All the photos shown below come from architect Tomás Saraceno's website.
The artist, in collaboration with the Darmstadt Technical University, developed a new tomography technique which, using lasers, allows to scan the complex architectures interwoven by spiders and to transformed them into 3D objects.
Finally, they also created a method to convert the collected 3D archives into their respective analogue forms. For example, on a 17:1 scale they recreated a spider's web and exhibited it for the first time in 2010 at the museum Bonniers Konsthall in Stockholm (as seen on the photo on the right).
Free the Air: How to Hear the Universe in a Spider Web, first exhibited in 2022 within the personal exposition Particular Matter(s) commissioned by The Shed (NY) and hosted in its multipurpose space The McCourt.
The huge installation allows visitors to feel in the same ways as spiders do, thanks to a system of oscillations and vibrations, which constitute the foundamental elements of the communication system of spiders. Participants can opte for the higher part, about twelve meters from the ground, or the lowest, about three. The experience lasts eight minutes and occurs in a dark haze.
In May 2018, Studio Tomás Saraceno, in collaboration with Christine Rollard from Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, conducted a survey, unveiling the hidden kingdom of arachnids within the Palais de Tokyo. The majority of the spiders found (around 500) were synanthropes: species that thrive in human-modified spaces.
Another example of this can be seen in Saraceno's studio, located in the heart of Rummelsburg, Berlin, an area that once hosted one of Europe's largest coal-fired power plants. Despite the process of re-naturalization that was later undertaken in that area, these creatures remained steadfast inhabitants of these buildings.
(Palais de Tokyo on the left, Saraceno's Studio on the right)
Underwater spider, it posses a bag that works exactly like the oxygen tanks used by humans for diving.
On the right, a divinatory method, which - for focusing on spiders, takes the name of Arachnomancy, practiced for example in Cameroon.
See more at the site below: https://arachnophilia.net/applications/
