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  • Spider Music
  • David Rothenberg (bio) and Tomás Saraceno (bio)

Birds, whales, insects—sure, they all make sound. But spiders? I first came across the work of Tomás Saraceno climbing through some bubbles atop the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in his piece On the Roof: Cloud City in 2012. Later, I saw a much-enlarged related work, Cloud Cities, filling the great hall of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Here was an art everyone could appreciate—sublime in its scale, awe-inspiring, and surprisingly accessible because you could climb right in it. Forget the usual admonishment to don’t touch. Saraceno was saying touch, touch, touch, get right inside the work itself. An Argentinian-born artist trained as an architect, Saraceno deploys insights from engineering, physics, chemistry, aeronautics, and material science in his work. He creates inflatable and airborne biospheres with the morphology of soap bubbles, neural networks or cloud formations, which are speculative models for alternate ways of living for a sustainable future.

At the time, I didn’t realize how much this work was intimately tied to science and research. After bubbles, Saraceno has become immersed in the world of spiders. What exactly are the rules that guide the construction of a spider’s web? Could we reconstruct and build one exactly from a three-dimensional scan? To come up with such a plan, it took an artist and many years of close collaboration with scientists to figure out how to run a complex web through a scanning machine, measure all the details of the silk strands and connections, and then rebuild it at a scale massive enough so humans might climb within. He was the first person to scan, reconstruct, and reimagine spiders’ weaved spatial habitats, and he possesses the only three-dimensional spider web collection in existence. Saraceno even convinces unrelated species of spiders to spin webs together, which he exhibits in art galleries and museums all over the world. He calls these projects hybrid webs.

What makes one web any better than another? Pragmatists would say the one that best entraps your prey, but with all the beauty they produce perhaps spiders have a sense of aesthetics as well. That’s a subject close to my heart. For years [End Page 31]


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Top: Sonogram of the drumming rhythms of a peacock spider, Maratus volans. Bottom: Sonogram of a clarinet playing along with a golden orb weaver, Nephila inaurata. Photos: Courtesy Studio Tomás Saraceno.

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David Rothenberg playing in Berlin with the golden orb-weaver. Photo: Courtesy Studio Tomás Saraceno.

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I had been interacting with the intricate songs of birds, which I wrote about in my books Why Birds Sing and Survival of the Beautiful. The latter work looks specifically at how important the aesthetic has been in evolution, a subject few biologists have paid much attention to in recent years.

But Saraceno has certainly been interested in it, and also bold enough to bring scientists into his endeavors, to push them to ask the kind of questions they might otherwise be afraid to consider. Is a spider’s web beautiful? Is any one more beautiful than another? What happens when you try to get spiders of two different species to spin a web together? Will they make something no one species could make alone, or will they eat each other up, like so many artists battling scientists?

I was flattered when Saraceno invited me to play music with his spiders. Some of these critters are master drummers, like the peacock spider whose music is graphed below. The regularity of the pulses is clear, but also the tonal complexity of each sound. This music is distinct, surprising, originally felt as vibration but here enhanced into sound, and then image.

The even spacing of the beats shows that the spider has got rhythm, and the rich colors and lines in each beat shows that each sound has a unique sense of tone, not a simple click or hit. The presence of patterns in the midst of clouds of noise shows that there...

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