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Tomás Saraceno in collaboration: Web(s) of Life
Oceans of Air
Silent Autumn
Drift: A cosmic web of thermodynamic rhythms
Aerocene: Free the Air. “Orbit-s” For a Post-Fossil Fuel Era
Cloud Cities Barcelona
Matter(s) for Conversation and Action
Particular Matter(s)
From Arachnophobia to Arachnophilia
Inter + Play 2
Ha Chi Ki
we do not all breathe the same air
Nggamdu.org
Lignes de possibles: Arachnophilia with Tomás Saraceno at the Festival La Manufacture d’idées
AnarcoAracnoAnacroArcano
Du sol au soleil
Webs of Life
Movement
Museo Aero Solar: for an Aerocene era
Interspecies Conversations
Avec qui venez-vous? Vinciane Despret in conversation with Tomás Saraceno
Prototype of Maratus volans (peacock spider), Web of Life (2020) | for a real Augmented Reality
The Art of Noticing – Louisiana Channel Interviews Tomás Saraceno
Radio Galena
Free the Air: Aerocene – Tomás Saraceno holds keynote speech at Herald Design Forum
Up Close: Tomás Saraceno in conversation with Harriet A. Washington
How to hear the universe in a spider/web: A live concert for/by invertebrate rights
Songs for the Air
Moving Atmospheres
Event Horizon
Aria
Fly with Aerocene Pacha
Invertebrate Rights for “Down to Earth”
Spider/Web Pavilion 7
Arachnomancy Cards
Acqua Alta: en Clave de Sol
On the Disappearance of Clouds
Tomás Saraceno. Aria at Cinema Odeon
Sundial for Spatial Echoes
2-Dimensional Webs Archive/Maps and Traces
Algo-r(h)i(y)thms
Tomás Saraceno at the Venice Biennale 2019
More-than-humans
Arachnophilia Community Meeting with MIT Professor Markus J Buehler
Beyond the Cradle 2019: Space and the Arts
Engadin Art Talks: Grace and Gravity
How to entangle the universe in a spider/web?
Printed Matter(s)
Webs of At-tent(s)ion
Art Basel Miami – Albedo | Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Tomás Saraceno
ON AIR
The Politics of Solar Rhythms: Cosmic Levitation
Living at the bottom of the ocean of air
Sounding the Air
“ON AIR live with…”
Spider/Web Oracle Readings Program
Algo-r(h)i(y)thms
Passages of Time
Particular Matter(s) Jam Session
Solar Rhythms
A Thermodynamic Imaginary
Hybrid Webs
How to Entangle the Universe in a Spider Web
Silent Autumn
Gravitational Waves
Our Interplanetary Bodies
Aerosolar Journeys
Stillness in Motion — Cloud Cities
163,000 Light Years
Tomás Saraceno’s Cloud Cities and Solar Balloon Travel – Interview with The Creators Project
Cloud Cities Barcelona: Rotating Selection of Books
Cosmic Jive: The Spider Sessions
Solar Bell
In Orbit
Ring Bell — Solar Orchestra and the Wind Structures
Moving Beyond Materiality – MIT Visiting Artist Tomás Saraceno
On the Roof: Cloud City
On Space Time Foam
Cloud Cities
14 Billions (Working Title)
Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web
Observatory, Air-Port-City
Poetic Cosmos of the Breath
Flying Garden/Air-Port-City
Suspended at a height of more than 25 meters above the atrium of K21 in Düsseldorf is Tomás Saraceno’s In Orbit. 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 meters.
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.
In Orbit was planned by Saraceno together with engineers, architects, and biologists from 2011 to 2013, and is one of the artist’s most complex installations. Despite the fact that the network construction alone weighs three tons, and the largest of the spheres is 300 kilograms, the site-specific installation is remarkably light: its fineness and stability hints to the structure of a spider‘s web.
The webbed suspended architecture provides a model for aerial dwelling, to reconnect with the interface between the earthly and the cosmic, reverberating Saraceno’s work on Cloud Cities.
In this way, the installation is an entry point into Saraceno’s practice, an apparatus of extended cognition in which our ordinary sensorial environment is displaced and enhanced. In Orbit is a methodological attempt to achieve an ethical sensitivity, becoming aware of the many phenomena that shape our possibilities of being-in-the-world and our role in it, making them perceivable through a unique synaesthetic experience.
Tomás Saraceno: […] In each discipline, I see another universe—and I keep getting lost every time I try to dive into a new one … struggling with how many I can’t even see or read, invisible to my eyes and so relevant to yours, I need more senses to perceive this, that, and your reality … the Cloud Cities should help to facilitate a dialogue and are therefore real on Earth or in orbit … in the way that stars become more real to someone who uses them for navigation, this model for reality is capable of a perception that becomes tangible as we construct it through dialogue … the medium is the message many times … and I have no preconfigured medium for expressing ideas. For the project at K21 … we could not find a computer program, or institution with the necessary knowledge to help predict the exact behavior of the net, or whether the force applied to the net could damage the existing building. The conclusion we arrived at with the engineers was that a 1:1 real model presents the most cost-effective means to test these real forces … this is interesting from a variety of perspectives … and it is the direction I am interested in pursuing with the construction of Cloud Cities. When you acknowledge that the process is not just a part of the project, but the project itself … then changes, expands, gets smaller again, rebuilds… hibernates, reproduces, and mutates … dynamic systems in feedback loops … the rest is unknown. It turns out that roughly 95 % of the universe is dark energy and dark matter, the rest—everything on Earth, everything ever observed—planets, plants, water, humans, hydrogen, helium … everything that is known adds up to less than 5 % of the universe.
Conversation between Tomás Saraceno, Marion Ackermann, Daniel Birnbaum, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Udo Kittelmann, Cloud Cities. Distanz, 2011.
What is this? Where are they? How could it be? Is this real? Displacement, fear… are they real..? If you dare to, you really become scared… afraid… you might hate it, you will feel uncomfortable of something you like to know… your limits. You will fall to an unknown landscape, not perceivable but so much necessary today… a mixture of feelings invades you… then the slight reverberation wakes you up, from this oneiric dream, half dystopia half utopia… you float in this landscape… transcendent and expanded towards a more-than-human sensorial inclusion… the spiders never stop… and you become small… riding on this cosmic web… I am interested only in your shared feelings with others… and you still reverberate… this is the artwork you get after you ‘transited’ through it…
Watch In Orbit, K21 (2013) video
Video production: K21/EKS/Ralph Goertz