ways of life, but on the contrary, it forms a semiosphere attuned to a specific plane of consistency that enfolds distinct modes of signs and develops them into an expression of hitherto unsuspected variants of life.
3D spider webs exhibit highly intricate fiber architectures and owe their outstanding performance to a hierarchical organization that spans orders of magnitude in length scale from the molecular silk protein, to micrometer-sized fibers, and up to cm-scale web. Similarly, but in a completely different physical manifestation, music has a hierarchical structure composed of elementary sine wave building blocks that can be combined with other waveforms to create complex timbres, which are then arranged within larger-scale musical compositions. Although apparently different, spider webs and music have many similarities, as we point out in this work. Here, we propose an intuitive and interactive way to explore and visualize a 3D Cyrtophora citricola spider web geometry that has been digitally modeled with micron-scale details from full-scale laboratory experiments. We use model-based sonification to translate the web architecture into sound, allowing for aural perception and interpretation of its essential topological features. We implement this sonification using Unity3D and Max/MSP to create an interactive spider web environment in which a user travels through a virtual spider web. Each silk fiber in their field of view is sonified using different sine waves. Together, the sonified fibers create new and more complex timbres that reflects the architecture of 3D spider webs. These concepts are implemented into a spider web-based instrument for live performances, art installations and data exploration. It provides an unprecedented and creative way to immerse the composer, audience and user in an immersive multimedia experience generated by the complexity of a 3D spider web.
Spiders are abundantly found in nature and most ecosystems, making up more than 47 000 species. This ecological success is in part due to the exceptional mechanics of the spider web, with its strength, toughness, elasticity and robustness, which originate from its hierarchical structures all the way from sequence design to web architecture. It is a unique example in nature of high-performance material design. In particular, to survive in different environments, spiders have optimized and adapted their web architecture by providing housing, protection, and an efficient tool for catching prey. The most studied web in literature is the two-dimensional (2D) orb web, which is composed of radial and spiral threads. However, only 10% of spider species are orb-web weavers, and three-dimensional (3D) webs, such as funnel, sheet or cobwebs, are much more abundant in nature. The complex spatial network and microscale size of silk fibres are significant challenges towards determining the topology of 3D webs, and only a limited number of previous studies have attempted to quantify their structure and properties. Here, we focus on developing an innovative experimental method to directly capture the complete digital 3D spider web architecture with micron scale res- olution. We built an automatic segmentation and scanning platform to obtain high-resolution 2D images of individual cross-sections of the web that were illuminated by a sheet laser. We then developed image processing algorithms to reconstruct the digital 3D fibrous network by analysing the 2D images. This digital network provides a model that contains all of the structural and topological features of the porous regions of a 3Dweb with high fidelity, and when combined with a mechanical model of silk materials, will allow us to directly simulate and predict the mechanical response of a realistic 3D web under mechanical loads. Our work provides a practical tool to capture the architec- ture of sophisticated 3D webs, and could lead to studies of the relation between architecture, material and biological functions for numerous 3D spider web applications.
Abstract Spiders of the tropical American colonial orb weaver Parawixia bistriata form a communal bivouac in daytime. At sunset, they leave the bivouac and construct individual, defended webs within a large, communally built scaffolding of permanent, thick silk lines between trees and bushes. Once spiders started building a web, they repelled other spiders walking on nearby scaffolding with a "bounce" behavior. In nearly all cases (93%), this resulted in the intruder leaving without a fight, akin to the "bourgeois strategy," in which residents win and intruders retreat without escalated contests. However, a few spiders (6.5%) did not build a web due to lack of available space. Webless spiders were less likely to leave when bounced (only 42% left) and instead attempted to "freeload," awaiting the capture of prey items in nearby webs. Our simple model shows that webless spiders should change their strategy from bourgeois to freeloading satellite as potential web sites become increasingly occupied.
There has been some controversy about whether adult females of the social Stegodyphus disperse by ballooning. Here we show that adult Stegodyphus dumicola Pocock 1898 are able to gain up-lift by releasing a very large number of threads. The threads fan out widely from the spider's body and form a triangular sheet. This previously unknown ballooning mechanism, enables even large spiders to disperse over large distances.
In The Open, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben examines the ways in which, throughout the history of Western culture, man has been distinguished from animal, and in his inquiry discovers that the human arises not from the conjunction of a natural, living body and a divine or rational element, but rather through the workings of the ââ¬Åanthropological machineââ¬? which produces man by means of a strategic, practico-political separation of humanity from animality. ---------- Giorgio Agamben is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Verona. This is the fifth of his books published by Stanford; previous titles are Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), The Man Without Content (1999), The End of the Poem (1999), and Potentialities (1999). ---------- The end of human history is an event that has been foreseen or announced by both messianics and dialecticians. But who is the protagonist of that history that is comingââ¬âor has comeââ¬âto a close? What is man? How did he come on the scene? And how has he maintained his privileged place as the master of, or first among, the animals? In The Open, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the ââ¬Åhumanââ¬? has been thought of as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether. In an argument that ranges from ancient Greek, Christian, and Jewish texts to twentieth-century thinkers such as Heidegger, Benjamin, and Kojève, Agamben examines the ways in which the distinction between man and animal has been manufactured by the logical presuppositions of Western thought, and he investigates the profound implications that the man/animal distinction has had for disciplines as seemingly disparate as philosophy, law, anthropology, medicine, and politics.
