Social spiders and hybrid webs at Studio Tomás Saraceno

Nephila

A female Nephila rests on her web, legs delicately tensed on a radial axis. She is blind and deaf, although she has one of the most sensitive bodies of any living being. Air is to her what water is to a human: she feels the atmosphere as a dense, stirring pool. ¹ When she spins, she uses her back legs to draw out silk from her abdomen, using gusts of air to cast strong, radial threads to points farther away than she can step. Sometimes she secretes thread with a special glue on the ends. Sometimes she eats part of her web and weaves it anew. For her, the cosmos is an explicitly vibratory one: she feels zones of perturbation and tension traveling from regions of the web to her receptive body.

For this Nephila, and also for most other spiders, spacetime is the immediate outcome of daily labor, of webs made fast or slow, and of decisions affected by factors like climate, reproductive state, satiety and the presence of other creatures. In casting and projecting herself into a milieu and measuring the result of such actions, she is sensing what is around her, while also producing a species-specific orb-web whose radial axis will serve as her world. Although she will weave many webs in her adult life, some in the space of only 30 minutes, each of these will approach a limit-scenario, or quasi-topological attractor, that is her species’ mode of spatial production and survival. As much as this is a strategy of survival, this is also a species-specific aesthetics.

What does it mean not only to contemplate such forms of other-than-human aesthetics but also to collaborate or experiment with them? How does one “co-author with the alien” ² or “co-author [with] the cosmos”? ³ The artist Tomás Saraceno has endeavored to address exactly this in artworks made in explicit collaboration with many different spiders. The artist’s spider-web sculptures and inspired musical instruments implicate the life stories, groupings and preferences of individual spiders, their environmental conditions, and the degree of human perturbation they tolerate and respond to. The processual and patterned production of hybrid webs at Studio Saraceno forces 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. As we meet with these spiders in the ethnographic and visual work presented in this paper – as we learn their names, their shimmering webs and their various colonies – we will consider how human-spider encounters are provocative spaces for conceptualizing an aesthetics of multispecies sociality.

Webs that web

Since 2007, Tomás Saraceno has developed a significant portion of his artistic practice around working with spiders and their webs. Inspired by metaphorizations of the structure of the universe as a “cosmic web,” Saraceno undertook an extended research project in scanning and analyzing the web of the black widow (Latrodectus mactans) and, working with engineers at the University of Darmstadt, devised a new imaging technology to digitally model such a web in three dimensions. ⁴ This project resulted in two major artworks: Galaxies forming along filaments like droplets on a spider’s web (2009) and 14 Billions (2010). In collaboration with arachnologists, engineers and astrophysicists, Saraceno has also made an application to the European Space Agency (ESA) to send a black widow spider to the International Space Station (ISS) in order to discover what structure it would weave in microgravity. More recent trajectories include forays into the field of bioacoustics, namely the sonification of spider webs and attuning to the spiders’ vibrational modes of communication, and recently the staging of an Arachnid Orchestra (2015).

Writing about webs in the practice of Studio Saraceno is a case of following lines of inquiry into an almost endless collection of material. There are the physical presences of the spiders and the webs themselves, but also documents and images, notes on experiments, spreadsheets cataloguing the various webs produced, sold and stored, records of various web exhibitions, correspondences between Saraceno, Adrian Krell, Jol Thomson and many arachnologists and entomologists, videos and sound files of “spider recordings,” equipment such as video cameras and wire frames, commercial orders for crickets and house flies, and books and articles on everything from spider orientation by moonlight to the evolution of webs over eons.

A primary insight that emerged during my doctoral fieldwork at Studio Saraceno in 2014 was that there is never only one web. These collaborative experiments are always already about the relations between webbed forms. They are about comparing webs to other webs, through analogy, metaphor and metonymy, but more precisely about the meshing, layering and attracting of webbed forms to each other. The kinds of relations in the multiple and more-than-human style of experiment with webs at Studio Saraceno involve holding patterns and suspensions. In the following sections we will encounter the diversity of these webs, the spiders who weave them, and the people intimately involved in their lives.

The spider room

The spider room at Studio Tomás Saraceno is a small, dimly lit space, containing shelves and shelves of rectangular wire frames, each containing webs (Figure 1). In total the room holds approximately three hundred spiders, although this number rises and falls due to the influx of new spider species and egg sacks, and the natural death of grown spiders. The spiders weave webs in the open frames standing in trays of water, which (to some degree) prevents them from wandering into each other’s frames or out of the room altogether. The room is coated with black sheets of plastic, and the door to the room is padded. Due to the water in the trays, the room is quite humid. Houseflies ricochet around the shelves and ceiling, and smaller wingless jumping flies hop on the wires. Jars teeming with fly larva stand open. As one might expect, combined with the humidity, the air has a particular odor.

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Figure 1.

