AEROCENE FOUNDATION

Aerocene is an era-in-the-making, a community, a non-profit foundation. As a movement for eco-social justice, adrift on air, floating free from fossil fuels, lithium or hydrogen, Aerocene moves us towards an ethical re-alliance with the Earth and its cosmic web(s) of life. Rooted in slower activism and weather-dependent interdependency, Aerocene stands as a platform for climate justice, an eco-social energy transition, human and more-than-human rights, and alternative modes of knowing and sensing. Our work connects beyond disciplines and borders, taking shape through application into art, technology, justice and education.

Initiated by the artist Tomás Saraceno, Aerocene brings together diverse artists, activists, geographers, philosophers, speculative scientists, balloonists, technologists, thinkers, and dreamers from around the world; collaborating with institutions including MIT, Greenpeace, CNES, EAPS. It has grown in parallel with Museo Aero Solar since 2007, and in 2015 the Aerocene Foundation was formally established at COP21 in Paris. Throughout this journey, the Aerocene community has come together across workshops, festivals and international exhibitions seeking to devise collaborative modes of ecological sensitivity increasing public awareness of global resource circulation.

Through open-source, ‘Do-it-Together’ tool-building and testing and flying of aerosolar sculptures and their mobilisation within performance and protest, the community attempts to overcome abusive extractive practices, like oil, gas, and lithium mining among many others, that some humans have imposed on landscapes, ecosystems, communities, and other species. The community has also published the Aerocene Newspaper I and II, which have been translated into Spanish, English, Korean, Mandarin, and counting! On January 25, 2020, in Jujuy, Argentina, Aerocene Pacha rose using only the air and the sun, setting 32 world records and becoming the most sustainable flight in human history. The flight lifted with the message: “Water and Life are Worth More than Lithium”, written by the Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc.

Aerocene is active in 152 cities, across 36 countries and 6 continents. 

Join the Aerocene era at aerocene.org!

Travel around the world lifted only by the sun with the Aerocene App.

ARACHNOPHILIA

Arachnophilia is an interdisciplinary spider/web research community founded by Tomás Saraceno. Building on innovations arising from Saraceno’s decade long research into spider/web architectures, materials, modes of vibrational signaling and behavior, the broad aim of Arachnophilia is to move us from arachnophobia to Arachnophilia and beyond the Capitalocene. Arachnophilia’s breakthroughs include: the Spider/Web Scan, allowing for the first time precise 3D models of complex spider/webs, and advancements in biotremology, bioacoustics and biomateriomics. They have been published in journals including PNAS, and featured in Nature. Collaborators include spider diviners from Somié, Cameroon; Max Planck Institute; and MIT.

Research on spider/web architectures began in 2010 when Saraceno made scientific breakthroughs with his development of the Spider Web Scan, a laser-supported tomographic method created by the artist. The artist has since refined, automated, and used this tool to study the functional dynamics of web architectures with collaborators including the Max Planck Institute, TU Darmstadt, and MIT.

Threads of biotremological, bioacoustic and biomateriomics breakthroughs began in 2013, when the artist along with collaborators from the Museum of Natural History, Berlin applied a Laser Doppler Vibrometer (PDV-100) to measure vibrational signals in a planar Nephila web and Cyrtophora tent web. Over the last decade, with Arachnophilia and an extended team, Saraceno has developed specialised web sonification and signalling devices that unveil the hidden musicality of the spider/web.

From these developments came an international series of Interspecies Jam Sessions and Arachnid Orchestras. Beginning in 2014 Saraceno invited a number of musicians and performers to enter into an acoustic dialogue with spider/webs, mediated through the instruments of his Arachnid Orchestra. These interspecies jam sessions experimented with vibration as a transductive force, capable of moving between the sensory Umwelten of anthropos and arachnid. 

On the occasion of the 2019 Venice Biennale, in which Saraceno exhibited the Biennale’s first non-human pavilion, Spider/Web Pavillion 7, Arachnophilia created Arachnophilia.net which contains a 3-D archive of spider/web typologies, a biotremological archive, and an archive of maps of spider/web ecologies. As a way of expanding possibilities for vibrational communication across sensory worlds and charting spider/web ecologies globally, the Arachnomancy App was also launched. 