This article employs Anne Sauvagnargues’ writing on ‘artmachines’ to explore a series of experiments with spiders and simulations at Studio Tomás Saraceno. These experiments were the first to ‘capture’ or ‘image’ the black widow spider’s highly complex, three-dimensional web and to investigate its similarity to astrophysical simulations of the universe. To develop the artmachine for cultural geographies of art, and as a grammar for techno-aesthetic and multispecies artistic practices, the article approaches Studio Saraceno’s webbed experiments as artmachines, or ‘ecologies of images’. In doing so, the article addresses the role of haecceity and simulation to accentuate the many forms of image-making and becoming within and beyond the studio. This account amplifies affective relations between humans, spiders, and webs, relations that emerge before and beyond the gallery or the exhibition. Thinking with artmachines also manifests art’s alliances to technology without foreclosing its unique modes of individuation. For these reasons, artmachines may hold promise for cultural geographies of art, creative practice, and production.
Philip Ball finds himself caught up in artworks woven by thousands of South American spiders.
A spider’s web is the species-specific production of spacetime; it is an aesthetic as well as an evolutionary, metabolic and climatic achievement. As part of a long-term engagement with spiders and their webs, the artist Tomás Saraceno has collaborated with populations of spiders and other creatures to produce hybrid webs. The processual and patterned production of hybrid webs at Studio Tomás Saraceno inspires thought on the axes of more-than-human sympoeisis, on collaboration between and across multitudes of creatures, and on a spectrum of social and semi-social encounter between different species. Through interviews, storytelling, visual material and critical description, this paper develops a notion of hybrid webs as philosophical-aesthetic propositions for multispecies sociality.
Animal communication, including that among humans, is fascinating in its efficiency, diversity and its complexity. The evolution of a communication signal requires that the encoded content sent by an organism (sender) is detected and decoded by a receiver, who then must respond in such a way that the fitness of the sender is increased. The signal could be visual, such as bright coloration or some stereotypical movement that attracts attention through the sense of sight. It could be chemical, such as a pheromone we detect by smell or taste, or it could be tactile, involving direct physical touch. It could be an acoustic wave, detected by an auditory organ as sound and perceived through the sense of hearing, or it could be a vibrational wave detected by a vibration receiver of another sort. The medium through which the signal is transmitted could be any that exists on the Earth (solid, liquid or gas), and each type of medium influences the type of signal that is able to most efficiently move through it.
The reaction of three species of web-spinning spiders, Araneus cavaticus, Argiope aurantia, and Argiope avara, in their webs and when removed from the webs, to web agitation and airborne sounds at known frequencies and intensities were studies. The reactions to web agitation and airborne sounds are not the same, and the receptors are probably different. The spiders react to web agitation by attacking the source, as they do with trapped insects; the receptors are probably proprioceptors of the legs. The spider respond to airborne sounds, from 200 to 3,000 cycle/sec at 90 to 110 db, by defensive movements; the webs are not needed for reception. The receptors are long, thin hairs which are agitated by near-field air movements of intense sound fields; they are not specialized phonoreceptors, for they are sensitive to direct bending and to air currents. Earlier discrepancies in results with airborne sounds are easily explained by the fact that intensities and distances to sound sources were not controlled. The defensive reactions to high intensity airborne sounds are probably involved, in nature, with escape from or defense against winged predators.
In addition to the collection of articles, it is a pleasure to announce a couple of bonus items exclusive to JSS. One is an interview with Douglas Kahn, pre-eminent historian and theorist of the media arts with a particular interest in the study of sound in the avant-garde and experimental arts and music. By good fortune, Kahn’s latest book Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts was published in late 2013 when contributions for the current special issue were under construction. Working independently, both projects – Earth Sound Earth Signal and JSS8 – historicize and critically examine sounds of space and this seemed like an excellent reason to strike up a dialogue and learn more about Kahn’s latest book. During the course of the interview multiple points of convergence, intersections, and shared research interests transpired and led to a lively discussion.
Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the occurrence of group living in spiders. Group living has arisen in spiders in basically two different forms. Cooperative or nonterritorial permanent‐social species are the main focus of the chapter. The form of group living in spiders has been termed “colonial” or “communalterritorial.” Colonial species have been likened to foraging flocks of birds and are described as foraging societies. Social spiders can be viewed as an ideal evolutionary experiment with independent replicates, both within and across several families. The designation of species as nonterritorial permanent‐social and nonterritorial periodic‐social applies to groups of traits that generally occur together. The chapter illustrates that, as this terminology is also somewhat unwieldy, for convenience it revert to the commonly used shorthand designations of social and subsocial, for nonterritorial permanent‐social and territorial periodic‐social, respectively.
In the Nylsvley Nature Reserve, in the South African savanna, the spider community in 320 abandoned mammal burrows was investigated. Three species, Agelena ocellata (Agelenidae), Euprosthenops proximus (Pisauridae) and Smeringopus pallidus (Pholcidae), coexisted in the burrows. The number of individuals and the number of species inhabiting the burrows increased with burrow size. Gerbil burrows were apparently too small to provide space for more than one individual of any of the three species. Only the burrows of springhares, warthogs, and antbears contained more than one spider. When artificial burrows were provided a rapid increase in settlement resulted. Competition for space therefore seems to be the determining factor influencing the population size. A relatively low number of prey items (136, in 119 webs) were found in agelenid webs only. Kleptoparasitic ants were observed stealing prey items from the webs.
Cosmic Jive: Tomás Saraceno. The Spider sessions
- G Pezzato
Spider webs in science, art and space - an interdisciplinary project on 3D-visualisation
- T Saraceno
- C Wulff
- D Steineck
- P Jäger
- S Zschokke
The open: man and animal. Meridian, crossing aesthetics; Variation: Meridian
- G Agamben
- Messias Basques
Unser Kosmos ist (fast) wie ein Spinnennetz
- T Saraceno
- P Jäger
Notes on the South African social spiders
- Gak Marshall