Tomás Saraceno and Hanna Baranowska in Acclimatized Spider Laboratory at Studio Tomás Saraceno for the solo exhibition Cosmic Jive. Tomás Saraceno: The Spider Sessions, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genova (2014). Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

Hanna Baranowska ⁵ works in the spider room. She usually comes to the studio three days a week, and spends the hours between 10am and 7pm “making sure everyone is happy”. ⁶ Her job is twofold: to take care of all of the spiders, and to facilitate the production of “beautiful hybrid webs”. ⁷ The first is a very repetitive task. However, the latter requires acute observation of the progress being made in each web, judgments on when each web is “finished”, and decisions on which different spider species to add to already completed webs, in order to produce a “hybrid”. A hybrid web is one in which two or more different spiders from different species have woven webs in the same space, and often have used each others structures. Baranowska enjoys both parts of her job, and even admits to spoiling some large spiders with crickets. However it is production of hybrid webs that interests us here, since it requires not only several acute aesthetic judgments, but also an understanding of each spider species’ habitual web structure and how it might look combined or superimposed on a different one.

Three hundred social and quasi-social spiders is an unusual ecosystem and provokes questions on the qualities of conviviality in this space. As part of a varied engagement with the more-than-human, geographers have begun to attend to creatures that are not ‘big like us’, and that are strange or monstrous. ⁸ If much of this literature has attended to human-animal companionship and its traces in the wider world, Davies ⁹ in particular has studied populations of creatures, especially mice and glowfish, in laboratories, speaking not only of individuals but of populations: creatures which are “not only multiple, but a multitude”. ¹⁰ Dixon ¹¹ and Johung ¹² have addressed how bio-artists employ the expressiveness of non-human beings in a critique of styles of genetic manipulation already common in industry. The spider room at Studio Saraceno also hosts both multiple species and a multitude of spiders whose expressiveness is the primary medium of production. The fact that the spider room is part of an artist’s studio does not mean it is free from the questions of animal welfare and bioethics raised by Davies and Dixon among others.

However, in response to such concerns, it is important to emphasize the degree of care and reciprocity that occurs between spiders and studio assistants like Baranowska, expressed through the degree of acute and careful observation that is necessary for such multispecies collaboration to succeed. As Saraceno and Adrian Krell invited the first spiders into the studio in 2008 and 2009, they faced enormous challenges in maintaining an ideal climate and environment for the spiders to weave webs. In fact, the first group of Tegenaria and black widow spiders in the studio hardly wove anything at all. It took significant collaboration with arachnologists like Dr. Peter Jäger of the Senckenberg Institute to develop the conditions in which the spiders would weave. ¹³ The point is that for the degree of weaving that occurs in the studio, and the diversity of species now habituated there, Saraceno, Krell and many other studio assistants progressed through a process of attunement to these creatures. Of course this process was reciprocal, as generations of spiders became habituated to the studio space. As Studio Saraceno has accommodated more species of spiders in the last two years since my initial fieldwork visit, the conditions have also been altered toward the creation of several micro-climates: the cultivation of different humidity and lighting conditions for the care of each spider species.

An extreme amount of caution is taken with the moving of webbed frames; given that the frames are open, many spiders freely leave or are released into the garden or the rest of the studio, where they take up other residences. The inter- and intra-actions between different species of spiders in this small (if porous) space are perhaps the most unusual aspects of Studio Saraceno, but it is precisely these relations between individuals and populations of spiders that have direct outcomes on the qualities of the “hybrid” webs produced in this multispecies milieu.

Hybrid webs

Baranowska begins each day saving drowning spiders: “well first of all I check if they’re all okay … sometimes they fall into water and if it just happened then I can still save them”. ¹⁴ She continues, “Once I’ve saved them, then I’m gonna feed them, so they all get their favorite food and her [Nephila] I like feeding best. She gets more crickets in the morning and maybe one later in the afternoon”. ¹⁵ When I spoke to Baranowska in March of 2014, the Nephila had woven a large orb-web spanning the length of a large frame and was perched vertically at its axis. Baranowska explains what happens after the morning feeding:

An important part of Baranowska’s job is to recognize the ‘finished’ forms of each spider’s web. Since there are many different species of spider, she has learned to notice when each spider has woven a web that is more or less the limit of what it will construct. For example, a Tegenaria, or “tunnel web spider” will weave a three-dimensional tunnel-web sometimes in the center of a frame, but more often around a corner. Then it builds itself a retreat in the corner as well. Cyrtophora spiders, on the other hand, build a mesh-like tent web, usually horizontally, suspended in the middle of a wire frame with long freestyle strands to the top and bottom. Once a spider has completed its characteristic web, she removes the spider from the frame and adds a different spider that will build a web nearby, or on top of, the first one (see Figure 2, in which a Nephila kanianensis and two Cyrtophora citricola have collaborated).

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Figure 2.