Arachnophilia have been published in journals including PNAS, and featured in Nature, along with dozens of other Peer-reviewed journals and publications. Arachnophilia has an international network of collaborators including web-building spiders, ground dwelling spiders, scientists, philosophers, sound theorists, biomateriomic researchers, anthropologiests, musicians, arachnologists, spider diviners from Somié, Cameroon, and institutions such as Max Planck Institute; MIT; Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum; Macquarie University; Natural History Museum, Berlin.

An archive of consultations can be discovered via nggamdu.org, a web portal by the spiders and diviners of Somié, Cameroon.

FAIRCLOUDS.LIFE

Can digital and physical clouds come together in life-giving water cycles? Fairclouds is an invitation to join an alliance of Cloudstewards to bring financial and ethical support to the Indigenous Communities of Salinas Grandes and Laguna de Guayatayoc in the fight against lithium extraction on their ancestral lands. Enter into a cloudscape above the Salinas Grandes and become a Cloudsteward by revealing its hidden ecologies, as imagined by a transnational group of contributors.

CLOUDCITIES.ORG

Cloudcities.org, currently in it’s beta-testing phase, is a growing repository of cloud-based knowledges, activated by an interactive tool for pareidolic ecologies. Users are invited to draw upon the ocean of air and interpret a cloud’s multitudinal relations. A mise-en-Aeroscène: images of cloud formations are selected from the platform’s archive, as collected by the artist Tomás Saraceno and users’ own contributions.

NGGAMDU.ORG

“We are pleased to offer you our service of ŋgam dù spider divination. You are invited to ask a question to the spider, but be aware that it may be modified by us in order to help the spider understand your query.

Spiders could once speak but now communicate using only leaf-cards inscribed with specific symbolic meanings. When asked a question, the spider will respond by manipulating the cards to indicate which direction should be taken, and this will be interpreted by us.

Even if we have asked a question that seems clear, the spider may respond in effect by saying we should ask a different question! Nothing is simple in the world and the spider knows that the questions must reflect this in one way or another.”

—Chef Gamgbé Kounaka, Bollo Pierre ‘Tadios’, Iréné Nguea

STUDIO TOMÁS SARACENO

After studying art and architecture in Buenos Aires, Frankfurt am Main, and Venice, Tomás Saraceno established his studio in Frankfurt am Main in 2005. The studio relocated to Berlin in 2012 and, after a brief interim, moved into the former administrative building of Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication (AGFA) in Berlin-Rummelsburg. The studio gradually activated and renovated the previously unoccupied building, which was constructed in 1916, and the neighbouring multi-story factory. Studio members from multidisciplinary backgrounds, including designers, architects, anthropologists, biologists, engineers, art historians, curators, and musicians work in the hybrid environment of workshop, office, the Arachnophilia Research Laboratory and Aerocene community-enthusiasts.

The system of signs stemming from Saraceno’s artistic practice engenders connections throughout the departments; the variegated roles of each studio member at times personifying the complex structures of the artworks surrounding them. An attunement to the disappearance of clouds and rising tides emerges through the cloud-like structures evocative of the Weaire-Phelan geometry of aggregating foam and soap bubbles. In the context of the current ecological crisis, the rights of non-humans and the non-living are investigated through a lens focused on moving past the hierarchical ethos of the tree of life metaphor to one that recognizes the entangled relationships between phenomena. In acknowledging the symbiotic threads linking all things, the hybrid webs spun in collaboration with the studio’s arachnid friends affirm how even our smallest movements send out vibrations along the web of life.

In an era of ecological upheaval, there is a perceived imperative for anthropocentric worlds to re-attune to other species and more-than-human ways of inhabiting our shared planet. These artistic and scientific enquiries can enable new hybrid encounters and relationships, involving multiple entities: from spiders to humans, from gravitational waves to particles of dust.

Tomás Saraceno is most grateful for the support of Natalija Miodragovic in developing the conceptual background of works and ideas developed until 2015.