The installation appears as a surreal landscape: an ocean of clouds and floating planetary bodies. The physically accessible work is constructed of near-transparent steel mesh that interlaces three levels spanning the glass dome’s immensity. Five air-filled spheres open the layers of the net structure that encompasses an area of 2500 square metres.

At the entrance level visitors are invited to crawl over, climb through and otherwise negotiate its space. Once inside, they are incorporated into an expansive ecosystem wherein every participant is equally influential—for each physical presence reverberates throughout the space. Codependent sociability is enacted by the milieu itself, simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the encounters happening within it. “To describe the work means to describe the people that use it—and their emotions,” notes Saraceno.

Visitors adapt to the changing conditions of this sensitively attuned network through improvised movement in consonance with the reverberations and changing tensions produced by others. Once several people enter the structure simultaneously, it is set to motion, altering the tension of the steel cables and distances between the three levels of the interlaced net. The floating space now becomes a vibrating web of relationships, resonances and synchronous communication. Similar to a spider/web, visitors perceive the presence of others through vibrations, echoing Saraceno’s artistic practice and research on hybrid and interspecies forms of communication.

The type of co-existence enacted by In Orbit alludes to the interplanetary, playing with recursive analogies, moving from the microcosmic to macrocosmic in a non-scalar way. Spider/webs provide a model to re-think interconnectivity, and, at the same time, recall the same invisible structure of the universe, envisioned by astrophysicists as the cosmic web: in the vibratory continuum of the installation, bodies move in a manner akin to molecules, planets and black holes.