Tomás Saraceno, Hybrid musical instrument Cygnus A: built by a solitary Nephila kenianensis and two semi-social spiders Cyrtophora citricola (2014). Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

An important factor is each spider’s specific degree of “sociality”. A "solitary" spider, such as a black widow or Nephila, will only weave a web by itself and will attack any spider that enters its webbed milieu. A “semi social” spider, in contrast, will build a web that is partially supported by, or touching, another spider’s web, without engaging in social relations (they simply tolerate each other). “Social" spiders are usually those that live in colonies, and cooperatively care for their webs, their kin, and also hunt together (For an example of a hybrid web with solitary, social, semi-social spider collaborators, see Figure 3). The species in the Cyrtophora genus are semi-social or social spiders. Even though there are only about twenty known social spider species in the entire Araneae order (which contains 40,000 approximatly known species), many of the active spiders at Studio Saraceno are of the “semi-social” type. As Yael Lubin, President of the International Society of Arachnology related on the occasion of Tomás Saraceno’s exhibition Cosmic Jive, at the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, Genova (2014): a social spider web is either like an apartment building “in Italy or Israel,” where, “all the neighbors have some interaction with one another, sometimes they are friendly interactions and sometimes they are not so friendly interactions, but they do interact a lot.” In other cases:

…the spiders have stopped building their individual webs and they all live in a single nest, in which case they really have to be very friendly in order to cooperate in constructing this nest and I would liken this more to a commune or to a kibbutz… where everyone has to work together for the common good. ¹⁷

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Figure 3.

Tomás Saraceno, Hybrid solitary social semi social musical instrument Triangulum: built by one Steatoda grossa, ten days; a small community of Stegodyphus dufori, four months; and two Cyrtophora citricola spiderlings, two weeks (2014). Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

As these accounts suggest, the degree of spider sociality is intimately related with living conditions. A colony of social spiders without enough food to share will become less social. Saraceno often tells the story of a large, ballooning species – Stegodyphus dumicola – that travels many kilometers during their lifetimes. To do this, the spiders collectively send out long sticky threads into the wind; as the wind mixes the threads, a meshed sail is produced that can lift all of the spiders at once. Maybe, Saraceno speculates, becoming more sensitive and attuned to environmental conditions, and especially to the invisible and elemental forces animating air and atmosphere, would make humans more social, too.

Luring aesthetics

The aesthetic and affective force of these hybrid webs is greater than the combination of multiple webs suggests. The force of the hybrid webs lies in the middle, in the discernible interweaving of both webs, and in the sense that their structures are in suspension, in a “holding pattern” (Figure 4). ¹⁸ In this fragile suspension, each web refracts its difference from the other. This is especially true in hybrid webs where an orb-web spider like Nephila weaves a two-dimensional web near that of a tent or tunnel-web spider like Steatoda or Tegenaria. Iridescent connectors cross the zones of both webs, giving texture to the middle space and highlighting the shared material. The sensuous perception of the visual qualities of spider silk joins with non-sensuous perception of tension and pattern. Surfaces tend toward each other and then veer away. Finer, denser areas capture more light, while long radial threads emerge as one circles the frame. The sense that there is always something hidden or obscured across this spectrum of difference is a large part of the fascination of hybrid webs, and what also makes them powerful aesthetic objects.

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Figure 4.

Tomás Saraceno, Hybrid semi-social musical instrument NGC 2976: built by Cyrtophora citricola three weeks and Cyrtophora moluccensis four weeks (turned 180 degrees on Z axis rehearsing towards ISS) (2014). Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno, 2014. Courtesy the artist.

What is produced, from the obscure and intense milieu of these hybrid webs, is also a visceral sense of the social. In a publication produced by Studio Saraceno with Museo d’arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce, in Genova, for the exhibition Cosmic Jive (2014), Luca Cerizza wrote that there is a specific kind of social experiment occurring in a room of hybrid webs, and that, “we feel it change and move on our skin”. ¹⁹ What he alluded to was that the dynamics felt in each web, and echoed in the spider room, offered a tangible sense of being and holding-together: qualities that Manning and Massumi find in aesthetic works whose expression crosses media and gesture. ²⁰ Following Yusoff’s articulation of “geomorphic aesthetics,” hybrid webs make present, “what passes between… holding together or forcing apart”. ²¹ However, part of what is produced in the middle of each hybrid web is also a sense of the work of maintaining a specific shape while approaching the structure of another, even giving structure to another. The aesthetics of this kind of multispecies sociality is an aesthetics of patterns and contrasts, lures and suspensions.

In the context of popular spatial theories and metaphors for the social, such as Latour’s networks ²² or Sloterdijk’s spheres, ²³ hybrid webs question the use of abstract geometries as workable diagrams for social behaviour. In the holding pattern of a Cyrtophora-Nephila hybrid web, there is no social “medium” to be made explicit, stabilized or homogenized. There is only the visceral sense of being and holding-together, however strange or improbable. Rather than abstracting social inter and intra-action in Platonic form, hybrid webs demonstrate a becoming-atmospheric of the social, expressed as the gathering and luring of vastly different species space-times across zones of iridescence and shadow.